https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/donald-trumps-politics-of-hate-began-with-a-cynical-and-evil-gop-memo/?fbclid=IwAR0_tjxvEFSKt1grhle5yeRFxyK0mDyAMI03AhZEw3indINK8XAtd539hB0
"Decades before Gingrich was a Trump-adoring Fox News bloviator, he was speaker of the House. And before that he was a bomb-thrower. In fact, he became speaker partly because he weaponized hate. Elected in 1978, Gingrich was a back-bencher in the House of Representatives when the Republicans appeared to be in a permanent minority. His strategy was to blow up his own party so he could take control and lead it to the majority—and one of his big ideas was that the GOP, in order to succeed, had to create more division within the national discourse. He established a political action committee called GOPAC to help Republican candidates across the country become more effective campaigners. And in 1990, the group distributed to GOP contenders a pamphlet called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which encouraged the candidates to “speak like Newt”—that is, to rely upon sharp and divisive rhetoric. It presented a list of 30 “optimistic positive” words to use, including “freedom,” “truth,” and “family.” It also provided a list of “contrasting” words: “crisis,” “decay,” and “red tape.” And this second list recommended going to extremes. Republican candidates, it noted, should call Democrats “shallow,” “radical,” “incompetent,” “pathetic,” “sick,” “bizarre,” and “traitors.” Gingrich’s group was urging GOPers to engage in all-out rhetorical war, going beyond arguing over policies to engaging in the politics of personal destruction. Which was one of Gingrich’s own favorite tools. (The good Newt loved to talk about policy; the bad Newt embraced and relished hostile name-calling and discordant combat.) And the nastiness paid off. The belligerent Gingrich led his Republicans to the majority in the House in 1994. The morning after Trump’s North Carolina rally, I called Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and consultant who worked with Gingrich in the 1990s, and asked him about this memo. He called it “stupid-assed,” adding, “It’s the most destructive political memo written in modern politics"."
