Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, supposedly the right-wing network’s resident comedian, dove into extremely dark and violent territory on Thursday, seemingly urging for a new American civil war because “elections don’t work” and the nation is in “peril and chaos.”
Gutfeld, whose rhetoric has grown angrier and more extreme in recent years, declared during Thursday’s broadcast of Fox News’ The Five that American democracy was no longer feasible. Instead, because crime has supposedly spun out of control—despite homicide rates falling this year and crime just a fraction of what it was 30 years ago—he suggested a radically violent solution.
During a segment discussing the recent looting spree in Philadelphia, which resulted in dozens of people being criminally charged, Gutfeld took issue with some looters being let go with a slap on the wrist, calling it a “criminal mulligan.” In his opinion, this was analogous to the Jan. 6 insurrection, but the Capitol rioters were given harsher criminal sentences due to their race and political affiliation.
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“Only certain people get criminal mulligans and Jan. 6 protestors, they don’t get criminal mulligans and here’s why. They’re the oppressor. So the oppressed get criminal mulligans,” he exclaimed.“The people who are complaining, like us, we’re actually oppressors, and we’re losing power so that’s why we are upset. I just got a job at MSNBC,” Gutfeld snarked, before comparing the “rights” of criminals to victims of crime.
“Criminals get a mulligan, they can steal up to $900 worth of stuff, they can loiter, sleep, and shoot up in public areas, including playgrounds, they can loot and burn and call it social justice,” he declared. “They can pile up dozens of arrests and never do time. Meanwhile, what about us? Well, we have to change our lives to accommodate risk wherever we go. We have to move out of cities for the sake of the safety of our families and our own safety. That’s what’s happening.”
Gutfeld continued: “We are being driven out of cities by the oppressed, so I return to my imperfect analogy from yesterday. We had a war over slavery. We knew slavery was inhumane and immoral, but somehow we couldn’t solve slavery peacefully.” Pointing out that slavery was “evil,” Gutfeld then said “one side refused to acknowledge it was evil because it was too big of an admission for them to make.” From there, he suggested that the United States was inevitably heading to another violent 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. So in a way, you have to force them to surrender.”
Liberal co-host Harold Ford Jr., meanwhile, responded to Gutfeld that “we can have an election,” prompting the so-called “King of Late Night” to seemingly go full fascist.
“No, elections don’t work,” Gutfeld retorted. “We know that. We know they don’t work!”
After Ford said “they do work,” Gutfeld went on a dystopian tirade before again insisting that democracy is no longer a viable path.
“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!”
Gutfeld did not acknowledge the fact that the U.S. is 13 months out from a presidential election in which one party’s frontrunner refused to accept the results of the previous election. He also failed to clarify that he was speaking on a network that had to pay $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit over allegations it had knowingly peddled voter fraud lies to boost ratings.
