Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld hosted conservative pundit Kurt Schlichter, a Townhall columnist who has also written a fictional series fantasizing about a second American civil war.
Schlicter’s series resembles The Turner Diaries, a white nationalist novel infamous for reportedly inspiring Timothy McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma City bombing.
The Bulwark’s Christian Vanderbrouk noted the alarming similarities, most notably the central premise of a “brutal race war” facilitated by a “tyrannical government that takes blacks off government assistance and gives them police powers, which they use to terrorize sympathetic white characters and seize their guns.”
Both books also encourage a paranoia that progressive governments will allow “blacks to enable them to rape white women and ultimately exterminate the white race.”
Schlichter has even admitted that he sees his race-war fan fiction as a premonition for the United States, writing in a forward for one of his books: “My worst fears are slowly coming true, much to my regret. … Nothing I write in People’s Republic or in this book is beyond their [the left’s] aspirations; in fact, my dystopian vision may well be too optimistic.”
In addition to fantasizing about a race war, Schlichter has echoed the white nationalist “great replacement” theory. He has also amplified white nationalist tropes to his followers, questioned how the phrase “kung flu” could be racist, defended Trump for not denouncing supporters who believe in QAnon, downplayed the January 6 insurrection as “a bunch of elderly Trump voters taking selfies in the rotunda” and praised Fox host Laura Ingraham for “rightly focusing” on the leak of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade rather than the decision itself, responded to the Uvalde mass shooting by saying, “The answer is more armed citizens,” and described a January 6 hearing as “public masturbation.”
During his December 6 appearance on Gutfeld!:
- Schlichter repeated his stance on January 6 insurrectionists: “There’s some grandma somewhere who took selfies in the rotunda and she’s doing hard time on a chain gang.”
- Schlichter mocked concerns over Trump’s authoritarianism: “This stuff about being – Trump being a dictator, you know, it would be terrible if Trump went out and, oh, I don't know, persecuted his political enemies and tried to silence them. That would be awful.”
- In a segment on congressional hearings regarding the expansion of Title IX to include trans athletes, Schlichter said of genital exams, “Frankly, I think a lot of people who are into this scene would get off on” them.
This is not the first time Gutfeld has platformed an unsavory guest. On October 2, antisemitic right-wing media personality Hotep Jesus appeared wearing a sweater promoting “Men of Order,” his bizarre blog filled with misogynistic dating advice. Hotep Jesus is an extreme antisemite who has attacked Black and Jewish people online for years and has defended the deadly white supremacist Unite the Right rally in 2017.