Posted on 07/25/2023 6:19:06 AM PDT by NetAddicted
Twitter was ablaze in the early morning hours with the latest smear of a right-leaning pundit. This time, it was Greg Gutfeld's turn … again.
So what egregious sin did Gutfeld commit this time? According to left wing journalists and commenters, and functionally left wing figures like Bill Kristol, Greg Gutfeld 'downplayed the horrors of the Holocaust' … and worse.
We're sure you've learned by now that you can't trust anything these people tell you. Your first instinctive reaction to such a story at this point should be distrust. They've earned it.
So what actually happened?
Greg Gutfeld downplayed the horrors of the Holocaust by paraphrasing Viktor Frankl. "Jews survived by being useful." Gutfeld leaves out that millions died in concentration camps the day they got off the trains. Gutfeld said this to his Jewish co-worker Jessica Tarlov. pic.twitter.com/tSsrLW6nJe
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) July 24, 2023
The panel on The Five was discussing VP Kamala Harris lying about Florida's new African American History Strand in the newly minted State Academic Standards for Social Studies.
The same people who have been lying to you about Florida's curriculum are now accusing Gutfeld of downplaying the Holocaust. That should be all you need to know, but we here at Twitchy provide you with better journalism than the hacks spouting off about Gutfeld.
Gutfeld's Jewish colleague, Jessica Tarlov, stated that she was uncomfortable with the sentence from the curriculum standard that has generated so much contention. The sentence is:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
This is one sentence out of over 200 pages, but has been used as a wedge issue by Democrats and liberal journalists to attack conservatives and Ron DeSantis. (Yes, it's all about politics.)
Everyone else at Fox fine with Gutfeld suggesting Jews sent to concentration camps could survive “by being useful?” How can any of his fellow panelists show up tomorrow to sit there next to him? https://t.co/iMmBa7MPwI
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 24, 2023
Bill Kristol, enabler of leftists, pounced on the opportunity to mischaracterize what happened.
After mentioning the Florida curriculum, Tarlov commented that, as a Jewish person, she would take offense to someone suggesting that there was some benefit to Jews during the Holocaust, perhaps developing a strong work ethic or learning a new skill. She was making a perfectly valid analogy to support her argument.
Gutfeld interjected that Viktor Frankl wrote in his book that some survived the concentration camps by being useful (he was a doctor).
The way you know @BillKristol is a leftist is that he lies and slanders in exactly the same disingenuous way the Democrats do. If he doesn't know what Gutfeld was referencing, he is an illiterate, unread moron.
He knows. He's lying. https://t.co/NY4JVoWNPy
— Nick Searcy, INSURRECTIONAL FILM & TELEVISION STAR (@yesnicksearcy) July 25, 2023
This is where bias and bad faith cause the wheels of decency to fall of the bus.
Someone who was trying to understand Gutfeld's point in good faith could easily understand him to be making the point that, in Tarlov's example, there are perfectly valid scenarios where a person might mention the benefit of skills, even during such a horrendous event as the Holocaust. He was providing a counterexample. You can argue whether it was a good point or not, but to run with 'Gutfeld's downplaying the Holocaust' is just hot garbage.
Perhaps @BillKristol should pick up the book Gutfeld was referencing, Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," rather than pretending Gutfeld is an antisemite -- in defense of Kamala Harris's intellectual dishonesty. https://t.co/5mjZhNGKmj
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) July 25, 2023
Perhaps the black professors, Dr. William Allen and Dr. Frances Presley Rice, who helped craft the Florida standards had similar good intentions when the now infamous sentence was placed in the curriculum standards. That was Gutfeld's ultimate point. Nah, they're probably just racists, eh Bill Kristol?
We here at Twitchy believe it's wise to listen to the African Americans who helped author the African American History standards as a more reliable source of what they intended than a Democrat politician trying to race bait the nation to score cheap political points.
We also think it might make sense to ask Greg Gutfeld what he meant instead of assuming you're getting an honest assessment from a Twitter account that calls herself 'Decoding Fox News'. No hint of bias there. LOL.
Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld just said that the Holocaust wasn’t all bad for Jews — because those with “skills” and “utility” survived.
This must be the end. It must stop now.
How much longer can ANY company advertise with Fox News EVER again?
— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) July 25, 2023
Nothing Gutfeld said could be construed as 'downplaying the horrors of the Holocaust'. We don't have to mention the systematic murder of six million Jews every time we discuss the Holocaust because we have a term that everyone knows refers to that unique historic atrocity. We call it The Holocaust.
The Decoding Fox News account and Bill Kristol got the smear machine cranked up and idling with the softer, yet still incredibly egregious, version of the slander. Then it was time for the pros to take over.
Tristan Snell has entered the chat.
Suddenly, Greg Gutfeld has now stated that 'the Holocaust wasn't all bad for Jews'. What the Snell, dude?
Ok fam, let’s roll
Let’s get a comprehensive list of ALL Fox News advertisers as of the present moment
I’ll compile a list and share it
— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) July 25, 2023
'Let's go after their advertisers because of this thing I just totally concocted out of whole cloth!'
Wow.
He did not say "that the Holocaust wasn’t all bad for Jews."
— Damin Toell (@damintoell) July 25, 2023
Tristan isn't going to let that get in his way. That's what the mini Greg Gutfeld living in Snell's mind was thinking!
Why are you lying?
— Rebecca Downs (@RebeccaRoseGold) July 25, 2023
Because it works.
People believe it. He gets clicks and retweets. Gutfeld's reputation is damaged based on a lie.
It's all good for Tristan Snell.
To borrow a phrase from @TheRickWilson "There is no bottom" https://t.co/reyJdFuTJ5
— JS GuitarGeek (@JGuitargeek) July 25, 2023
Twitter is awash with willing dupes who just accept the characterization they were fed … and who also believe Rick Wilson. Yeah, we just cringed.
@foxnews comes out in support of the Holocaust! at least they don't hide it in the shadows any longer. https://t.co/jTmRqJVEdP
— GOP Troll (@stop_the_gop) July 25, 2023
See how it morphs as it spreads? Now Fox News supports the Holocaust. Unbelievable.
This is what they have to do though because what Gutfeld actually said and actually meant doesn't support the narrative they want to peddle and need to believe.
Damin Toell does a good deep dive in this thread into what Gutfeld said, why he said it, where he missed on Frankl, and the complete lack of honesty by Tristan Snell.
Tristan warps what happened. I'll have the clip in the next tweet.
Jessica Tarlov proposes the idea of someone saying that Jews could've benefited from Holocaust by learning a strong work ethic. Tarlov brought up the topic of the Holocaust.
Gutfeld responds by basically saying… https://t.co/WJrMDiqqQ1
— Damin Toell (@damintoell) July 25, 2023
The misinformation is loose now, and nobody's going to let facts get in their way.
Greg Gutfeld tells @TheFive that the Holocaust wasn't that bad since "Jews survived by being useful." Gutfeld left out the part that anyone deemed unable to work was immediately sent to the gas chambers after getting off the cattle cars to Auschwitz. pic.twitter.com/vyhQY9LcJh
— Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) July 25, 2023
They're just going to run with 'Gutfeld said the Holocaust wasn't that bad'.
A suggestion I hope will be taken seriously: what if, instead of the new X logo that Elon Musk rolled out today, this platform’s logo were just Greg Gutfeld’s head?
I feel like that would do much more to underscore what X is all about. pic.twitter.com/KcMyuEE4Hw
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) July 25, 2023
Leave it to Seth Abramson to play connect-the-dots on fantasy antisemitism. LOL.
As she so often must do, Jessica Tarlov has to explain basic decency to her panelists on "The Five."
Most people would not have the patience she continually displays in the face of Greg Gutfeld's repellent partisan narcissism. https://t.co/UYMPToBnew
— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) July 25, 2023
We're not sure how dishonestly screeching 'racist, Nazi, antisemite!' at every opportunity is basic decency, but we'll keep correcting the smears because we all know they're not going to stop.
***
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I watched the show and Greg cited a source. Of course, the Left will think he, Fox, and the audience believe otherwise. I hope Jessica says something about it if the tweet is brought up on The Five today. And to confuse non Fox viewers (but critics) even more: That’s Jesse, not Greg shown at the beginning of the clip. I detest liberals.
Brooks made fun of the people who perpetrated the Holocaust. He did not claim that it was no big deal or that the people who died implicitly deserved it because they weren’t useful to their masters. You know better than this.
Dishonest Journalist: From the Redundancy Department of Redundancy.
As I noted in 12-13 not the best paraphrasing, but a renowned source. Victor Frankel, founder of Logotherapy, one of the three schools of Viennese psychotherapy, the other two founded by Freud and Adler. The book Greg was citing, Man's Search for Meaning, specifically deals with Frankel's experience at Auschwitz, he survived, and the characteristics of those who survived. Yes, survivors are a small subset of the camp's populations, but their characteristics are a legitimate topic, exploration of which in no way demeans the deaths of the vast majority.
What he said is patently true. Those internees who could be helpful in operating the camps were kept alive for awhile, most slowly starved and worked to death. The rest, too young, too old, too sick, or just over the quota, in their millions, were murdered shortly after arrival. The survivors, tattooed like branded cattle, to the Germans’ dismay and shame giving witness, did make it out because they were somehow useful. Gutfeld denied nothing.
“Jews survived by being useful.”
See George Soros.
“Gutfeld said this to his Jewish co-worker Jessica Tarlov.”
Isn’t Gutfeld himself Jewish?
He was raised Catholic.
He cited a source whose message he did not understand. The idea that Viktor Frankel was arguing, AS GUTFELD WAS, that the Jews could have survived if only they had worked harder, is a monstrous and outrageous lie. It is literally “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
Gutfeld is a comedian and he should not stray into serious topics, because he is too stupid to do so coherently.
No
I know a survivor who survived 5 death camps because he was a machinist they needed.
Point taken.
It’s another example why, even if you think you have a good point, it’s never a good idea to talk about the Nazis in any shape or form. It just leaves too much room for someone to pounce on it.
PSDT?
And I don’t think on his worst day Viktor Frankl was saying that he was better than the people who died because he was a harder worker. He was trying specifically to find meaning in the suffering, so that he could go on living in a world where such evil was possible.
One of the things people don’t talk about is how the Holocaust happened because we tend to see things through the modern prism.
All of the leaders during WWII went through WWI. Now think about that for a second. These people witnessed the deaths of literally thousands a day on the battlefields without blinking an eye, at a scale unheard of up to that point. Plus you had the Armenian Holocaust going on during the war. So really, what happened to the Jews to them really wasn’t all that out of the ordinary.
We react to it, because for the first time we had the images of the camps and the technology to thoroughly document the atrocities and disseminate them to the public.
But the fact is, events like the Holocaust went on for centuries. If you aren’t familiar with it, read up on the The Massacre At Clifford’s Tower, in York in 1190. It’s as blood-curdling as any Nazi atrocity.
Make it all stop...
It’s true. The veneer of civilization is very thin in the best times, and the barbarity comes through a lot more often than we realize.
I’m afraid we’re about to find that out the hard way real soon, hope I’m wrong, but I grow more pessimistic with each passing day.
“Jews survived by being useful”
Those that did survive, that is how they did it.
Viktor Frankel did, and his philosophy is praised by Stephen Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe honored him, too. In a nutshell, Frankel believed that the only thing one can control is how one reacts to what happens in life. Since he was a famous scholar, this was praised. Rednecks have known for a long time, however, that when life throws you lemons, you make lemonade. Same thing, just more plainly stated. But it got Frankel through the Concentration Camp, and it is a profound perspective, whether expressed in Viktor Frankel’s or a good ol’ boy’s wording.
They ought to try being useful in DC, but they already are being useful idiots.
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