Newt Gingrich on Mornings with Maria discusses editorial changes at the New York Times.
Transcript
Mornings with Maria
06/08/2020
NEWT:
What you’re seeing and I wrote a book last year called Trump vs. China which really captures what’s going on. What you are seeing is Maoism, people who are supposed to be in public confess that they’ve been guilty, people who have to toe whatever the party line is and we as were warned years ago in Orwell’s Animal Farm you know sometimes the mob gets to change what it thinks matter and your job is to trail the mob and do what the mob tells you. When we see an institution as famous and as powerful as The New York Times collapse totally in front of the mob, it tells you what’s going on in terms of American elites. They’ve had 3 generations of brainwashing, those young people at The New York Times actually believe all this stuff and therefore they thought it was their moral duty to coerce and crush their editor.
NEWT:
I think what you’re seeing though is societal maoism. You’re seeing company after company where leadership issues instructions. I just talked to somebody the other day on one of the major networks who they have been told they are not left wing enough, and if they expect their career to survive, they better get in line and memorize the right words. You can draw the distinction but if the dominate force is society decides to adopt Maoist strategies and public confession, public group think, these are the keywords that matter, you have to pretend these things make sense, all of these things which we watch now growing the last 5 or 10 years, and facts don’t exist. What matters now is what the mob decides and what you saw was the mob at The New York Times making a decision and it is literally, remember Mao created the cultural revolution but as instrument of the government but as an instrument of personality and the stepped in because it was so endlessly destructive so I think this is very, very dangerous. I think it’s why the news media is collapsing in terms of respect and the psychodrama what we saw in The New York Times is example of collapse of free speech and replacement by group think.
NEWT:
I think that’s a good optimistic case but if you end up with a President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer, you will not have very much opportunities. I think they would rapidly move to turn the whole country into the equivalent of New York or California and create a one-party state. Look at the level of coercion in schools now or in the university campuses or for that matter in Washington, D.C. by the city government. I think what you’re seeing is a continuing erosion of what you and I grew up with and a continuing in-position of left-wing values that are not based on facts, they are not based on arguments, they are based on sociological implications of people who are going isolate you ostracize you, make sure you’re not in polite company, so I’m very concerned. New York Times is arguably the most powerful newspaper in the world, certainly historically was the most respected newspaper for at least half century falling on The London Times. For them to cave and become this overtly and clearly a left-wing propaganda device I think is very sobering and I think The Washington Post is about a half step behind them.
I think it’s hard to imagine how when you have ABC, CBS, MSNBC and all CNN all following the Washington Post, New York Times, the dominant heights are increasingly controlled by the hard left and they increasingly define what you’re allowed to think and say.
NEWT:
Well, first of all, Colin Powell, who I respect a great deal and worked with for many years, Colin Powell voted for Hillary Clinton. There’s no great shock here. Second, you know, in 1936 Al Smith who’d been the democratic nominee in ’28, ended up splitting from Franklin Roosevelt, said that Roosevelt was too radical and he couldn’t be for him and in 1948, the previous Vice President Henry Wallace ran as a third-party candidate because he couldn’t stand Harry Truman. I think when you have the scale of change that Donald Trump represents both the personality scale of change, he’s more disruptive personality since Andrew Jackson and also policy changes that almost resembles Lincoln in 1860 in terms of the scale of change, the people who fought the wars in the Middle East are offended by Trump on policy grounds and as people who are organized, corporate personalities they are offended by his aggressive entrepreneurial style. And the degree to which he is a disruptive personality. You are going to see more of this.
I think the country is going to have to decide. What I am surprised by is this is not about Trump, this is about Trump versus Biden, Pelosi and Senator Schumer, and in my mind from a conservative perspective, the prospect that we are going to end up sabotaging our presidential candidate, guaranteeing we lose the senate and guaranteeing Pelosi gets to stays as Speaker. That’s a future that I don’t understand how a Mitt Romney and George Bush, despite their irritation with Trump, I don’t understand how they can say that’s a better future for America and I think that’s a very frightening future for America. I have done several podcasts of Pelosi’s 3 trillion-dollar bill which is filled with radicalism. I think people need to understand what’s coming. If the three of them win, you’re in for radical change in America in January, February, and March of 2021.
