After Fox News gave Greg Gutfeld at least tacit acceptance of his call for civil war, he is keeping up his dangerous, inciting rhetoric.
The opening discussion on Friday’s The Five was yet another Fox effort to attack Hillary Clinton for saying that Trump fans are cultists who should be deprogramed. Of course, it’s really just another excuse for poutraged Foxies to play the victim and demonize the left.
Cohost Jessica Tarlov nicely called it out. Cohost Jeanine Pirro, who helped promote the lie that the 2020 election was stolen (and then got promoted), “asked” Tarlov if Clinton’s comments weren’t “in itself a threat to democracy?”
“I really need everyone to spare me the faux outrage and the pearl-clutching about this. Little collection of things that Donald Trump and high-ranking Republicans call liberals on a daily basis: anarchists, anti-American, deranged, communists, corrupt, compromised, groomers and perverts, thugs and traders,” Tarlov said.
Tarlov went on to point out the threats to democracy by Donald Trump.
“You tell me if the leader of the Democratic Party, so that would be Joe Biden, was facing four indictments with 91 felony counts, he had been found liable of sexually assaulting a woman and defaming her, that's E. Jean Carroll, guilty of fraud, sharing the nation's secrets not only in the Mar-a-Lago indictment but there was a report yesterday from ABC News that he had shared information about our nuclear submarine capacities with an Australian billionaire who's a member of Mar-a-Lago, who had then gone on and shared that with dozens of other people, ended up making a purchase I think of three subs, and included specifics up to how many nuclear warheads they carry, and how close they can get to Russian subs without being detected,” Tarlov continued. Then, pointing out how Trump has been “shooting up in the polls” during all that, Tarlov said, “It's actually tame what Hillary Clinton was saying.”
Of course, not one of the cohosts cared about Trump’s felony charges nor the very incendiary language coming out of the mouths of Fox News colleagues on a daily basis.
Cohost Jesse Watters went on a long jag “joking” that he wants to be “deprogrammed by Hillary,” be told that Sen. John Fetterman is a smart dresser, Joe Biden is smart and read Jesse Jr. a bedtime story about gay sex, e g. “These are the kinds of things that Hillary will reprogram the entire country to do,” he smirked. “This is what people do in North Korea when their entire country is devastated by dumb policies, they try to brainwash the peasants into believing everything is great. She knows it's over. And that's all they have left.”
Well, it was Trump who slobbered over North Korea’s dictator, but I digress.
Next, it was Gutfeld’s turn. He got right to suggesting civil war is justified, if not called for. At the very least, he used the kind of language that suggested a violent response is justified and/or needed:
GUTFELD: Number one, you got to define what a cult is, OK? A cult isn't defined by its supporters. It's defined -- it's defined by destroying those who don't support you.
So, scientology is not a cult because it -- because it has followers. It is a cult because it goes after people who leave or people that are against it. That is the party of the Democrats. Who created canceled culture? It wasn't the Republicans, it was the Democrats.
What you're seeing right now -- and it's a bigger issue -- you're seeing cancel culture on a wider, larger scale. You wonder why people are worried about 2024? Because there are a group of elites that are already placing targets on people's backs, from the top -- Elon Musk and Trump -- to the bottom -- the January 6 trespassers.
And if you call it out, if you dare to call it out, a target will be placed on you. If you talk about issues that matter, that the Democrats have abandoned, whether it's immigration or crime or education, you will need deprogramming, you will go to the camp.
Again, this is cancel culture. It is no longer a bug in the system, it is the system. You have the FBI now targeting MAGA Republicans as terrorists, that's part of this equation. So, how should the rest of us react? How should half the country react? Should we just laugh it off?
I mean, you said Trump says all these bad things -- or actually you didn't say that, you said, "This is what people say about liberals and Democrats." Fine, that's name calling. Trump targeted people in power. He didn't go after voters, right? She goes after voters. She goes after Americans. He went after the media and he went after politicians and he went after the Democratic Party. He never went after, quote, "the small-d Democrat."
So it validates everything that Trump has said and others. They are coming for you. They're just no longer hiding it. They want us to be scared. They want us to stay home. They want you to think twice before you say anything or like a post by Trump on Truth Social. But what are we supposed to do? Because if we say something about it, then we get targeted, right? That's what's happening.
I’ll guess that Gutfeld’s fee fees were still smarting from being widely called out last week for just “expressing his opinion” that there should be a new civil war. And maybe Fox News gave him a slap on the wrist for it. But as I wrote in an earlier post, he should have been fired for it. Full stop. The fact that he wasn’t says as much about Fox News as it does about him.
Oh, and by the way? Gutfeld has canceled at least two of his cohosts and one guest.
You can watch the rhetoric that Gutfeld and Fox surely know could provoke political violence below, from the October 6, 2023 The Five.