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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The French get a bad rap for The Holocaust, and true, some of it’s deserved.
But what surprised me was when I read that if you were a French Citizen of Jewish origin, you had a 75% chance of surviving the war. So when it came to French citizens, Vichy actually did a decent job of protecting them.
But most of the Jews in France at the time were considered aliens, many fleeing from Nazi Germany and other occupied areas of Europe, and the French were more than happy to let the Nazis take them off of their hands.
Did you not actually READ what he said, and not what other people said he said?
He was paraphrasing Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor “Jews survived by being useful.” Frankl was a doctor.
So you disagree with a Holocaust survivor about what he experienced.
Does that make you a ‘Holocaust Denier?”
“Most lived with that horror for the rest of their lives, having what we would call PSDT or survivor’s guilt”
Is that somehow related to PTSD, or DDT?
I guess he should have said “A few survived by being useful”
Being useful didn’t help you in Treblinka.
They executed the Sonderkommando’s every 3 months.
Now in Treblinka, only 67 survived out of 1M.
They survived by escaping during an uprising in Aug, ‘43.
Maybe Greg will finally realize that Faux News wants him out.
My hunch is Greg was thinking of the movie “Escape From Sobibor” where they would ask if Jews had certain skills and would allow them to live.
I really hate using Tweets as an “article”.
Formatting goes to hell and we can no longer tell what is the opinion piece and what are the quotations from Twitter.
Seems this ended up just being quotes by liberals, with no real commentary on it.
Greg, a very smart commentator IMO, was not really commenting about the Holocaust to Jessica. He was commenting about the comment in the Florida curriculum regarding the fact that some slaves developed skills under the horror of slavery. This is not an excuse for slavery but something noteworthy to be included in teaching about slavery. Jessica was correctly demonstrating that one can make claims about any terrible event and it can be taken as demeaning the horror of the event if one takes it that way.
The Five is a format of 4 against one (Jessica) so they typically don’t want any point she makes to go un countered. Greg was simply making a poor retort.
The same can be said for the comment about slaves learning skills. Why is it that slaves are never taught about skills that could be used to resist their condition of bondage?
PTSD
PTSD
Actually there is a lot of half-truth omissions about American slavery (not all slavery).
In truth the Holocaust comparison doesn’t seem to really fly because NAZIs really did want to ultimately exterminate Jews. They just wanted to use them all they could before that. And that was basically short-term.
Slaves here were not kept with the idea of killing them. So that urgency didn’t exist, and in fact the idea of being “useful” was probably more sensible for slaves than the Jews. Why? Because, they could get paid and they could buy their own freedom. (Yes, there is another thing they don’t tell you about American slavery, albeit that varied from time and place). They could be freed. And it could be a long-term issue before they might get freed. That is actually one up on Jews in the Holocaust.
Thank you for your educated, literate reply.
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