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Fox News' Greg Gutfeld sparks backlash after reclaiming ‘Nazi' as his own ‘n-word': ‘Beneath contempt'
During a segment on Fox News' top-rated panel show The Five, Gutfeld and his fellow co-hosts discussed the recent immigration raid at a California cannabis farm that featured protesters confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, griping about Democrats' 'violent anti-ICE rhetoric,' which has become a significant talking point on the right-wing network.
The frenzied raid, which saw authorities nab roughly 300 farm workers, resulted in the death of 57-year-old Jaime Alanís, described as a 'hard-working, innocent farmer' and the sole provider for his family.
Mocking a California professor who was arrested for allegedly throwing a tear gas canister back at ICE agents during the protest, co-host Lisa Montgomery – better known as Kennedy – called for demonstrators to be sent to 'Alligator Alcatraz,' the migrant detention camp located in the Florida swamps.
Gutfeld, meanwhile, insisted the professor's actions – the educator claims he was moving the canister out from under a wheelchair when he was tackled by ICE agents – are why progressives' criticism of Republicans and the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts don't hold any water.
And to make his point, he said that right-wingers should deflect the accusations that they're veering towards fascism by reclaiming the word 'Nazi' for themselves.
'This is why the criticism doesn't matter to us when you call us Nazis. Nazi this and Nazi that. You know, I'm beginning to think they don't like us,' he sneered. 'You know what? I've said this before. We need to learn from the Blacks.'
Gutfeld continued: 'The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So, from now on, it's, 'What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?''
'Nazi, please,' a gleeful Kennedy interjected while co-host Jesse Watters giggled in the background.
'Thank God you did a hard 'i' there,' Gutfeld quipped.
It didn't take long for this Fox News segment to make waves and draw an intense amount of backlash and outrage over Gutfeld's pained analogy.
'These quotes, even if said in jest, would destroy the careers of any other journalist on any other mainstream national media platform,' Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan noted. 'But Fox doesn't employ journalists and doesn't have any journalistic (or decency) standards.'
Leftist streamer Hasan Piker bluntly observed that 'we've officially gotten to the point where fox news commentators are comfortable calling themselves nazis,' while conservative writer Cathy Young said these 'people are really beneath contempt.'
With others pointing out that the segment represented the 'normalization of Nazism' in real-time, several commentators and journalists noted the parallels between Gutfeld's call for conservatives to ironically embrace their own 'n-word' and cartoonist Matt Bors' famous 2018 strip about right-wingers blaming progressives for becoming Nazis.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Travon Free recalled his time as a writer on The Daily Show, saying it was 'crazy' that it was just a decade ago when Fox News hosts used to actually TRY to pretend not to be racist.'
'If it's possible for a Nazi to jump the shark- this Nazi has jumped the shark,' actor John Cusack chimed in. 'Never forget or forgive Rupert Murdoch for turning conservative corporate news into a raw sewage Nazi circle jerk.'
Jonah Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of conservative outlet The Dispatch and a one-time Fox News colleague of Gutfeld's, pointed out that while he understood the Fox host was 'joking,' he doesn't think 'he's thought this through.'
'And that's the best defense I can offer,' Goldberg added.
In recent years, and especially as the former Trump critic has grown increasingly sycophantic towards the president, Gutfeld's rhetoric has become increasingly extreme and unhinged.
Two years ago, for instance, the acerbic 'comic' took on a fully fascist position when he floated the idea of an American civil war because, in his view, 'elections don't work' and the nation is in 'peril and chaos.'
At the same time, it is at least a tad ironic that Gutfeld wants his fellow conservatives to probably reclaim Nazi as their own personal 'n-word,' considering how he's used the moniker to pillory those he's deemed evil. For example, he claimed last year that transgender health care providers 'will be seen as no different than the Nazi doctors who experimented on Jews in the Holocaust,' and he 'cannot wait' for that reckoning.
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