If you lived during the 1990s and ever switched on a television, you probably remember former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and televangelist Pat Robertson denouncing swearing and railing against what they viewed as a culture shaped by decaying morals and values.
Fast forward to today, and many of the "moral majority" conservatives who used to warn that curse words were a "threat to our national values" are now singing a very different tune, MSNBC's Ari Melber said Monday night. In the wake of President Trump reportedly referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and unnamed African countries as "shitholes," Gingrich, who once called on corporations to stop doing business with radio stations that played rap music, has been silent, and so has former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who in 2016 said it was "unprofessional" and "just trashy" for people to drop F-bombs.
When you watch the clips Melber provides, the hypocrisy seems pretty blatant — former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly is seen cheering and taking credit for Pepsi dropping profanity-using spokesman Ludacris in 2002, but he wasn't afraid to cozy up to longtime friend and noted swearer Trump when he still had a television show to put him on. The same goes for Ralph Reed, a conservative political activist and onetime director of the Christian Coalition; he declared in the 1990s that "character matters" and "American people ... care about the character of our leaders," but after the Access Hollywood tape featuring Trump bragging about grabbing women leaked in 2016, Reed defended him by saying it was a "10-year-old tape of a private conversation" that "ranks pretty low" on evangelicals' "hierarchy of concerns." "This isn't a story where the emperor has no clothes," Melber said. "The rest of the royal court has been exposed and it's not pretty." Watch the video below. Catherine Garcia