Newt Gingrich on Fox News Channel's The Ingraham Angle | April 13, 2021

NEWT:

Well, sooner or later, we're going to have to decide that we're not going to tolerate this. Everybody talks about the insurrection on January 6th, but we've seen wave after wave of local insurrections where people explicitly reject the police, attack the police. In many ways we have a war on cops that nobody wants to talk about. We have a totally one-sided system right now. Sooner or later, the society will demand that we re-establish order, that we re-establish safety and that we not tolerate people who think they have the right to go out and break the law and deliberately try to undermine what in the end, are the forces of order. I think there been 100 police officers killed this year. I don't think a single one of them led to a riot. Not one. But you have a system across the country from Seattle to Portland to now back to Minneapolis of people prepared on any excuse to go out and basically break down the law.

NEWT:

Look, fact is, in almost every case we're talking about, it is poor African Americans, poor Latinos, poor whites for that matter, people who are in neighborhoods where they get preyed upon by criminals. So, breaking down the forces of order actually increases the danger to the poorest Americans in a disproportionately racial way. We had Democratic congresswoman yesterday call for the end of policing, the end of incarceration. Think about the level of madness that this suggests. We are already having a dramatic increase in murder rates across the country, we are having a greater increase in theft. We just had Walgreen’s announce that they were closing every one of their ten drugstores in San Francisco because they can't cope with the scale of theft that is now permitted in San Francisco. So, you're watching the decay of the entire civilization as the forces that hate it use every possible excuse and we let them get away with it. You have video cameras nowadays, you have an ability to film every person that is there tonight, go out and pick them up, arrest them. In some cases put them in jail, in other cases charge them a very steep fine. Make it too expensive to go out and attack the police. You just saw New York, by the way, a totally unprovoked attack on a police car by a group of thugs who wanted to beat up the police if they could have gotten in the car.

NEWT:

As you point out, we've seen this before in the 1970s as the forces of law collapsed. It led to a series of movies like the Clint Eastwood series of Dirty Harry in which basically vigilantes came into being because people wouldn't tolerate the level of fear, the level of threat that was happening around them. This is what people need to understand: If the police collapse as a system, you'll have a genuine fight between people who are protecting their property, people protecting their lives and those who are the forces of violence, of criminality, and who want to dominate by force. This is a very dangerous period. We've been here at least three times since World War II. In the 70s, where it ultimately culminated in massive problems. Again, I think you have it going on right now. There's no reason this has to be happening. There's no excuse for it to happen. We need the rule of law. If a policeman does something wrong, it ought to be investigated. Ought to be tried. This is great irony about tonight in Minnesota. You have a trial underway of a policeman who is being accused of killing a person, so the system is working. At this very moment, you now have a whole new cycle where people say I'll go out in the streets. As you point out, it rapidly deteriorates and begin to trash the local store, which is very often minority owned, it begins to be burn things down. We do not have to tolerate this as a society. We have to have the courage to stand up and say this is wrong, and people who engage in it are going to either go to jail or face very, very severe fines.