Greg Gutfeld is the designated “funny” guy at Fox News. How do we know this? He has his own show, and Fox advertises it as a humor program. Which is extremely helpful because there’d be no way to tell otherwise. Indeed, as a “professional,” um, “comedian,” he lies somewhere on the humor spectrum between Dane Cook and clown penis cancer. (Apologies if you’re a big fan of clown penis cancer. Or Dane Cook, I suppose.)
But what Gutfeld lacks in comedy chops he makes up for by urging a violent, democracy-ending civil war in order to address a minor, likely pandemic-related uptick in crime in many of our cities.
Then again, if conservatives aren’t scaremongering on behalf of our looming Thousand Year Trumpian Reich™, brought to you by Stormfront and Hobby Lobby, they’re not really trying.
Recently on Fox News’ “The Five,” whose name is an apparent reference to Mitch Albom’s bestselling novel “The Five People You Met at Phyllis Schlafly’s Key Party,” Gutfeld went on an extended anti-democracy tirade that defies belief. To their credit, the other panelists, including Harold Ford Jr. and Martha MacCallum, pushed back. For now, anyway.
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Watch:
GUTFELD: “But only certain people get criminal mulligans, and Jan. 6 protestors, they don’t get criminal mulligans, and here’s why. They’re the oppressor. Right? So the oppressed get criminal mulligans. The people who are complaining, like us, we’re actually oppressors and we’re losing power, so that’s why we are upset. I just got a job at MSNBC. So let’s compare the rights between criminals and victims, okay? The criminals, they get a mulligan. They can steal up to $900 worth of stuff; they can loiter, sleep, and shoot up in public areas, including playgrounds; they can loot and burn and call it social justice. They can pile up dozens of arrests and never do time. Meanwhile, what about us? Well, we have to change our lives to accommodate risk wherever we go. We have to move out of cities for the sake of the safety of our families and our own safety. That’s what’s happening. We are being driven out of cities by the oppressed, so I return to my imperfect analogy from yesterday. 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 for 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.”
JESSE WATTERS: “Or we could make love, not war.”
GUTFELD: “Uh, I tried that once …
HAROLD FORD JR.: “Or we can have an election.”
GUTFELD: “… I had to go to a doctor.”
MARTHA MACCALLUM: “Yeah, elections.”
GUTFELD: “No, elections don’t work. We know that. We know they don’t work!”
FORD: “They do work.”
GUTFELD: “Look what we have! Look what we have! We had a moderate president and we have crime exploding everywhere. We had a Democrat [sic] president promise that he was going to be moderate, promise that he was gonna 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.”
FORD: “No, elections do matter. We don’t need to go to war for it, we go to the election booth and vote the people out who don’t do the things we say.”
Sheesh. Where to start? First of all, crime has been decreasing for decades, and the upticks in crime that occurred during and after the COVID-19 pandemic are mere blips compared to the major decreases in crime we’ve seen over the past 30 years. In fact, the reported violent crime rate has been cut nearly in half since the early ‘90s.
The FBI tracks seven major types of crime, [data analyst Jeff] Asher explains on Morning Edition. Property crime — theft, auto theft and burglary — has been falling regularly for the last 20 years. Violent crime — aggravated assault, murder, rape and robbery — increased at least in 2020, but remains lower than it was in the 1990s.
“But even that, when we talk about crime, is not what people think of,” Asher says. “What they’re really thinking of is murder and gun violence, and murder makes up 0.2% of all big-picture crimes every year. But it’s the crime with the most societal harm. It’s the thing that people tend to care about the most.”
Yes, murder is the crime people worry most about, and is the one that tends to be the most reliably reported. And the murder rate did increase significantly starting in 2020 during—oh, this is inconvenient—the Trump administration. So how are we doing on that score now?
Murder is down 13 percent in New York City, and shootings are down 25 percent, relative to last year as of late May. Murder is down more than 20 percent in Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. And, most significantly, murder is down 30 percent—30 percent!—or more in Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Little Rock, Arkansas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and others.
Explaining the trend is much more difficult than describing it. The cause of the Great Crime Decline of the 1990s, when murder fell 37 percent over six years, is still not fully understood, so any explanations of the current trend must remain in the hypothesis phase for now. The national nature of both the surge in murder in 2020 and the apparent decrease this year suggests that national explanations will be more convincing than local anecdotes. Moreover, the factors that caused murder to begin to spike in the summer of 2020 may not be the same factors (now, theoretically, in reverse) that are contributing to its decline in 2023.
So essentially, Gutfeld is advocating for a second American civil war—like the one that ended chattel slavery—in order to address the equally morally noxious problem of rapidly falling murder rates under Joe Biden. (Also, this guy really needs to stop talking about slavery, ‘cause he gets it wrong every time.)
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Meanwhile, if you really want to protect your children, you should stay in blue states and stay the hell out of red states. For one thing, the murder rates in conservative “Trump” states have been higher than those in blue states for at least two decades. For another, children are at far greater risk of experiencing a violent death if they live in a rural area, largely because of the much increased danger of car accidents. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to live in the country or that we should start forcibly relocating people for their own safety, but it does lend some needed perspective to our now-histrionic crime debate and the associated hand-wringing about families’ safety.
Also—and I can’t believe this actually has to be said—we do have a border. (Unfortunately, we’re even extending its barriers.) And the current administration is aware of it. That’s why people keep getting arrested there.
As for the brutally oppressed Jan. 6 defendants—is it possible that attempting to overthrow American democracy at the behest of a wannabe autocrat is just a wee bit more serious than doing a smash-and-grab at an electronics store? And it should go without saying that those who are truly interested in social justice aren’t going on looting rampages. For example, the 2020 protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd were overwhelmingly peaceful.
But hey, at least Fox clearly labels Gutfeld’s pig-ignorant utterances as “jokes.” If only they’d come clean about the rest of their comedy lineup.
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Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
