This week Newt Gingrich made an appearance on Meet The Press to discuss the NSA and whistleblower Edward Snowden. During the interview Gingrich, the former Presidential candidate, seemed confident Millennials would “love the NSA” if they experienced a “major attack.”

• “The first time there’s a major attack on the United States, all the millennials are going to decide they really want the government to protect them.”
• “The core idea here that one person has the right to judge very complex issues more than the commander in chief, more than the Congress, more than the Secretary of Defense, is an act of such extraordinary arrogance that it threatens the very fabric of our national security.”
• “The precedent he sets, if we decide it’s okay to be a Snowden, then we are really going to have dramatically crippled our capacities.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpXFiy1rEIA%5D

Gingrich’s comments contradict what he said last year following the Boston Marathon Bombing and the NSA leaks. An attack that should have been prevented, according to political rhetoric during the Bush Administration, by the implementation of the Patriot Act.

• “With all this information, why couldn’t they figure out there were two Chechens that had bombs in Boston? Why couldn’t they figure out that there was a Pakistani who was creating a car bomb in Times Square?”
• “The fact that they relentlessly refuse to profile, and be accurate, and focus on people likely to kill us—and so instead they gather mounds of data about everybody—actually I think weakens our ability to find out the people who are the most dangerous.”
• “It seems like if you hired millions of people you wouldn’t be able to sift through all that, would you?”
• “They do it all by computer and code word and looking for specific things. What is it they are missing when they have all this information on innocent people and can’t figure out who the guilty are?”