“The more you study modern American government,” Speaker Newt Gingrich writes in “American Despotism,” the first installment of his new American Spectator series, “the more you realize that totalitarian efforts are all around us — and they have been winning on many fronts.”
Nowhere is that totalitarian effort demonstrated more clearly, Gingrich argues in his fourth installment, than in “the great upheaval over race in America,” which “began in the 1950s and accelerated dramatically in the 1960s.”
Speaker Gingrich continues:
In many ways, the bridges that started being built in that era are crashing down around us. Today, we have the Black Lives Matter movement (which has supported widespread destruction across America and grifted many millions of people for misspent donations). Anti-white racism fuels most of the current cultural left. Educational efforts such as the 1619 Project seek to rewrite American history so that slavery and the African American experience are the central themes. There is a growing contempt for police (especially white officers) and acceptance of crime. All of these make up part of the hardcore anti-Americanism emerging as the central value of the left.
While much of this radical activism and militant anti-Americanism extends beyond the struggle over race, the power of that conflict was the biggest driver of change in the 1960s. The struggle against segregation — both de jure (legal) and de facto — became powerful. In some cases, it was violent and created patterns of thought that became a significant part of the challenge to our constitutional system and the rule of law. Consider how much of today’s radicalism is organized around the struggle against repression and injustice.
Read the rest of the piece here!
Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the Speaker here. Find the first in the series here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here.
READ MORE from Newt Gingrich:
American Despotism: How the ’60s and Early ’70s Ignited the Culture Wars