Newt Gingrich: Only way to stop violence is to ‘keep arresting people until there’s no one left’

Former House of Representatives speaker described himself as ‘very hardline’ and said protesters should be charged with ‘the highest possible crime’

Former speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich said this weekend that the only way to stop the violence unfolding in cities like Kenosha and Portland is to “keep arresting people until there’s no one left”.

Asked on Fox & Friends on Monday whether the Department of Justice should investigate demonstrators who allegedly shouted death threats at Senator Rand Paul, Mr Gingrich agreed that it should — but also diagnosed a wider problem.

“In Kenosha,” he said, “they just arrested three out-of-state vehicles when they frankly trailed them and found them at a gas station filling up containers with gasoline, and they opened up the vehicles and they had all sorts of combat equipment. And they had clearly come for the purpose of bringing violence to Kenosha.”

The incident Mr Gingrich described occurred on Wednesday, when the police descended on trucks owned by a group named Riot Kitchen, which serves food at demonstrations. Those arrested at the gas station said they were filling cans to power a generator; they were charged with disorderly conduct, but released on Friday.

Mr Gingrich, who led House Republicans during the creation of the infamous 1994 crime bill, did not include this detail. “I’m very hardline on this,” he continued. “I’m a historian. I lived through the violence of the sixties, when we had 2,500 bombings in this country. The only way you break this is you just keep arresting people until there’s no-one left.

“And I think they need to take every video they can, they need to ask people to send us whatever video you might have taken, they need to track these people down, they need to charge them with the highest possible crime.

“And the reason is simple: you have to break the fever by which these people on the left, Antifa and others, have come to believe that they have the right, as they just did in Portland, where they killed a Trump supporter — and by the way, almost none of the news media were willing to say this was a Trump supporter killed by somebody on the left …

“And I think you’re going to see this continue until we stand up for civilisation and say no, you don’t have the right.”

Mr Gingrich’s reference to violent agitators coming to Kenosha from other states covered anti-racist and left-wing protesters, but did not seem to include 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a right-wing police supporter who travelled to the city from neighbouring Illinois and has since been charged with shooting two people dead using an assault weapon.

Mr Rittenhouse may have come to Kenosha following a Facebook callout from a self-styled militia, the Kenosha Guard, which called on “armed citizens” to come and “defend” the city since law enforcement was outnumbered. Video has emerged showing police officers handing out bottles of water to heavily armed militiamen and thanking them for arriving to help.

There have also been multiple cases of activists on the right preparing to incite deadly violence at protests. Earlier this summer, an FBI sting saw three members of the “Boogaloo” movement arrested on their way to a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Las Vegas; they were carrying Molotov cocktails and fuel, apparently intending to firebomb the event in an attempt to incite mass violence.

As for large-scale arrests, numerous protesters in Portland, Kenosha and elsewhere have not only faced violence at the hands of police and federal forces — with many incidents caught on camera — but have also been arrested and not charged.

In Portland, there were multiple incidents reported this summer of people being taken from the street in unmarked vans by unidentified troops sent from the Department of Homeland Security.