There is an "increasing intensity of hostility on the left," and it seems to be "a pretty directed kind of behavior" that the Alexandria ballpark shooter intentionally asked if the congressmen who were targeted before he started shooting were Democrats or Republicans, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday.
"We should be very grateful that nobody on the congressional side was killed, and nobody working for Congress was killed," said Gingrich, a guest on Fox News' "Outnumbered" program. "I don't think any of us expected today for this to come."
Gingrich, calling the shooting by James T. Hodgkinson "sobering," said the intensity and division have been building since President Donald Trump won the election and that there have been a series of events that "tell people it's okay to hate" him.
"I talk to college students regularly who say to me, if they openly are for Trump, they get threatened," Gingrich said. "Some of them get death threats. We have the intensity on the left that is very real, whether it is somebody holding up the president's head or whether it's right here in New York City, a play that shows the president being assassinated, or it's Democratic-leaning national politicians who are so angry they have to use vulgarity because they can't find in a common language."
Gingrich said he thinks it makes sense to speak of such things following the ballpark shooting, as there has been a "series of things" that makes such actions seem acceptable.
"You had a series of things that tell people that it's okay to hate Trump, it's okay to consider assassinating Trump and then suddenly we are supposed to rise above it," said Gingrich. "Until the next time?"
Gingrich said he'd compare the shootings to an incident that occurred while he was on Capitol Hill.
"When I was speaker, we had an incident one Friday where suddenly the police broke into my office and told me to stay and I had no idea what was going on," he said. "Two of our policeman had been killed directly under my office by a person who is deranged, who came in and before he went to the metal detector, pulled his pistol and started shooting. It was a very horrifying event."
But in Wednesday's shooting, with Hodgkinson asking which lawmakers were practicing, makes it a directed behavior, Gingrich insisted.
"I don't know of any time in recent history where they have the kind of level of intensity that we see growing," he said. "Maybe you are right and maybe this is the moment where everybody takes a step back . . . but I have been communicating. I go out on campuses, I have young people tell me how threatened they are."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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