MSNBC’s Joy Reid took aim at Greg Gutfeld on Friday after the Fox News host called for an American civil war and said elections don’t result in an effective means of governance.
Reid rightfully went personal on “The ReidOut,” pointing out that if such a war were to break out, Gutfeld would certainly not be a willing participant.
“Greg Gutfeld I’m sure lives in some sort of penthouse in Manhattan,” Reid said. “He’s not going to be out there shooting anyone. He’ll be on his yacht or whatever. You know, he’s like a Tucker Carlson. They are sort of playing at or cosplaying like tough guys.”
Gutfeld on Thursday compared the current state of national politics to the Civil War era, when the question of slavery pitted the Union against the Confederacy.
“You need to make war to bring peace because you have a side that cannot change,” Gutfeld said on “The Five.”
Gutfeld then replied to co-host Jesse Watters’ quip that maybe they “needed to make love not war” with a no-less-damning take, saying “elections don’t work.
“What he means is Republicans can’t win elections on the issues they care about,” Reid said. “They cannot win an election when they say they would like to ban abortion. Women say no. Even in red states. They can’t win elections when it comes to things like gun reform. They have to gerrymander their states so we can’t have gun reform.
“The majoritarian positions that he wants to now solve by having a civil war and forcing the majority to heel, to bend the knee, to do what he says, give birth because he says, and all of us to live the way they say,” Reid added. “What he’s saying is, they are the Confederacy in this scenario.”
Reid said she’d be fired from her MSNBC show if she were to make similar remarks so quickly “I couldn’t clean my office out. They’d just mail my stuff to me.”
“On Fox you can say that and everyone else sort of chortles along and no one in management does anything,” Reid said. “We couldn’t even get a response.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor, appearing as a guest on “The ReidOut,” put Gutfeld’s civil war comments into a wider context dating to the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential term.
“Trump himself since 2016 has been engaged in a very relentless information war and psychological warfare to change Americans’ idea of violence,” Ben-Ghiat said. “That from violence being something that is repugnant to violence being something that is necessary as a way to solve differences.”
Ben-Ghiat said the ultimate point of election denial wasn’t to paint the perception of an election as having been corrupted.
“It’s that we shouldn’t have elections at all, that elections should not be the way we decide things,” Ben-Ghiat remarked. “And so violence and getting rid of elections, this is a mentality of coups.”
Watch more from “The ReidOut” segment in the video below.