Future, solving the great problem offered our time, and at the spread of the coronavirus to the highs and loafs the economy, and teen election, 2020 will continue to be a process of change. He is here with us today to discuss his book and his thoughts on america. We now invites you to enjoy our Virtual Program from our air force one Leadership Academy with Newt Gingrich and Reagan Foundation and Institute Executive director. Speaker gingrich, terrific to have you with us at the Reagan Library. Also you know we originally had planned to have you live and in person as we have so many times. Want you to know when this pandemic is behind us and youre able to travel and things can be safer again, we still would love to have you out Reagan Library again with your new book or the next one you write. So, thanks so much for joining us today. I want to say first of all im a huge fan of the Reagan Library and particularly the educational work you do and the way you create learning experiences for young people, and i cannot remember other time that i have visited that we did not have just a wonderful experience. So i can assure you as soon as im allowed to get back to the west coast i will be dropping in to see you. Terrific. Love to have you, mr. Speaker, and ambassador gingrich as well. Ive known you for years. You are an intellectual. You are a historian. Youre an imaginative guy. I wonder, though, mr. Speaker, could you have ever imagined a situation like the world and the United States finds itself in today . Ever imagine a pandemic and hit recalltily stop literally stopping the world in its tracks during your lifetime . No. I think when i first started writing, trump and the american future, it was at the peak of the great economic, lowest black unemployment in modern history, lowest last teen know unemployment, everything was going well. We were negotiating tough live with the chinese, it seemed rational. And then, boom, you start with what originally was the chinese virus, now given a different name for political reasons. Then you go to the first time eve ever seen countries deliberatesly create a depression. Then you good to politicians deciding what you can and cant do. Then you good to people being totally fed up, weeks of isolated, worried economically and you have the tragic death of george floyd and all of a sudden the country seems to come apart at the seams. So, if you would have asked me could i have imagined putting all of that together, i think the answer is, no, i couldnt think. I have written a bunch of novels. Dont know i would have had the imagination to put them im not sure people would have said it wasnt believable and then the you had the impeachment and all sorts of things the level of turmoil in some ways resembled the late 1960s except the left is better organized and more totalitarian now more than the late six it in but a similar kind of turmoil. In fracture you mentioned the ofs as a decade. Was trying to think back to what the closest experience that america has had in the last century to what were facing today and, when the pandemic initially arrived, people were comparing the halt in the economy to the 20072008 period and i thought whether or not you think its been since, well, world war ii and attack on pearl harbor and a nation literally mobilized in a very different way, of course, but i think that it might be the closest experience we have had to the present day. I think thats right. I have written things once for publication and for the white house saying this is the largest mobilization effort since world war ii and in fact i wrote a piece which turned out to be unusually impactful because i was over here in italy and so i had seen this building for six weeks before washington did, and i wrote a piece and said, whatever youre planning to dotriple it because you dont understand how big this will get and i think that was probably people read it because they knew i was here and actually changed the conversation and led us to the very, very large bills they passed and the efforts to sort of stabilize the economy. But its a really i think big challenge right now, and i think its compounded because we are probably as politically divided as we have been in a long time. I have good friend who is civil war historian at princeton who says that the language used to attack trump resembles the slave owning newspapers in South Carolina attacking lincoln in 1860, said the level of vitriol and the nastiness and the degree of hatred is really unlike even with franklin roosevelt, never get to love the depth of the kind of thingsor getting about trump. And that of course is this whole how do you mobilize a country when the countries i dopily split and at love people deeply split and people decided that we get social distancing as long as you worriedology include ideologically pure and doing the right thing. So its a very strange, very complicated time. In fact, a core theme it seems to me of your newest book is that america finds itself in a cultural civil war, and i know you too are a civil war historian. Can you explain that to us . Actually, i just recently wrote a newsletter entitled three generations of brain washing, and the core of the newsletter is reagans farewell address, where he says the one thing he most deeply regrets is not being able to institutionalize teaching patriotism in American History and he is really worried that we are losing the ability to talk to ourselves about who we are and that if that happens, that the country gradually starts to disappear. And i think that he was exactly when you go back and you read it you realize he gave this in january of 1989. Amazingly prescient about where we are today. Partly i suspect because as governor, o california he had debt with the radicals of berkeley so he had pretty request instinct for how bad it would be. But were clearly in a cultural civil war. You clearly have people who have accepted a lenin stalin maoist [inaudible] people who despise america. When you refuse to stand for the national anthem, its not because youre repudiating racism, its because your re feudate neglect United States and youover hat. A surprisingly large number of people today its almost like the radical generation of the 60s has now had almost 50 years to glow and strengthen and gather more force and so in that sense, i think we are in a very deep cultural war which will in many ways have a huge effect on what kind of country we become over the next half century. In fact, i look pretty closely and i think that you turned the book into your publisher early midmarch. Right. As the pandemic had struck in a major way. And so this book was written pregeorge floyd. Yes. So, i we do have a chapter in there on poverty and a chapter on the failure of big studies. Id already had to redo the book once for covid and once for the selfimposed depression. So it was pretty loud. It was the most complicated book ive ever written. Its a magnificent book, mr. Speaker, really. You cover the waterfront. I mean, its just amazing. Its terrific all the way around, but the back half of the book, my gosh, you cover all the ground. Its just great to see. I bet you, had you written the book or finished it next week, for example, you would double down on your thinking about this being a cultural civil war because of the addition of this whole issue of racism and george floyd, right . Well, actually, and i do podcasts every week which are free, and i do newsletters, and and ive done a series recently on exactly this. But i would say for me, im too much of an intellectual, the really big moment was when the New York Times reporters forced the firing of their editor because he had published an oped by a conservative senator. And i thought if wed gotten to a point of tyranny on the left where one conservative Opinion Pieces in a virtually totally leftwing newspaper was so, is such an act of heresy that the man had to be fired, get rid of him, and then i watched a principal in vermont in a town that is 97 white who tweeted shouldnt all lives matter, and the following day she was fired, and then in your part of the woods there was a professor at ucla who actually read Martin Luther king jr. s letter from the birmingham jail and was then suspended. Now, how that could offend somebody on the left, to read kings letter which, of course, is about nonviolence and is about the american dream, and king was very much saying to america you have to live up to the great dream you have, not i want to repudiate america. And you look at all that and you just think this is truly a cultural civil war. Black lives matter is popular right now because its a slogan, but when you actually look at the organization which has as one of its explicit goals the destruction of the nuclear family, now, why they want to destroy the nuclear family, im not sure. It strikes me as irrational socially and the guaranteed step towards weakness, but its in there. And you realize that the people who founded black lives matter are inherently antiamerican. In the sense that they want a totally different america, and they want to replace the america that exists today. The other example is the congresswoman from minnesota whos somali by background. How you can leave mogadishu for minneapolis and have a grudge rather than gratitude, i think, is one of the great things worth studying. You know, she left a society which was a disaster, dominated by war lords, people starving, no sense of individual opportunity, a fairly oppressive behavior for women to come to the freest, most open society in the world, and shes angry. I sort of look at that and go, i dont get it. You think that its in fact, id be curious, im trying to get a friend of mine who lives out this to go ask her, does she e really think mogadishus better than min yap his . Minneapolis . Because she behaves like weve somehow done her a terrible injustice by making by letting her be an american. What do you think, of course, the conversation, the dethe bait, the discussion the debate, the discussion about the issues of racism are, of course, important. I wonder what you think about the evolution of the argument on the left though now where this new phrase is coined, systemic racism. Its this concept of, well, youre racist, but you just dont know it. First of all, i think you have to acknowledge that africanamericans more than any other Group Experience [inaudible] and tim scott, the senator from South Carolina, in introducing the bill on Police Reform said he was stopped, i think, six times last year. You know, and hes a u. S. Senator. So i think in that sense, we have to start by acknowledging that it is more challenging to be black and that there are inherent difficulties you have to overcome. The question then becomes, and i think its a really simple test which im going to be writing about, and that is is it more important for blacks to succeed or for whites to feel guilty. Now, for some bizarre reason the left has decided that white guilt and announcing youre guilty, feeling bad about being guilty, taking a knee to prove your guilty somehow achieves things. And i said in an interview with npr yesterday, you know, id be a lot more sympathetic to all of the multimillionaire nfl players who want to take a knee e if they each went out and founded a Charter School and actually helped children succeed. But im totally unimpressed by people who america has made into millionaires who now want to too impose on the rest of us their particular viewpoint. And so i think we need a conversation, and the nice thing about the left is they cant contain themselves, and because they own the news media, they have no Feedback Mechanism to say youre nuts. So, for example, the california aassembly just passed by 565 creating a commission on reparations which is the number one goal of the black caucus in the california legislature. Well, reparations is is both morally and mechanically hocus, and its a fight that the left will lose badly, but they just have to do it. They cant stop themselves. Pelosis 12 trillion bill includes paying 1200 per person for every illegal immigrant in the United States as part of the stimulus. Now, thats overreach which i suspect 75 of the country will disagree with. So if they had some ability to be selfdisciplined, theyd probably be dramatically more dangerous than they are. I got a galley copy of the book, mr. Speaker, and i think your title was initially trump and the american future building a better american future. And as the book hits the shelves, i think you changed the title, updated it to solving the great problems of our time. Tell me why the shift there. I felt as i looked at all the things that were emerging that we needed to shift towards a more open, problemsolving, you know, i think in the world before the pandemic and before the depression it was easier to imagine trump really continuing to solve things at a rate that was amazing. Now were in a situation so complicated and with so many different unknown parts that i think were all going to have to pitch in to solve them. I dont think trump by himself can be the solution. I i think he can lead the solution, but its going to take millions of americans to get us out of the ditch that were now in. I know youve commented on this before because youre a historian. But now we see an acceleration of this phenomena, and that is that we, the left believes we can improve the future by destroying the past. You know . This rush to pull down not the civil war monuments, the monuments of american president s, you know, the revolution, you know . Comment on that and whats happening in America Today on that front. Well, again, i i think part of this is were maybe having you know, part of the reason i wrote the recent article on three generations of brain with washing is brainwashing is it hit me that we have lots of people who are so badly educated, they dont understand how much theyre doing a street dance with dead people. Weve had the french revolution. Weve had the Russian Revolution of 197. Weve had maoism. We know how these things work. If they could read, they could read not just 1984, but they could read animal farm, and they would understand what orwell, who had been a trotzkyite, was actually in the spanish civil war when stalin decided to wipe it out. So hed seen up close and then the, of course, he had mussolini and he had hitler. And its very significant that he puts 1984 in britain. Its not describing moscow. The tendency of this society will be to create a totally false story, to then have a memory hole into which we will put everything that doesnt fit the story, and well reserve the right of the state to change the story whenever it wants to. Well, thats what these people are doing. You know, i mean, where does it start, where does it stop in stop . You know, for example, should the suffragettes, probably almost of whom believed in traditional marriage, therefore have no statues pulled down because they werent adequately sensitive to what a hundred years later would emerge as the Gay Rights Movement . The idea that washington, who more than any other Single Person created the framework within which people could say that their rights came from god and not the king or that jefferson who actually wrote the words, that these people are anything less than historically astonishing figures who advanced the cause of freedom, its an absurdity. But what youre dealing with is a mob, and the mob has no mind. It has emotion, and it doesnt you said that its beginning to set up patterns that are totally unacceptable. And by the way, i think in seattle, washington, there is a 7foottall statue of lend anyone which was lenin which was put there years and years ago. Some guy bought it when it was being thrown away. I dont object to lenin being there because i think its a great with opportunity to teach people what a monster he was and how many peoples lives were destroyed by him. But as a conservative, if they can deny [inaudible] you sort of think this is crazy. But its both an act of cultural war fare, and its an act of proving that they have the energy and the drive and the courage to rebel. You have to see it as both things coming together. And i think its a very, very dangerous pattern. But again, it goes back to this idea that for three generations weve told people things that are lies. Reagan once said it isnt what they dont know that is so troubling, its what they know that isnt true. And i think thats what were seeing today. Yeah. Id like to touch for just a second on russia, you know, meddling in the election and the rest of that. I think that, you know, President Trump would make the point that he won fair and square, you know in whether, you know, russia set up a few facebook sites and that sort of thing, its fairly irrelevant. But i wonder if you think, newt, that at the present time with america in this cultural civil war, if, you know, without knowing it at present if the russias of the world are intentionally stoking these fires and trying to set americans against themselves. Well, i think they are if they can. Look, theres a, you know, it was a very long historic tradition of countries meddling in other countries, and weve been the dominant country now for a long enough period that there are people who naturally resent us and would like to, you know, knock us off. I feel the chinese fear the chinese more than i fear the russians. Both of them, i suspect, are involved. You know, i went back and read clark cliff orders 44page cliffords 44page memo for harry truman he wrote in 1947. Its an amazing document. This was before the socalled red scare. Hell say that mayors a communist, and thats just what it was. You know, he wasnt doing anything about it necessarily, but weve had its oozy for us to forget that in the easy for us to forget that in the 30s it was about nazi penetration. But originally it was set up to go after the nazis, not the communists. Anden then after world war ii there was enough communist penetration that they were going after the communists, and then we were told youre not allowed to do that, so we had to lie about whether or not there were any communists. And, of course, one of the reasons reagan got into politics was his aawareness that there were communists [inaudible] so i look at all that, and i think that they can try to interfere. They might