OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Fox News star Greg Gutfeld made a startling claim earlier this week during an interview with comedian turned podcaster Dave Rubin.
The conversation centered around the “Gutfeld!” host’s career as well as the dramatic rise of cancel culture, especially within the entertainment industry, where stars who are not sufficiently “woke” and left-wing are essentially blackballed by liberal production studio bosses and CEOs.
“Do you think it’s kind of, I guess, weird or bizarre that you’re on a cable news network where everyone is watching you waiting to destroy you at any given moment?” Rubin said.
“It’s weird because, the irony is, more dangerous on Gutfeld! — they leave me alone. But the people that are really trying to get me are the ones that are auditing, and I use, like auditing “The Five,” which is Fox News’ most popular program and which regularly tops all cable news programs as the most-watched.
He went on to explain: “So they’re actually like, it’s like they’re not taking the course, you know, they’re showing up in the back hoping that the professor uses the wrong pronoun. I noticed that it’s more like — I would assume that at least once a week, there is somebody deliberately trying to destroy my career, but I can’t let that stop me.”
“I’ve talked about this in previous books. We all have to share the risk, and I’m not blowing smoke up your ass, but I have to say that you helped destroy cancel culture by monetizing the act of being canceled. If you get canceled, and there’s another way out, you will always rise above,” he said, throwing some praise to Rubin.
Gutfeld gained attention in recent days when a clip from his appearance on The Five started circulating online. During the show, the hosts were discussing Florida’s new Black history curriculum, which reportedly includes teaching that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” as noted by NBC News.
The hosts raised concerns about the implications of applying a similar idea to the teaching of Jewish people sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust.
“Did you ever [read] Man’s Search for Meaning? Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive,” Gutfeld said during the segment, noting a historical fact.
The remarks faced severe backlash, with criticism coming from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, as well as from the White House. Gutfeld, in turn, criticized the original poster of the video, @DecodingFoxNews on Twitter, for spreading the clip and misrepresenting his words, which received wide coverage in the media.
“Translation: if I falsely accuse someone of a horrible thing, it’s up to them to prove it wrong. This odious thing spends her waking hours smearing people & says ‘oh if it’s false-they’ll deal’. I first diagnosed this engine of envy a decade ago. It’s to fill a hole in an empty life,” he wrote in response to the account’s tweet.
Translation: if I falsely accuse someone of a horrible thing, it’s up to them to prove it wrong . This odious thing spends her waking hours smearing people & says “oh if it’s false-they’ll deal”. I first diagnosed this engine of envy a decade ago. It’s to fill a hole in an empty… https://t.co/wvY3fzDlsD
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) July 30, 2023
Meanwhile, Fox News employees anonymously said they were appalled by host Gutfeld’s remarks about the Holocaust, according to a report last week.
During the segment, liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov got into a heated debate with Gutfeld and the other hosts while discussing the recently approved Florida Black history curriculum.
That debate heated up when Tarlov, who said she was Jewish, asked a hypothetical analogizing the Florida standards to a similar premise of millions of Jewish people killed by the Nazis after the panel showed a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris wildly protesting the Florida standards — which have been defended by black academics involved in writing the curriculum.
“I do think that she read the whole thing, and I think that it’s an incredibly complex piece when you look at it, 191 passages. You have some good… And frankly, I’m just fundamentally uncomfortable with the sentence that Blacks benefited at all from this. And. You know, it made me think of someone,” Tarlov said.
“Obviously, I’m not Black, but I’m Jewish. Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews? Right? While they were hanging out in concentration camps. You learned a strong work ethic, right? Maybe you learned a new skill,” she added.
