Maybe Gingrich can’t be expected to understand how that history looks to conservative women who, stunned that Republican men are defending Trump, are taking a closer look at the men who have claimed to represent them and their interests. As Gingrich says himself, he lives in a parallel universe, one where that kind of behavior has been tolerated, protected, and sanctioned for decades.

So when Gingrich accuses Kelly — who very recently helped Carlson oust Roger Ailes by getting enough victims to come forward that they reached a critical mass — of being fascinated with sex, he’s really describing himself and his colleagues. More concerningly, he’s doing what the party has always done: reframing a woman’s right to bodily autonomy as a distraction or worse, a political pawn. He’s demonstrating his ignorance of the extent to which women like Kelly — and Navarro, and Perino, and Whitman, and Rice — have had their professional lives dominated by men like him. He’s right: He’s living in a parallel universe. And staying in it is not a smart move.

While Gingrich angrily defends men who have been systematically asked to leave their posts due to sexual misconduct and women like Scottie Hughes who vote for them anyway, people like Marybeth Glenn, Ana Navarro, Dana Perino, Meg Whitman, Gretchen Carlson, and Condoleezza Rice are coolly defecting to universes that don’t force them to tolerate sexual predators or else get accused of being “fascinated by sex.” It will be interesting to see which universe Megyn Kelly will choose, and whether she’ll bring Fox News with her.