Multiple prominent Fox News hosts doubled down on right-wing attacks against an Olympic boxer who defeated her opponent in under a minute and has since faced a deluge of smears on social media, including from former President Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance.
Algerian Imane Khelif defeated Italian boxer Angela Carini when Carini forfeited. Khelif is a woman from birth and has naturally occurring high levels of testosterone. She was excluded from competition last year for failing an unspecified gender eligibility test, leading many right-wing commentators to falsely claim she is transgender or a "biological man."
The fight became a talking point for right-wingers, with Trump saying being punched by Khelif would be "like getting hit by a horse" and Vance saying "This is where Kamala Harris's ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match."
ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast
On Friday, Fox News' afternoon show "The Five" waded into the fray, including anchor Jesse Watters, who suggested that Olympic committees "got greased" by Khelif.
"All of these international Olympic committees are corrupt," he said.
Watters added that "whenever you have a trans situation in anything, it gets a lot of publicity. So they're probably thinking this is great publicity."
But, he suggested, "We're now at the point where we're going to give gold medals to men for beating up women. We might have a gold and silver medalist who just beat up a bunch of women. They're going to stand up on the podium with a bunch of medals around their neck for punching girls in the face!"
When fellow co-host Jessica Tarlov tried to interject and say, "No one is saying that they're men, they're not men," Watters doubled down.
"They're men. Everybody knows they're men, Jessica. And if Trump were president he would slap Algeria with sanctions."
Watch the clip below or at this link.
