Greg Gutfeld Under Fire from Fox News Insiders: 'At Any Other Place, His Career Would Be Over'
Cue the liberal outrage at Fox News — from both inside and outside the building, it seems.
Just a week after the liberal outrage involving Vice President Kamala Harris’ misguided treatment of Florida’s curriculum as racist because of one cherry-picked point about slavery taken out of context, the latest target of their ire is Greg Gutfeld. His comment on a Monday edition of “The Five” has resulted in a context-free pile-on from the left, including everyone from the White House, to anonymous “Fox News staffers and insiders.”
In case you missed the prior controversy, the vice president and other leftists spent most of last week braying about one point in Florida’s history curriculum which noted that slaves did occasionally learn useful skills while in servitude while pointing out that, the rest of the time, slavery was indeed a horrific thing.
The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona claimed that conservatives “have rushed to defend Florida’s new and controversial education curriculum.” Among those conservatives are Gutfeld and Fox News stablemate Jesse Watters.
“During Monday’s broadcast of Fox News’ ‘The Five,’ which both Watters and Gutfeld co-host, the panel raged against Vice President Kamala Harris’ condemnation of the Florida curriculum as racist. Watters, for instance, blasted the veep for not wanting ‘African-Americans and white Americans to know that Black Americans did learn skills despite being enslaved,'” Baragona wrote.
“The heated discussion, however, took an uncomfortable turn when lone liberal panelist Jessica Tarlov drew a parallel between slavery and the Holocaust, wondering if Florida schools would also teach that Jewish people received some benefits from the Nazis systematically murdering them in death camps.”
Gutfeld then referenced psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” noting that the author “talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills.
“You had to be useful,” Gutfeld continued. “Utility! Utility kept you alive!”
Well, cue the outrage, including by Substack writer and City University of New York professor Juliet Jeske, who said she “wanted to throw up after this comment”:
I wanted to throw up after this comment. How would he not know that Jews were sorted the day they arrived in some camps and were immediately murdered. I thought that was common knowledge. A lot of them were children.
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) July 24, 2023
Mind you, this is not what Gutfeld is saying or a misinterpretation of Frankl, for that matter. But, if you accuse your opponent of the worst kinds of ignorance and hatred and that opponent happens to work for a conservative media outlet, it’s automatically treated as true!
Baragona was also able to find a handful of “Fox News staffers and insiders” who told him “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.'”
It’s unclear how many of these “staffers and insiders” have names that rhyme with “Peraldo Tivera,” or if that’s all of them, but I digress.
“Obviously, it is a disgusting thing to say, same with Jesse’s remarks on the matter,” an individual identified as a Fox News producer said.
“Just generally speaking, I’m amazed that Fox has any ability to retain employees from multicultural backgrounds. Our workplace is shockingly diverse given the vitriol that often makes it to the air. Understand that they’re likely here for the same reasons I am, these jobs are scarce, but I can’t help but feel awful for them because they undoubtedly see this nonsense and can’t do anything to stop it.”
“At any other place, his career would be over,” said an insider of unknown role, adding there was a “lot of internal worry” about the controversy.
The Western Journal reached out to Fox News for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
The White House also pretended to wring their hands over the latest controversy, apparently willing to attribute the worst intentions possible to anyone right of center. According to The New York Times, White House spokesman Andrew Bates released a statement about the remarks Tuesday, calling them “a horrid, dangerous, extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of Americans who suffered from the evil of enslavement.”
Much like Harris’ decision to throw divisive aspersions on Florida’s curriculum by grotesquely inflating one out-of-context, manipulated point taught to students, the decision to jump all over Gutfeld is motivated not by a search for the truth but the search for a target. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, noted that “what Gutfeld says there is absolutely unobjectionable.”
“As an orthodox Jew — and, thank God, my immediate family, our family line was in America since the early 20th century, but the entire extended family was in Europe at the dawn of the Holocaust, so we lost a lot of distant relations and family relations in Europe … and, of course, I’m deeply ensconced in the Jewish community, so pretty much everybody knows a Holocaust survivor — what he’s saying there, which is that, the durability and the adaptability of human beings, the resiliency of human beings in terrible circumstances, leads them to cultivate skills that are useful to them in the rest of their lives, even in the worst circumstances, is one of the glories of being a human being,” Shapiro said. “That’s unobjectionable.”
As for the White House’s remarks: “There was nothing good about slavery. There was nothing good about the Holocaust. Full stop,” Shapiro said. “No one said there’s anything good about slavery or the Holocaust. They said that resilient human beings sometimes are capable of making the best of their horrific situations, which is of course true.”
Truth? What a horrid, dangerous, extreme lie that insults the millions of Americans who suffered from the evils of [insert next week’s outrage here].
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