Newt Gingrich, who may very well become the next President of the United States, has a second life. No, I don't mean his second life as a lobbyist, I mean literally, a second life: A few years ago, the leading GOP candidate for President created a Second Life avatar and gave a long lecture on the steps of a virtual Capitol building, where he proposed that Congress itself meet, all while being protected by a squad of all-female avatar bodyguards, and protested by a green fairy with wings who called him a fascist.
This was back in 2007, when the 3d virtual world was in its period of maximum media hype, and Gingrich was not even the only nationally prominent political figure to dabble in SL. In 2006, for instance, when Mark Warner was considered a leading Democratic Presidential candidate, the then Virginia governor (now Senator) made a short whistle stop appearance in Second Life.
Unlike Warner and most others, Newt went whole hog on virtual reality, not only making an appearance in SL, but praising it as the future of Internet, lecturing more generally about the Metaverse, and then to top it off, proposed that America's political leaders meet on a Second Life island called Second Legistlation.
Here's what he said: