Now that the midterms are over, can we speak honestly about the moral black hole named Greg Gutfeld—an abysmal vortex that sucks everyone around him into a perverse world of cultural depravity. Yes, he’s more politically astute than media’s leftist Cretins, but if politics are “downstream from culture,” what kind of political environment is being created in the witches brew of Gutfeld’s pre-pubescent potty humor? It’s certainly not a milieu that exhibits any attachment to, much less reverence toward, the great achievements of Western literature, art, civic life, and morality.
Seldom does Gutfeld manage to complete a late-night monologue that omits his obsession with scatology, and never does he focus sustained attention on the essential roles that intact families and religious faith play in creating a virtuous culture. Assuming his humor bears some relationship to the truth, Gutfeld has no affection for children and offers scant appreciation for male-female households whose primary focus is raising their offspring to be moral adults. Instead, when proffering remedies for our political (not cultural) rot, his default position echoes the leftist cliché about education. Yes, he adds an important school choice proviso but is totally blind to the fact that schooling alone, even if academically sound, will have little impact on cultural degradation absent a widespread moral awakening—a revolution that spawns massive institutional changes and millions more intact families. If Gutfeld’s show ever emphasizes the role played by overwhelmingly religious families in shaping children’s lives, it’s up to conservative guests like Mercedes Schlapp who, like other true conservatives, must crave a long shower after being dunked in Gutfeld’s verbal cesspool.
Ironically, Gutfeld’s expletive-filled program airs at 8 p.m. on the West Coast, the former “family hour.” That irony becomes thicker when Gutfeld passionately and regularly advocates for the legalization of drugs—a position that coincides with his comic persona as an aficionado of most forms of chemical intoxication and sexual deviancy. Given his attachment to music emitted by bands with nihilist leanings (cf. Power Trip) as well as that compulsive snicker, it’s rather clear that Gutfeld assuages his obvious psychological demons by resorting to other than over-the-counter remedies.
On this issue Gutfeld has a reliable echo in the person of Kat Timpf, a self-proclaimed libertarian whose on-air superficiality doubtless has Ayn Rand spinning in her grave. Kat’s a “no rules” gal whose “live and let die” philosophy opposes laws both against and for sexualizing young kids in school. In real life, of course, that means allowing radicals who set the agenda for public education to continue pushing “instruction” on six-year-olds that would have been deemed child abuse twenty years ago. Timpf is even unwilling to oppose drag queen shows for young kids. Instead, she comments with passion about her friendships with practitioners of that “profession.” The same inane preference for dogma over reality applies whenever Timpf opines about illegal immigration. The “real” problem, she asserts, is the welfare system, not immigration—as if there were some possibility that the former will magically disappear before the country’s schools, hospitals, and social services are overwhelmed with a hundred million foreigners possessing little education, no proficiency in English, and a clear preference for the political party that encourages illegal border crossings and provides “migrants” whatever “entitlements” are needed to ensure their ballot-box loyalty.
If those considerations aren’t sufficiently damning, consider Timpf’s self-congratulatory insouciance over “bump and grind” high school entertainments. After all, she observes, kids nowadays already have access to that activity and much worse online—just as she herself did in high school. Never crossing Timpf’s mind is the thought that using her own experience as a normative rule will have the effect of producing multitudes of self-absorbed, morally clueless adults incapable of cherishing a society in which individuals care about their neighbors and exhibit gratitude for the accomplishments of folks who came before them. Anyone who thinks those words are unduly harsh should ponder Timpf’s comment that she would only want to have a child if it were ugly, since it would then not detract attention from herself. It’s difficult to imagine a more staggering expression of narcissism.
I also find it hard to understand how Timpf became a writer or blogger for National Review, but it’s clear she has no affection for religion and only offers back of the hand “raised Catholic” slights that would have made William F. Buckley bolt up straight in his chair. It’s revealing that Timpf once complained bitterly about how cold she was in the studio while wearing, as is her wont, attire suitable for a Caribbean beach. On another occasion Timpf scoffed at the name Rand Paul (as if he were a Libertarian) and affirmed her political allegiance to the Senator’s eccentric dad, former Congressman Ron Paul. To sum up, Timpf has to be squeezed to say anything remotely akin to a moral imperative but is quick to denounce, with passion, “losers” who object to bikini-clad baristas. Her fantasy society consists of human monads free to engage in depravities that never impact anyone else—a society miraculously devoid of ruthless folks bent on wielding absolute power for whom an assemblage of party-goers who only wish to be left alone pose no obstacle whatsoever.
It isn’t particularly surprising that late 20th century America has produced individuals of the Gutfeld-Timpf stripe, personalities who display for an audience’s amusement lives enmeshed in emotional turbulence, stimulants, and various degrees of intellectual virtuosity devoid of serious attachment to the West’s literary and moral traditions—persons who also have little contact with folks in “fly-over” country who love God, family, football, and the flag. It is, however, depressing that FOX seems willing to subject its guests and audience to Gutfeld’s morally debilitating influence—a pox that even infects more serious news programs like The Five.
Sam Donaldson once defended sensationalized news coverage with the rationalization that apart from its ambulance-chasing exaggerations and frivolities no one would watch. It always occurred to me that news hidden beneath so much toxic “frosting” was hardly worth watching. The same analysis applies to the noxious effluvia that accompany the occasional political insights on Gutfeld’s show. Bottom line: if politics is “downstream” from the culture exhibited on that program, those politics won’t be compatible with a Constitutional system that, as John Adams observed, “was made only for a moral and religious people” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
