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!”
I just want to say that I appreciate you are the one response that wasn’t a knee jerk reaction to my comment. You took the time to make a point, and provided something you thought would be beneficial from what you think my point of view is. Thanks. I appreciate the effort, and laud you for it. We should all be so kind to people we disagree with.
Damn, man. You really gotta call out my disengaged ass, don’t you? I think you make an extremely important and overlooked point here. In any kind of social movement it’s imperative that you gain a following for that movement. On an individual level, you do that with good reasoning and specifically not using unnecessary antagonism. It reminds me of all the leftists who were recently bemoaning all the apathy in the 2016 election for what they perceived as “I like whichever candidate, but their supporters were mean to me”. I mean, they’d be correct that this is a childish reason to disengage completely, but these are the exact same people you need to join in your social movement. Too many times we get so obsessive with the academic structure of a movement that we become blind to the world that would benefit from it. We forget that we need to find a way that others would be receptive to our message in how we present it. Truth at all costs is admirable on the surface, but how admirable can it be when the cost is mass dismissal because we felt entitled to be antagonistic toward those who don’t agree yet? So maybe I should put childish ways behind me and begin engaging with others in charitable and good faith.
If you and I can both be better, its a start. Also, eloquently put.