Fox News host Greg Gutfeld erupted with dark rhetoric during Thursday’s broadcast of “The Five,” appearing to advocate for a new American civil war because “elections don’t work” and the nation is in “peril and chaos," the Daily Beast reports. The host, whose takes have grown more extreme in recent years, made the remarks during a discussion on the recent looting in Philadelphia. Gutfeld bemoaned how some looters received lesser consequences than participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection, who he claimed received harsher sentences because of their race and political affiliations. He went on to allege they were being “driven out of cities by the oppressed” and compared the political tensions of the moment to the turmoil around slavery that gave birth to the Civil War. “Doesn’t that feel that way now?” Gutfeld rhetorically asked. “That this defiant refusal to reverse this decline argues against the survival of a country. What does that leave you with? It leaves you with ‘you need to make war to bring peace’ because you have a side that cannot change. Because then that means the admission that their beliefs have been corrupt all the time.”

Liberal co-host Harold Ford Jr. responded by suggesting an election, but Gutfeld disagreed. “No, elections don’t work,” he retorted. “We know that.” After Ford countered that they do work, Gutfeld went on a tirade insisting democracy is no longer a possibility. “Look what we have! We had a moderate president, and we have crime exploding everywhere,” he shouted. “We had a Democrat president promise that he was going to be moderate, promise that he was gonna unite the country and now we have a terrible education system. We have no border. We have crime everywhere. Every facet of society is in peril and in chaos because our elections don’t matter!”