Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich criticized cities like Chicago and Baltimore for ignoring their skyrocketing murder rate and poverty level in favor of pushing a political wedge issue.
“What’s truly tragic is there is a huge wave of murder in Baltimore. There’s a huge wave of shooting in Chicago,” Gingrich said on “Fox and Friends” Thursday. “There are enormous problems in helping every person purse happiness. All of this stuff is a lot of noise. It doesn’t fix a single one of the underlying key problems that trap people in poverty and violence in America.”
Gingrich compared the tactics used to remove Confederate monuments to those ISIS, the Taliban, and rioters during the French Revolution used. He then jokingly called for a committee to remove offensive history.
“Maybe we need a committee to perfect American history, and it can go through and decide. For example, Sen. Bob Byrd, a Democrat, belonged to the Klu Klux Klan. Should we erase the different references to Bob Byrd? Former member of the Supreme Court, Hugo Black, had been a member of the Klu Klux Klan. Should we erase the memory of Hugo Black? You could go down a whole long list of things. What’s the ground rule going to be?” Gingrich asked.
He said radical elements of the political left would move on to scrubbing the memory of the founding fathers and the cycle would never end.
“If you really look at the hard left, they would eliminate Washington. I don’t know what they would do with the Washington monument. But they would eliminate Washington. They would eliminate Jefferson. They both owned slaves,” he said.
Gingrich accused activists of wanting to subjectively “erase America” based solely on emotion without a rational public debate.
“You start getting into a zone here of who’s history is it? Who are you to define it? And who are you to go back 250 years and apply this year’s standards to someone back then? There’s a whole zone here of wanting to erase America on the left that I think is very real,” Gingrich said.
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