Experts on history, extremism, and the media are sounding the alarm after Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s carefully-crafted rant declaring “elections don’t work” that’s being seen as a “call for stochastic terrorism” and “civil war.”
Saying Gutfeld’s remarks go “into some very dark territory,” Daily Beast senior media reporter Justin Baragona posted the video of the Fox News host’s tirade Thursday evening on social media, including the transcript. He writes: “Greg Gutfeld says ‘elections don’t work’ and ‘society is in peril and chaos because our elections don’t matter’ while urging for a new American civil war.”
Over at The Daily Beast, Baragona observed that Gutfeld went “full fascist” and “dove into extremely dark and violent territory.”
“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.”
Complaining about crime, Gutfeld told Fox News viewers (transcript via Mediaite): “We had a war over slavery. We knew slavery was inhumane and immoral, but somehow we couldn’t solve slavery peacefully. It was an evil, but one side refused to acknowledge that it was evil because it was too big of an admission of them to make. Doesn’t that feel that way now? 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 an admission that their beliefs have been corrupt all the time, so in a way you have to force them to surrender.”
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After some back-and-forth with his co-hosts, Gutfeld continued: “Elections don’t work. We know that. We know they don’t work. Look what we have. Look what we have. We had a moderate president and we have crime exploding everywhere. We had a Democrat president promise that he was going to be moderate, promise that he was going to 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.”
History professor Thomas Lecaque, who describes himself as a “historian who specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence,” wrote that Gutfeld’s “‘joking’ about civil wars is a call for violence.”
“The ‘joking’ does not in any way stop it from being a call for stochastic terrorism,” he noted, adding: “We’ve just accepted that it’s normal for supporters and leaders of one of our two major political parties to call for murdering members of our society.”
Elad Nehorai, who writes on extremism and antisemitism, warned, “Fox News hosts are now openly calling for an end to democracy and a civil war. I’m sure this will be largely ignored and treated as a peculiarity despite all the evidence we’ve seen that we need to take this stuff seriously.”
Princeton University professor of history Kevin M. Kruse summed up Gutfeld’s remarks, writing: “The Fascist and the Furious.”
“Anyone not taking this seriously needs to consider that we’re sitting on the same social and political fault lines that led to total war a historically short time ago. And the losers literally promised they would one day rise again,” warned former Obama administration official Brandon Friedman.
NBC News’ Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley wrote: “Amazing that this kind of thing is now normal discourse on the right being watched and discussed in millions of homes.”
And investigative reporter Ben Collins, who writes about extremism and disinformation for NBC News, commented simply: “Jesus.”
Watch below or at this link: