Fox News Silent on Top Host’s Screed Calling For Civil War

Picture this: a star anchor on a major news network turns to the camera and informs his millions of viewers that elections don’t matter, democracy is over, and the only remedy is a violent civil war against his political opponents.

You might expect the news network to issue a statement condemning the anchor, bench them, perhaps fire them. After all, the comments are as stupid as they are dangerous: elections do in fact still matter, American democracy remains intact, and violence is not a sensible solution to political differences.

Yet Fox News is not an ordinary news network. On Thursday, one of its most popular hosts, Greg Gutfeld, declared all of those things on The Five. His comments may have been incoherent, but the message was clear: Democracy is done, elections are pointless, the only remaining solution is violent war against liberals.

Yet when I reached out to Fox News for an explanation, the network refused to comment.

Gutfeld’s screed would have been enough to ensure some kind of consequence at any other news outlet, but Fox proved long ago it doesn’t adhere to the same set of standards.

What media critics suspected for years to be true about the most-watched network in all of cable news was made clear as day in the evidence spilled into public view over the course of the Dominion defamation suit against Fox, which the network settled for an eye-watering $787 million. The evidence proved that Fox News hosts and executives knew that the 2020 election was not stolen, but continued to promote that lie for profit. (Some of its hosts continue to flirt with the stolen election lie, with impunity. All they appear to have learned from the Dominion fiasco is you shouldn’t directly defame a company in the process.)

Fox News knows that Gutfeld’s comments are reckless and ridiculous but will continue to let him host The Five and his 10 p.m. program Gutfeld!, because his shows rate. Profit over even an iota of principle.

A comedian and the former editor of magazines including Men’s Health and Maxim, Gutfeld joined Roger Ailes’s Fox as the irreverent funnyman. But his commentary has become darker in recent years, in tandem with his convenient U-turn from harsh critic of Trump to unconditional booster of the former president. Now, delivering extreme rhetoric night after night with the zeal of a convert, Gutfeld is one of the most-watched personalities in all of cable news.

Back in 2015, after Trump mocked John McCain for spending five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Gutfeld condemned the media for defending Trump with words that apply neatly to the Gutfeld we see on air today.

“When you see righties defending jokes about POWs, it says this game of ‘I’m more conservative than you’ is about ego and not issues,” Gutfeld said on The Five. “Trump is your id, not your conscience. And so we embraced him, exposing TV’s true purpose, which is ratings. An election is in 16 months, but ratings come out for us every single day — and Trump delivers.”

TV’s true purpose is indeed ratings. Huge ratings — or to put it another way: influence — drove Gutfeld to embrace Trump once he took over the Republican Party. And ratings — or to put it another way: money — are why Fox News won’t do anything about its star host’s increasingly unhinged commentary.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.