White House condemns Fox host Gutfeld’s Holocaust comments
The White House is blasting a popular Fox News host for his commentary on the Holocaust this week.
During an episode Monday of the network's top-watched table talk program "The Five," the panel discussed the state of Florida's new controversial standards for teaching Black history, which direct teachers to include instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
After a liberal member of the show's panel asked if the same standard could be applied to Jews who were captured and tortured during the Holocaust, Greg Gutfeld chimed in.
The late-night host replied by referencing the book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” written by a psychologist, Viktor Frankl, who survived a concentration camp.
“Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful,” Gutfeld said on the show Monday. “Utility. Utility kept you alive.”
The White House on Tuesday issued a scathing rebuke of Gutfeld's remarks.
"What Fox News allowed to be said on their air yesterday — and has so far failed to condemn — is an obscenity," spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement to The Hill. "In defending a horrid, dangerous, extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of Americans who suffered from the evil of enslavement, a Fox News host told another horrid, dangerous and extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of people who suffered from the evils of the Holocaust."
Gutfeld is one of Fox's most recognizable hosts and was recently awarded a weeknight prime-time slot at 10 p.m. after his late-night conservative comedy program beat out the major networks in the nightly ratings race several months running.
Biden's White House and Fox News, the top-watched network on cable, have sparred on a number of occasions, including over the booking of an interview with the president before this year's Super Bowl halftime show that fell apart and some of the content about the Bidens' business dealings routinely aired on the network.