The Hysterical Absurdity of the Modern Media

by Newt Gingrich: On Wednesday, I wrote about President Trump’s remarkable address to the Polish people in Warsaw on July 6 that he made before attending the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany.

Today, I’d like to discuss the hysterical, absurd, and truly looney response that many in the media had to it.

Throughout his speech, President Trump did a wonderful job highlighting the strong, enduring relationships the United States has with Poland and our NATO allies, the tremendous importance of maintaining these relationships, and the need to band together to defeat ISIS and other enemies of Western civilization.

To any normal American, the speech was likely reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s address to the British Parliament in 1982 or speeches made by Sir Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the World War II era.

But the leftwing media saw something entirely different.

One article in The Atlantic described the speech as “racial and religious paranoia,” saying “to be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.” Then, I suppose to support its faulty thesis, the article wrongly suggests that there’s some confusion about whether Latin American countries are a part of Western civilization – saying while they are mostly Christian, “by U.S. standards, they’re not clearly white.”

This is a perfect example of the writer creating a false definition, then projecting it upon Latin America. He ignores that modern Latin American civilization was developed by settlers from Western Europe and that the leader of the Catholic Church (a cornerstone of Western culture) is from Argentina. This is either profoundly ignorant or delusional.

A story for Vox Media called the speech “an alt-right manifesto” because Trump urged NATO allies to “fight like the Poles – for family, for freedom, for country, and for God.” Those seem like pretty normal American values to me. After all, it’s the Declaration of Independence that states Americans “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It makes me wonder if these words penned by Thomas Jefferson would be considered alt-right, by Vox’s definition.

A writer at Slate claimed Trump’s only definable ideology was “white American chauvinism” and said the speech in Warsaw, “fit comfortably into a long history of white nationalist rhetoric.” Really? The editors at Slate must have missed when the President said that “above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.”

The truth is, the media is so frenzied in its disdain for the President, it is operating in a distorted version of reality. As I explain in my #1 New York Times best-selling book, Understanding Trump, members of the media cannot accept that the American people chose Donald Trump to represent them, so they have turned to a false world of facts in an effort to wage war on the White House. They might find it useful, however, to consider what President Reagan said to the British Parliament in 1982: “self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.”

While it is not surprising that the media attacked President Trump’s Warsaw speech – they were committed to doing that regardless of what he said – the offensive against Western civilization is simply baffling.

Western civilization grew out of centuries of spiritual and intellectual thought going back to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. It has produced foundational documents such as the Magna Carta – part of the bedrock for our concept that all people are equal under the law.

To suggest that Western civilization is racist or intolerant, is to deny the fabric by which our modern society has evolved – particularly in the United States. The effects of Western civilization on the world have amounted to a continual pattern of technological advancement, the creation of free markets, healthy competition, enforcement of the rule of law, and the promotion of freedom of thought.

This last hallmark points to the most absurd aspect of the media railing against Western civilization: Without it, there is no free press.
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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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