The Left’s Mania

by Newt Gingrich: The Left is getting trapped in its own mania.

Steadfast liberals in the media, academia, and Congress are so pathologically opposed to President Trump and the Republican majority – and so fiercely committed to rejecting the fact that the American people elected both, that they now willfully embrace vulgarity, insults, violence, and hysterical dishonesty.

Late night comedians are so dismayed that they have traded jokes for political assaults and opening monologues for lewd diatribes. Take for example Stephen Colbert’s unhinged rant against President Trump last week. His comments were as obscene as they were offensive, and went well past the line of political satire. Had a TV personality made a similar implication about President Obama or Secretary Clinton, he or she would have been promptly fired and blacklisted from the entertainment industry. Not surprisingly though, Colbert’s network, CBS, took no such action, further proving the media’s growing complicity toward this kind of behavior.

Meanwhile, on college campuses such as Middlebury College and UC-Berkeley, instead of learning to respect those with differing views, liberal students have resorted to violence and threats to silence those with whom they disagree. The academic institutions have largely let it happen – although Middlebury College has said it plans to discipline about half of the more than 70 students who rioted in order to keep Charles Murray, a libertarian social scientist, from speaking March 2, the college has been vague and indecisive about what the ultimate discipline might be. What message does this send to the student body? It implies that if you disagree with someone, it’s okay to shout them down and, if necessary, hurt them.

At UC-Berkeley, administrators have simply given up policing the violent Left. CNN reported that during one protest, “masked agitators” caused $100,000 in damage to the campus. The mere threat of another riot – and the college’s inability or unwillingness to defend against it – kept Ann Coulter from speaking there last month.

Finally, faced with the reality of their dwindling influence, Democrats nationally have turned to fear-mongering and outrageous lies to undermine the efforts of the Republican majority.

Here are a few examples:

• Elizabeth Warren on May 4 tweeted that the American Health Care Act “will devastate Americans’ healthcare. Families will go bankrupt. People will die.”
• Bernie Sanders told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on May 4, “If the bill passed today in the House became law, thousands of Americans would die.”
• Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said Republicans will be responsible for “every preventable death, every untreated illness and every bankruptcy” if AHCA is passed.
• Democratic groups across the country have promoted the blatant lie that victims of rape, domestic abuse, and sexual assault could be denied health insurance under the law. Even the Washington Post had to stand up and correct this complete falsehood.
• Some spread the untruth that Congress was unaffected by the AHCA and had some other tier of health care. This is demonstrably false.
• There are some liberal groups even offering to send the ashes of the dead to Republicans in Congress. This is just morbid and deranged.

From the party of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pledge that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the Left has descended to the politics of cremation and demagogic fear-mongering.

Let’s be clear: The Left is calling Republicans looking for a better health care plan murderers in order to distract from the complete failure of Obamacare. These extreme liberal over-reactions have even caused the New York Times to pause and fact-check their outlandish claims.

The Left is behaving like it has nothing to lose. The irony is its members’ actions are promoting ideas that are completely opposite to liberalism. Liberals are trapped in a pathology of anger and desperation that is leading them to silence dissenting opinion with vulgarity, threats, and violence; and obstruct real progress by spreading lies and propaganda. I discuss this pathology at length in my new book, Understanding Trump, which will be released June 13.

All Americans who care about maintaining the basic tenets of civil society today must stand up to the Left’s campaign of violence and intimidation.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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