Greg Gutfeld’s attempt to justify Florida’s slavery curriculum by arguing that concentration camps taught Jews how to be useful has been condemned by the White House, the Anti-Defamation League, the Auschwitz Museum and Fox News insiders.
As I wrote yesterday, The Five show was quite intent on defending Florida’s education requirement that students be taught enslaved Blacks “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Cohost Jessica Tarlov, the lone liberal and lone dissenter, who is also Jewish, likened it to being taught that there were benefits to Jews to being in concentration camps because they “learned a strong work ethic.”
Gutfeld jumped in to suggest that indeed that was the case. He said Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, “talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp. By having skills you had to be useful. Utility kept you alive.”
As I also wrote, developing a skill to keep oneself alive is not at all the same as saying a concentration camp bestowed the prisoners with benefits, as the Florida curriculum does with slavery. But hey, maybe Gutfeld thinks it really is time to start teaching how the Holocaust benefitted Jews.
The whole discussion was disgusting. There was Watters whitesplaining to Vice President Kamala Harris and Blacks about how great it is to be teaching kids the benefits of slavery, Katie Pavlich saying it’s better to teach what’s good about slavery than to teach CRT to kindergarteners (CRT is taught in college and graduate school, not kindergarten) and, before he got to concentration camps, Gutfeld said it would be “really nice” if “Blacks didn’t feel oppressed because the media told them to.” But whites, according to him, are “always going to be the [real] target.”
Gutfeld’s concentration camp remarks went viral. The Daily Beast reported today on the backlash:
Fox News staffers and insiders also told The Daily Beast that it was a “disgusting thing” for the network’s resident “comedian” to say, adding that “at any other place, his career would be over.”
On top of that, the White House condemned the Gutfeld! host’s remarks as an “obscenity,” while the Anti-Defamation League said it was unclear if he was spewing “nonsense” or arguing a “well-documented” point.
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Media Matters senior writer Eric Kleefeld, meanwhile, claimed that Gutfeld had “unironically” extolled the value of the infamous phrase “Arbeit macht frei,” [work makes you free] which hung above the entrance of the brutal Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.
It didn’t take long for the Auschwitz Museum to weigh in on Gutfeld’s remarks, pointing out that the self-described “King of Late Night” didn’t seem to have a full grasp on the horrors of the Holocaust.
“While it is true that some Jews may have used their skills or usefulness to increase their chances of survival during the Holocaust, it is essential to contextualize this statement properly and understand that it does not represent the complex history of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany,” the museum wrote in a lengthy statement.
Let’s not forget that Gutfeld has kicked at least three people of color off The Five. The most recent was Geraldo Rivera. During a recent appearance on The View, Rivera said that management always sided with Gutfeld:
“I thought that it was very unfair that I wasn’t judged objectively in our disputes,” Rivera said about the still unnamed cohost we all know was Gutfeld. “But, rather, he was always favored and I was the one. I was suspended three times. I had two, three appearances scheduled weekly, then bi-weekly then monthly, then they kind of disappeared. They were cancelled in the last day, right before I was supposed to go on. So, I was really ticked off.”
Not surprisingly, Fox did not respond to The Daily Beast's request for a comment.
In case you missed it, you can watch the entire discussion below, from the July 24, 2023 The Five.
