Some cities are taking down Confederate monuments and statues after the protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned violent.
But that isn’t sitting well with former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who said on Monday that the efforts to remove Confederate memorials had taken a “destructive” turn during a conversation with Fox News host Martha MacCallum.
He referenced former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s statement that the removal of Confederate monuments was akin to sanitizing history before he went further:
“I think the point is we ought to be a country focusing on the future, not a country frothing at the mouth about the past,” he said. “And it tells you something about the intellectual collapse of the left ― that all they have is this kind of rabid behavior. And of course, mayors in towns that are largely Black are going to pander to their audience. They are going to go out and prove they are popular by doing something that meets the current demagogic needs.”
Gingrich said that this was “every thing that the founding fathers worried about,” before he went on.
“Having demagoguery define your country is truly dangerous,” he said. “Listen to the mob you got on the screen back there. That’s not democracy. That’s not a free society. That’s a group of people behaving like a mob.”