Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday lauded President Trump for having the “guts” to call out the mobs that are destroying statues and spreading violence as anti-American.
“The people who are destroying these statues are bad people. The people killing these young girls are bad people. And Trump had the guts to say it,” Mr. Gingrich, a Republican, said on Fox News.
In a speech over the holiday weekend at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Mr. Trump warned that the iconoclastic fervor sweeping the country is “designed to overthrow the American revolution” and “wipe out our history…erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”
Mr. Gingrich called it the most significant presidential speech since President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 address to the British Parliament in which he predicted that Communism would be left on the “ash-heap of history.”
Mr. Trump’s speech was panned by major news outlets, including The New York Times, for inflaming culture wars and dividing the country.
“Liberalism has been transformed into anti-Americanism,” said Mr. Gingrich. “You are dealing with mobs. You have a 7-year-old killed in Chicago, an 8-year-old killed in Atlanta. Not killed by policemen — they were killed by predators. People talk about reducing the number of police which is going to increase the number of murders.”
An 8-year-old girl in Atlanta was shot and killed Saturday by a mob that was illegally barricading a street. A 7-year-old girl was among 13 people shot and killed in Chicago over the 4th of July weekend.Mr. Gingrich said a crackdown by law enforcement on violence and mayhem was inevitable.
“No one has a right to tare down any statue. You have a right to petition the government, and if you are successful, the government can remove the statue. The government can destroy the statue. But no mob has the right to select what they want to destroy,” he said. “At some point, we are going to have to have the kind of intervention where people start getting locked up in large numbers and they are sent away for a very long time.”
That’s what happened in the tumultuous 1960s, said the former speaker.
“In the late ’60s, when we had 2,500 bombings, ultimately it was broken because we in fact locked people up — and theses were bad people,” said Mr. Gingrich. “The people who are destroying these statues are bad people. The people killing these young girls are bad people. And Trump had the guts to say it.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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