The rise of the far right has unfolded in plain sight. But many people didn’t want to see it. During the Obama years I took a lot of grief for writing about Newt Gingrich and his leadership in the radicalization of the Republican Party. The criticism came from progressives. They thought I was focusing too much on the GOP when I should have been criticizing the Democrats. (I did criticize the Democrats plenty BTW.) But it greatly irritated quite a few people that I followed the developments on the right so closely because they just didn’t take it that seriously. That I kept going back to Newt was considered to be some kind of dodge. If you go back and read this blog over the past 20 years you will see that I got a whole lot of things wrong. Tons. But I was right about this. Here’s Robert Draper on Newt and the GOP NutHouse: Newt Gingrich was disdainful. After watching days of House Republicans failing to elect a speaker, Mr. Gingrich, the most famous of all recent G.O.P. House speakers, vented about the hard-right holdouts, among them Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. “There’s no deal you can make with Gaetz,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview Thursday night. “He’s essentially bringing ‘Lord of the Flies’ to the House of Representatives.” In contrast, Mr. Gingrich said of his own speakership, which sought a revolt in the Republican Party and the way Washington does business, “We weren’t just grandstanders. We were…