Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich: People who destroy statues should get “locked up in large numbers”
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From the July 6, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): What do you make of what we continue to see regarding these statues being taken down? Over the weekend you got Columbus, and then Frederick Douglass.
NEWT GINGRICH (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Well, look, I think the president, in his amazing speech at Mount Rushmore — which I think may have been the most important presidential speech since Ronald Reagan at Westminster in 1982 — really began to tell the truth and lay it out in a way that's going to make The New York Times and The Washington Post and the major media very, very uncomfortable.
You know, liberalism has been transformed into anti-Americanism. You're dealing with mobs. You have a seven year-old killed in Chicago, an eight year-old killed in Atlanta — these are not killed by policemen these are killed by predators — and people talk about reducing the number of police, which is going to increase the number of murders.
There's no one has a right to tear down any statue. You have a right to petition the government, and if you're successful, the government can move the statue, the government can destroy the statue. But no mob has the right to select who they want to destroy. And at some point, we're going to have to have the kind of intervention where people just start getting locked up in large numbers, and they get sent away for a very long time.
In the late '60s, when we had 2,500 bombings, ultimately it was broken because we in fact locked people up. And these were bad people. People who are throwing these statues are bad people. People killing these young girls are bad people. And Trump had the guts to say it when he was speaking Saturday night in South Dakota.