Greg Gutfeld critiques the monetization of cancel culture by figures like Dave Rubin, contrasting his small, teasing team at his show with MSNBC's destructive incentive for certitude over outrage. He highlights New York City's male exodus due to fentanyl abuse and argues Democrats act as a "carrot" while Republicans serve as the "stick," warning that despite his admiration for Donald Trump, intense opposition from a despising faction threatens to cost him the election. Ultimately, this analysis suggests the current political landscape is engineered for failure rather than genuine discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
The people that are really trying to get me are the ones that are auditing, and I use, like, auditing the five.
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, and that's, that's, that's what I, I notice that it's more like, so, you know, like, uh, you know.
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 have to, I've talked about this in previous books, we all have to share the risk, and I have to always, 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 cancelled and there's another way out, you will always rise above.
Well, first off, before I tell you that, I just want to say on the off chance that I say anything offensive here during the Gutfeld exclamation point program, I just want to say I'm doing today's show as a black lesbian.
Identifying as today, but on the first show, the first Gutfeld show, I was sitting in this chair and I said, you would be the number one king in late night within one year.
You said, it's going to happen, and I think I might have been a little reluctant, and you said, no, no, no, no, no.
There's no way it can't happen.
And you looked, basically you looked at the environment, and you were right, that there was this gap, and they were all feeding, aww, now he's back, and they were feeding off one little calf.
Now there is the dog that I know, but you were right, you were right, you hit it, and then it, I was gonna say it was gonna take like a year, It was six months.
Well, you know, the thing is, man, it was obvious to me, because you'd obviously been doing it at the weekly level.
I'd done it a million times.
It was and is fun.
And you, people always ask me about you.
I get probably asked about you in terms of what he's like off camera more than anyone else, because you're sort of right between corporate press and online media, so everyone wants to know.
And it's like, to me, it's like they turn on the camera, you are exactly the same.
You're having fun.
It's kind of messy.
And how many people even work for you?
You know, the other shows have, what, 50, 60, 80 people working for them?
Actually, you know, it's the irony of this, and it's like if you look backwards and try to reverse engineer a career, it's impossible.
But it had to do with me being editor-in-chief of Maxim in London, and I was interviewed for something called The Black Table by AJ Delorio, who then got famous because of the Gawker lawsuit.
Right, right, right.
And it was a really fun interview and Matt Laibash saw it and Matt Laibash had been asked to be an original blogger on the Huffington Post and I think the Weekly Standard wouldn't let him do it because Bill Kristol's an asshole.
It's because I love the fact that he's impervious.
And so we get along.
A lot of people go that Greg is really mean to Brian Kilmeade.
He's really mean to Cat.
And it's like Cat writes the introductions that I use.
But the thing is, if you see me not teasing somebody, it's because they're not worth it.
Or they're so thin-skinned, it's not even... Like, I don't want to get a call later saying, like, so-and-so appreciates that you just leave her or him out of it.
I won't say who these people are, but there was, like, one female who's no longer at Fox, who had her own show, who... I even apologized to her.
Her name's not...
Doesn't rhyme with MRETA, MBRAN, LUSTERN, but it could be.
Yeah, but I even apologized to her and she called me an awful human being and blah blah blah, but I realized like there's some people who have been in, I don't know, in this cloistered world so long that they're not used, they're not used to somebody saying a joke about them or, and I think the only thing I said that was mean to her or bad about her was, it was a softball interview with Trump.
That was it.
And it was just a silly joke, and she, man, she was pissed!
So I learned that, like, okay, steer clear of the humorless people.
I don't want them around me.
But the people that I really like, I will tease them till the end of time, because to me, that's the only way I can express affection.
I'm not that, I'm not good at the other ways of doing it.
So, it's like when I first, the five kicked off quickly, because I made fun of Dana.
Like, Dana had, Dana was in a world world would nobody made fun of her right and I I we were we
were seated together for height reasons because we know when
you're when you're planning a show it's all about the lighting and you can't have a seated next to I don't know
Jesse because he's tall and I'm sure so she's like this and like
this. I'm actually more like this and so we were seated together and it was like being next to the serious homeroom
girl except that you you could tell that she she was fun.
There was something going on in there, and she was never allowed to, like, go... So I just started... And I don't even know what I was doing.
I was making fun of her, but in a kid brother sort of way.
And that was the immediate thing that kind of got picked up.
And meanwhile, you know, there's Beckle, who's hilarious, ripping on everybody, but anybody who wasn't Amenable to teasing never lasts because they Can't handle it and they think like oh my god.
You made a joke about me and on camera.
I need to be outraged It's like no you don't the moment you laugh and come back.
They know and and to your credit I'll say something nice about you, man We've done it on your show where you'll make a gay joke about me and then I make a short joke about you.
And it's like, we're not angry.
It's so, like these people that are just looking for everybody to be pissed.
But do you think that, is that in a weird way more than anything, the secret to what, to you becoming the king of late night?
Like, it seems so weird to me.
Like Johnny Carson was the king of late night and now it's Greg Gutfeld.
I think that there's a bit of coziness with the celebrities.
with the celebrities.
When you bring a celebrity on, they're like in this cage.
And I don't like to do that.
Like, we're gonna have this person come out.
He's got a movie out.
Don't ask him about the divorce.
Don't ask him about, you know, his kid being picked up for drugs.
You have to talk about the movie.
I can't I can't do that, because that's, like, you know, Jay Leno was, like, think about Jay Leno with, uh, who was the British actor from Love Action?
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.
You do a little bit more of a straight thing on The Five, but, you know, you're yourself, but the show is a little, let's say, a little more straight or narrow.
It's weird because what 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.
the five. So they're actually like, it's like they're not taking the course, you know, they're
showing up in the back, right, right, right, the professor uses the wrong pronoun. And that's,
that's what I noticed that it's more like, so, you know, like, you know, I would assume that at
least once a week, there is somebody deliberately trying to destroy my career. But I can't let that
I have to, I've talked about this in previous books, we all have to share the risk, and I have to always, 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 cancelled, and there's another way out, you will always rise above.
The perfect example is Jason Aldean.
Getting Target, his song goes to number one.
There are a lot of other things, and then there's the reverse, that if you try to be the opposite of cancelled culture, that is woke, That will have an effect, like the Bud Light thing, where that is actually people, not social media, but people going, you know what?
I don't like that they're trying to sell me something that's so fake.
And by the way, the consumer had to be educated on why Bud Light did that.
Bud Light was trying to supply their brownie points for No, no, no.
However, I think that when you see that somebody is trying to pull a fast one on you, That's worthy enough to call it out and to avoid them.
But, and then when you see somebody who's being unfairly targeted, that is when you share the risk.
And that is when you go like, okay, I'm gonna go by Greg Gutfeld's book because they accused him of being a bigot or a racist.
Because I know he isn't, I wanna have the Jason Aldean effect, where it's like, oh, so you said this, you said a song that has no black people in it, that has no lynching narratives is racist.
What's your policy on when you're watching the clips of the lunatics of The View or the crazy people at the televised mental institution of MSNBC, when you're prepping your show, because I have no doubt you're going through the same thing I'm going through.
On one hand, I want these people to be ignored and disappear and whatever.
On the other hand, they are literally writing our shows for us, and I do think they have to be exposed.
But I always have this little internal struggle with how much attention What do we do with that, Greg?
You know when people smoke, let's say, the herb, and you realize your tolerance level's gotten so high, you need to take a tolerance break from gotcha videos.
When I look at the view clips, If there's a punchline for me exiting it, then I gotta use it.
Because everybody loves those clips, and if you have a good zinger, you put that in there, and that's fun.
A lot of people do it themselves on Twitter, you know, they'll tweet something and go, I can't believe this, or whatever.
But it's not, if I have that clip of, you know, Joy Reid, like I got bored with Joy Reid, because everything was the same thing, and I realized maybe I'm helping her.
But if I got a really good comment coming out of that, that I know is a surefire laugh, then you have the evidence there.
Since you're on the corporate side of this, so to speak, you work at a corporation, it's a big corporation.
One of my things lately has been like, when I'm making fun of Joy Reid, it's like, to me, it's like, I don't know if at this point she's a willful idiot or just, or if she's genuinely the racist lunatic I think she is.
But I keep thinking, isn't this really about not just the producers above her, so like the EP in charge of her, but the exec in charge of that guy?
And then really all the way up, like, can you just talk a little bit about corporate structure in cable news?
Because I think people, I think people are wondering about that.
Like, they know every day they put her on air or they put any of these people.
And then this was the beginning of the siloing where I'm going to this side, you're going to this side.
And they saw a monetary possibility in creating a silo specifically for that.
And then what happens is and it's a it's a destructive incentive and you have to be careful with it.
That you will be rewarded the more certain you are, not the more outrageous you are, but the more certain you are about your position.
I've never been one to be, I don't like the idea of certitude and I think you're the same way.
It's like, it's like It feels good to be wrong.
It's like a great feeling.
Like I've had this, you know, this, you know, come to Russell Brand moment with him where it's like, you know, I was a dick to him and he was a dick to me.
I was a dick to Glenn Greenwald.
He was a dick to me.
But it's like, it feels really good to realize that I screwed up.
They might've screwed up, but I might've screwed up more.
But it's like, if you are just that person every single day that comes in and goes, This is the most outrageous story.
I've never been more outraged in my life.
It is the worst.
I don't even know.
There was one person talking about me that said I had to step away from the TV when I saw.
Remember the line on Twitter that you always hear?
I think there's a sense of giving in, which is the same as giving up.
I notice on Mondays and Fridays, there's not a lot of people in the city and it has nothing to do with weather or holidays.
The people that can afford to leave, leave.
So really, New York for a lot of people is three days and and I come in I go to the I have a cabin about an hour and a half away and I come in Monday and it's amazingly fast and that's like there's nobody on the road there's tons of parking
And then on Friday, it's like, oh, I'm gonna hit a lot of traffic when I leave work on Friday.
So I think what's happened is instead of trying to improve the city, the people just reduce their presence in the city.
And so you still have, it's strange how the sadness and the depression of a city has moved to Midtown.
It's not like the Lower East Side.
Right, right.
It's actually where people work because there's fewer people there.
So that when you have less foot traffic, you have more bad things.
And I know that everybody says, oh, the broken windows theory has been debunked.
No, not really.
I mean, when they keep arresting people that do little things and you find out they're wanted for big things, maybe it's there.
But I think that, like, you have graffiti, you have theft, and it just gets worse.
And then pretty soon you have... I have this weird... All I see on the streets when I'm driving up on the city from, like, Soho up, I see, if I pick an age group, say the 35-year-old human being, women, they're all in Lululemon going to their yoga or Pilates classes.
They're just walking.
The men, strung out.
Now, I'm eliminating tourists and UPS and FedEx.
It's strange how the men have become thoroughly, almost emasculated by drugs.
They're kind of just, they're, They're sad, they're depressing, but they're almost not harmful.
Except for the ones that will beat the shit out of you or put you in front of a subway train.
Except for those.
Except for those.
A small exception.
But you see women, and they're going to work because it's almost like, what's this strung-out, fentanyl-laced guy going to do to me?
And so they take up the bus stops.
They sleep in there.
It's all there.
So you have all these little middle-aged women who are going to do their maid jobs having to stand on the side, but it's almost all drug-induced men.
Drug-induced men.
Drug-addled men and women getting to their exercise classes.
You're a Jordan Peterson guy, and you pay attention to all this stuff, and what do you make about what's happening to young men as a guy that was writing a men's magazine and editing a men's magazine and all that?
But when you talk to those in the know with drugs, no, they're like, fentanyl is a desired, it's not, it's like the drug dealers wouldn't put it in there if they weren't making money.
So there is a desire for that next level high.
And I think you're seeing that on the streets.
I think that there is a hole for meaning and I think that people are filling it in the weirdest ways and women are on their own and men have kind of abdicated their role in society.
I don't know if it has something to do with culture or what but it's I kind of sense that that like, you know, we've retreated into our own camps.
We know what we're seeing and unfortunately there may be no way out that there is A very little possibility that Trump won't be the nominee, and there's a strong possibility that he will lose.
So, we kind of know that, and I've raised this question to people that are pro-Trump people.
And I go, like, how can you reconcile this?
And they go, well, the polls aren't telling the whole story.
be the nominee. That's the red flag for me. Because and it's not Trump's fault. It's the
fact that there is a faction of people that hate him so strongly that they will put in
the effort. Yep. You know, you got if it's they say it, they say it every day. If it's
30% of the population that despise him, they're gonna feel like
And I know that to say that you're not going to counter that seems like you're giving in, but if you've got other candidates that could win, it's not.
And that's the thing.
I think Trump is amazing and hilarious, but I would say, dude, This is gonna, like, I don't see, I see you getting, obviously getting the nomination, but I don't know how you're gonna win because these, it's being set up so that you will lose.