Newt Gingrich, Social Engineer

Social engineering. It’s a term that has found its way back into my personal lexicon after a several-year hiatus.

Social engineering is the intellectual basis for a variety of scams or frauds perpetrated on people, either through mail, over the phone or through the Internet. Social engineering scams take advantage of certain social weaknesses — also known as “cognitive biases” — that make us vulnerable to doing things we might not otherwise do.

According to Wikipedia, social engineering is “similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access; in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the global criminals/victims.”

These techniques focus on manipulation of trust, fear, and curiosity.

For example, if I can gain your trust that I am an employee in the IT department of your company, you might give me information I need to hack your network. Phishing scams work by scaring people into thinking that something negative may happen if they don’t cooperate. Entire corporate information systems have been compromised by someone leaving a hacked USB stick on a table with a filename like ‘executive salaries,’ to be picked up later by a curious employee.

And while such social engineering techniques have enabled millions or perhaps billions of dollars worth of fraud and theft, they pale in comparison to the larger playing field where social engineering has been practiced for a much longer time.

Yes, I’m talking about political social engineering. But I’m not going to reach into the stone age to show you examples. We have living examples of social engineering at work today, and perhaps the most eggregious example is the GOP presidential front-runner today, Newt Gingrich.

Since his early days in congress, Gingrich has perpetrated frauds on the American public to gain their confidence and achieve a personal agenda that has cost this country billions and perhaps trillions of dollars.

For example, even as a freshman Congressman from Georgia, Gingrich perfected the trick of making people believe he had widespread power and influence. At the time, broadcasting companies had won an important battle allowing them to install cameras in the houses of Congress to videotape live sessions. Gingrich realized that these cameras were set to record 24 hours a day, and that they were fixed only on the speaker’s podium. So he would walk in to the House chamber late at night and deliver apparently scathing speeches — to an empty floor. Then his staff would secure copies of the tape and send them around to his political backers to demonstrate how much he was working for them. The trick was so blatant that Congress had to pass legislation requiring that the cameras pan the room to make note of how many people were in attendance during a given speech.

During the Clinton administration, he worked an unlikely ally to stave off health care reform — the AARP. Betting that he could instill enough fear into the executives of that organization to convince them not to support the Clinton health care reform bill, Gingrich hammered home the idea that Americans would lose the ability to choose their own doctors and lose control over their health care decisions – claims that he knew weren’t true. He worked that idea continuously until the board relented and issued a statement of non-support that played a key role is the GOP victory. Twenty years later, when President Obama tried it again, Gingrich went back to AARP with the same ploy, but to a much less receptive audience. All he could achieve was a weakened reform measure.

Gingrich learned early in his political career the power of manipulation. In the 1980s he co-authored a playbook of dirty tricks that was distributed to Young Republican groups to stir controversy on university campuses. This ploy allowed him to attack the public college system as liberal strongholds and brought a powerful new ally to the Reagan and Bush administrations.

But to understand where Gingrich is really going with all of this, you have to look at an even bigger picture … as Gingrich himself has done for some 30 years.

Educated as an historian, Gingrich has authored or co-authored nearly two dozen “historical fictions” – rewrites of history targeted to conservative audiences. The exercise has expanded his historical knowledge and his audience, brought in millions of dollars, and afforded him the title of party historian – a simple fraud, replicated many times over for multiplicative effect.

Most of these works reach back into American history, but some focus on contemporary political leaders, in particular the late President Ronald Reagan. Indeed, Gingrich was instrumental in creating the aura that surrounds the late president and has learned much from the experience. He fully understands the interplay between power, perception and popular culture and envisions himself as an American hero.

In keeping with this, he identifies himself less with politicians, and more with politically adept groups that he can use for specific purposes. His membership in the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank  is well known, but he’s also personally responsible for creating dozens of action groups both within congress and in the non-profit sphere. He uses these front groups and non-profits like a small army, to create the political pressure and illusion of support necessary to move his ambition forward. Just as important, he has a history with these organizations that no other candidate can achieve.

Gingrich is on a quest to prove himself smarter and – by means of social control – more powerful than anyone around him. He is the quintessential narcissist, which is both his strength and his downfall.

For instance, while President Clinton was being investigated for the Monica Lewinski affair – an investigation largely orchestrated by Gingrich, who was then speaker of the House – Gingrich himself was involved in a multi-year affair of his own.

During the Bush years, he engineered the Contract with America, a manifesto representing conservative views. More importantly, and to Gingrich’s delight, the Contract was and continues to be used as the big stick by which conservatives control the GOP, creating and maintaining the deep cleft in American politics today. A brilliant effort at social control through fear, intimidation and the fraudulent promise of riches to come.

Arguably, the Contract With America set the stage for the economic meltdown which followed, by engineering a Bush-era regulatory environment that was unwilling to deal with the excesses of Wall Street money managers. Indeed, many of the schemes that created the economic collapse were themselves monumental attempts at social engineering, rampant with fraud.

The heavy handed, aggressive approach represented by this contract (Clinton referred to it as the “Contract on America”) revealed in part Gingrich’s lust for power. This was further expressed during his showdown with Clinton over welfare reform, in which he caused a shutdown of the federal government to force approval of his reform bill.  Even fellow republicans cringed at the power play and many formulated a plan to oust him as Republican Whip.

Under pressure from this group as well as the threat of censure for multiple alleged ethics violations and a rapidly dwindling public opinion, Gingrich resigned from Congress one day into a new Congressional term in 1998.  Publicly, he denounced his fellow Republicans as ‘cannibals,’ but in fact he was more terrified that his public persona would forever be ruined.

Pegged as a ‘lightning rod of controversy’ and under considerable scrutiny for his morally questionable private life (he reportedly divorced his wife while she lay recovering from cancer surgery to marry his staffer), Gingrich was afraid further bad press would dash his hopes for the presidency.

For a while, it looked like Gingrich – who rose from political obscurity to a charlatan, an oddity and finally a masterful architect of the conservative agenda, would fall again in to the shadows.

But if he did fall, it was only to the boardrooms of countless resource-laden conservative political action groups of his own design, where he continued his ploy of fear-based reconstruction of American opinion of health care policy, ongoing manipulation of public policy, and a new historical fiction: the reconstruction of his personal history.

His numerous non-profit groups, works of fiction and privately-funded public policy documentaries (co-starring his wife Callista, with whom he had the affair during the Clinton years) have earned more than $100 million and afforded him unprecedented public exposure (particularly among conservatives) through book and video promotion opportunities.

So now Gingrich sees his window to make a run for the presidency. Why? Because the country is, like some weakened individual, vulnerable to a good fraud – and he thinks his bag of tricks will work. He’s ready to take the gamble.

After all, he’s Newt Gingrich, social engineer, legend in his own mind.

Author’s note: I am a social media strategist for Broadcom Corporation, and Siliconcowboy is my personal blog. All opinions herein are my own.

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