Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich encouraged America Fest attendees to persevere no matter what for the cause of freedom. Gingrich exposed some of the Left’s craziest ideals before providing a history lesson on George Washington and the founding of the country. But he opened and closed his talk with similar lines.
“People get frustrated. They get upset. They get tired,” he said. “But the fact is the struggle for freedom is permanent. It’s every year. It’s every generation. And as Ronald Reagan once said, liberty is literally one generation deep. And so we too have a rendezvous with destiny and our challenge is to return our country to a culture and a policy that strengthens freedom, that preserves American independence and that connects each generation back to the founding fathers and to the principles which have enabled every day people to govern themselves.”
Gingrich said America was the first great experiment in which the individual citizen mattered more than the government.
“Part of the struggle we’re in now is a permanent government, and its allies in big business, big media, big education, are all working to try to take power away from the American people,” he said. “And so we’re engaged in a great struggle just as much as Lincoln was when he gave the Gettysburg Address, just as much as Washington was. We’re engaged in a great historical struggle over whether government of the people, by the people and for the people will in fact endure and whether our rights granted to us by our Creator will remain real or whether a power-structure breaking the law, violating every aspect of American life, will in fact gradually, steadily coerce us into tolerating a government against the people. A government for the elites. A government which in fact will not defend America and ensure our survival as a free country.”
America Fest is really important, he said. He said it is as important as the initial group that met to create the Republican Party in Wisconsin. And as important as the group that met in Philadelphia to write the Declaration of Independence.
“You are among missionaries who will go out across the country,” he said. “Turning Point USA has built a nationwide movement that understands you have to win the culture if you’re going to win the politics.”
A group called America’s New Majority Project, which Gingrich has been involved with, asked Americans basic questions. And it found that when asked whether they agree with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., that character matters more than color, 91 percent of Americans agree.
“Yet we have a woke Left determined to reestablish racism in America,” he said. “And their great contribution is moving it from being anti-black to anti-white. But it’s racism pure and simple and we need to be prepared to stand up and fight and say it’s wrong.”
Eighty-four percent of those asked agree parents have the right to know what their children are being taught. But, he said, teachers’ unions are such major contributors to the Democrat Party that it is a constant fight because all of the rules are “rigged against parents and in favor of woke indoctrination.”
“Some of which, frankly, I think is sick,” he said. “Some of this is not political, it’s a mental health problem. And look, I may be old fashioned, and maybe I don’t quite get this modern world, but when I see a nuclear security officer with clarences stealing women’s luggage, I think to myself that’s probably not really good national security. Now, I’m going out on a limb here, I recognize that the fact that that particular person — and I’m not sure which pronoun they have in between thefts — but you know you have to say to yourself this can’t be a serious government. You know it’s not a serious government because the President of the United States, despite his weekly visits back to Delaware, can’t find the border and he can’t go and see how bad it is. And he can’t understand what’s happening because he doesn’t want, not because he’s stupid.
“You have to remember, a lot of the things that they do that we think are weird, they think are normal. They think pledging allegiance is weird. They think the Star Spangled Banner is weird. They think that defending America is weird. But they have their own set of things.”
The Left struggles to understand with violence — whether it is committed by criminals, terrorists or nations, because “people on the Left saw the Lion King and though it was a documentary.”
“And they really believe that lions and zebras sing and dance together,” he said. “And we tried to explain to them, ‘You know, lions eat zebras.’ And they go, ‘No, no. You don’t understand, you haven’t seen the movie.’ So we have a Secretary of State who thinks the Iranians are fellow zebras who want to hang out together and they think that Kim Jung Un keeps firing off missiles because he’s bored. It is extraordinarily dangerous.
“But here’s what you have to remember — these are serious people deeply committed to changing our country and deeply committed to undermining America.”
Gingrich said every time they get to choose between strengthening the United States or weakening it, they choose to weaken it.
He said conservatives will win the cultural fight, but they haven’t figured out how to win the political fight.
“If you look at the gap between the number of Americans who agree with us culturally about values and what happens in elections, you learn two things pretty quickly,” he said.
First, Democrats have an effective machine.
“And you’re in one of the counties where their effectiveness has been shown two elections in a row,” he said. “We have no idea what the real vote in Maricopa County is because every time you turn around there’s another number, there’s another thing that went wrong, 70 percent of the precincts couldn’t quite vote, now they found 25,000 ballots they can’t quite explain. But it’s all just among friends.”
It isn’t anything new. Gingrich said when he was working on a campaign in 1964 a rural Democrat county in Georgia decided they weren’t going to count ballots until the day after Election Day. And there was nothing he could do about it.
“Ever since I’ve had a simple model,” he said. “Conservatives have to win by a big enough margin that liberals can’t steal it. It’s that simple. You see it in Chicago. You see it in Philadelphia, and it shouldn’t shock us. It’s historic patterns.”
While it all may lead to frustration, he forged down the historical front to remind people how America earned its independence from England.
George Washington went west and started the French and Indian War. He had to surrender his command but returned and wrote a pamphlet explaining why he had done the right thing. He was asked to be an advisor to the commanding general for the British Army and he told the general he didn’t know what they do in Europe, but he wouldn’t have men in red uniforms marching four in a row down the middle of a road because the French and the Indians would shoot at them from behind trees. The general told Washington he didn’t understand European warfare.
They went down the road and got ambushed early on and the general was killed. Washington took command. He stood 6-3 and was on large horses. Gingrich said he was physically huge for his time period.
He had two horses shot from under him and four bullet holes in his coat. About 10 years later an Indian chief told him God must have something in mind for him because the Indians shot at him all the time but couldn’t kill him.
In 1776, Washington was asked to head up the Continental Army. He went to Boston and helped drive the British out of Boston. He took 30,000 men to Brooklyn and the tide began to turn. His numbers shrunk from 30,000 to 2,500. One-third of them didn’t have boots, in winter.
Washington sat with his generals and said if they didn’t win a victory, the army would disappear and if the army disappeared, every person in the room would be hung. Therefore they had nothing to risk.
He proposed a plan to cross an icy river in a snowstorm at night, march eight miles and surprise 800 professional German soldiers, capture them and then run like crazy.
“And it worked,” Gingrich said. “It’s absolutely a miracle. As they’re getting on the boat, (Washington) had the officers read from Thomas Payne’s new pamphlet in which Payne says these are the times that try men’s souls. And it talks about the fact that the devil doesn’t give up, hell is not conquered easily and you have to have courage. You have to be prepared to stay and fight.”
They won victory three weeks later and had 15,000 troops.
Even with all of that, Gingrich said one-third of the Continental Congress wanted to fire Washington out of jealousy. Despite it, Washington succeeded.
“The struggle for freedom is permanent and unending,” he said. “Yes, we have some people in Washington who aren’t doing a very good job. Yes, we have some people that are not very effective. But the fact is that whether it’s at the state legislature, the county commission, the school board, governor, senator, house member or ultimately a presidential candidate, what it takes is a deep, passionate belief in America and a deep, passionate belief in freedom and the courage to do what is necessary to learn how to win. It took Washington eight years. But in the end, we had a country.
“You are here because you recognize what Washington and Lincoln understood. That freedom is under threat. That our rights that come from God could be taken away from us. That there are people who don’t share our dreams, our values or our hopes. And the answer, in the end, is you have to go back home as missionaries. You have to reach out to your friends and your neighbors. You have to have the courage to stand and fight. And you have to have a deep belief that in God’s good time, once again as it has for over 250 years, Freedom will win and tyranny will lose and we will once again be the greatest, freest country in the world.”
