By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

In a televised interview with former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, he stated the following:

We are in a very dangerous situation.  We have our two major international competitors, Russia and China, coming closer and closer together.  We have a president who clearly does not have a clue what to do.  We have a vice president who is an embarrassment, and the best possible insurance policy for keeping Biden as president.  And Americans need to understand: this is not a game.  This is not one of those things you get on Xbox.  We are in a real world faced with real crises.  And we have a president who is totally out of touch with reality, in terms of what's going on in the world.  I personally, as a historian, think that this is the most dangerous period we've been in since Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776.  I think the number of things going bad are so great, and the threat to our civilization is so great, that we really need a dramatic change.

. . .

It's very sobering that Xi Jinping last week—Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, which is his real title—gave four different speeches in one week on preparing for war.   And I think people should take that seriously and understand how determined, how aggressive and how competent Xi Jinping is.  Putin, of course, was a KGB agent and is himself ruthless, tough, smart.  So you have two people who are sort of gangster allies, and they represent the competitive alternative.  They represent a totalitarian, dictatorship-led world where they take care of each other against the democracies, almost exactly a recreation of the Axis powers of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s who took on the democracies.  And now, unlike the 1930s, we have a president dedicated to weakness, dedicated to confusion, whose family . . . got $3 million from the Chinese Communists in one check.  There's lots of other money out there.   We have no idea how corrupt the Biden family is, but what we do know is that with an Attorney General who is as bitter and as frankly dishonest as the current Attorney General, nothing is going to be done; and that's a crisis in itself.  We have an American system in enormous crisis, with a news media that doesn't want to cover the truth. 

. . .

I think Xi Jinping looks at the Biden family—which I suspect he thinks he owns—and he thinks: this is the moment when America truly is what Mao Tse-tung once called us: a paper tiger.  And I think it's a very sobering and, as a citizen, frightening moment in American history.[2]

Has Gingrich engaged in hyperbole?  I think not.  He is a historian; and his sobering concerns mirror my own, as set forth in other articles here.[3]  I do not believe in gloom and doom.  But at the same time, one cannot underestimate or ignore the risks today; and it is necessary to understand history and its lessons.

Great civilizations have come and gone.  Perhaps the greatest was that of the Greeks, whose leader—Alexander the Great—changed life on this planet in countless ways that are evident even today.[4]

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© 2023, Timothy D. Naegele

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[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass).  See, e.g., Timothy D. Naegele Resume-21-8-6  and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/accomplishments/   He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University.  He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service).  Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in American Law, and Who's Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/articles/ and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/articles/), and studied photography with Ansel Adams.  He can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See https://video.foxnews.com/v/6322995604112 ("We have a president that is ‘totally out of touch’ with what’s happening in the world: Newt Gingrich")

[3]  See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2023/03/20/lots-of-us-began-as-democrats/  ("Lots Of Us Began As Democrats . . .")

[4]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/alexander-the-great/ ("Alexander the Great")