Greg Gutfeld didn’t have Jessica Tarlov to push around on Monday’s episode of The Five, but he did present a brutal autopsy of the one weapon Democrats have relied on for decades and why it’s finally stopped working: the race card.
He started with the core diagnosis: The left is trapped in the past.
“Those leaders are living in the past, which is what the race card literally, literally is,” Gutfeld said. “You’re living in the past to imprint it on the future. The things that they say are happening aren’t happening.”
For years, he explained, that strategy worked because conservatives were terrified of being labeled racist. That fear was the weapon. Once it’s gone, the weapon is useless, and that’s exactly what’s happened.
“It used to work. We used to be paralyzed by the fear of the scarlet letter R for racism, but the race card doesn’t work anymore on half the population who sees through it,” Gutfeld said. “The other half are just doing it out of habit. But we disarmed the left because we lost the fear. And so now, it’s just a gun shooting blanks.”
The political math, Gutfeld pointed out, is just bad. Screaming racism only rallies voters you already have. It doesn’t persuade anyone. “And absent of other tools beyond the race card, you are kind of like a fat, out-of-shape fighter with no way to win but to call out the refs or just cancel the whole game.”
ICYMI: Jessica Tarlov Had a Complete On-Air Meltdown, and Then Greg Gutfeld Torched Her
Gutfeld then zoomed out to explain how fear, and not just racial fear, has been the engine driving the entire Democratic agenda — from transgender ideology being pushed on children to open borders to soft-on-crime policies. Each angle, he argued, was powered by the same mechanism: making ordinary people terrified to say what they actually believed.
“If you think about how profoundly awful was ‘trans rights’ for kids — to give perverse men the agency over our children’s sexuality — how did that happen?” Gutfeld demanded. “It was like, we feared the swarm of activists calling us transphobic. We feared being called bigots if we came out against illegal immigration. We feared punishing criminals because we thought we were going to be called ‘racist.’ Once you lose the fear, you can finally get back to the normal way things go.”
And the thing is, the Democrats haven’t figured this out yet. They’re still running the same play.
“The Democratic Party, in my opinion, still has to do that. They haven’t done it. They’re still on the same path to destruction they’ve always been on, which is identity politics. It’s taken this country down a terrible path,” declared Gutfeld.
Then came the history lesson — the one Democrats really don’t want to have. Harold Ford Jr. pointed out that race relations were better roughly twenty years ago.
And he was actually right. Polling data shows a sharp decline after Barack Obama’s election.
Gutfeld wasn’t willing to blame Obama specifically, though. “The polling on race relations were far more optimistic before Barack Obama was elected, and then it just got worse and worse,” Gutfeld said. “I’m not saying it’s on him, but I’m trying to figure out what happened since then. Did the KKK return? Was discrimination now decided to be illegal? Was there some kind of attack that happened? No.”
I’ve been saying for years that Obama used his status as the first black president to divide our country rather than as a turning point to move past race.
“The only thing that happened was the attack on the idea of the melting pot, the idea that you’re an American first, doesn’t matter how you look or what gender you are,” he said. “They created a poison, a toxin that they put in that melting pot. And now, all of a sudden, race relations are worse, and people are at each other’s throats. This is a filter, Harold, and I’m talking about identity politics. It is a filter put in place to destroy a country because it’s absolutely opposite what a melting pot is.”
Obama certainly helped.
“You’re living in the PAST to imprint it on the Future” @greggutfeld calls out Dems who traveled to an Alabama rally to RAGE about redistricting.
What do YOU think? pic.twitter.com/nPDJ0tlO73
— The Five (@TheFive) May 18, 2026
Monday’s exchange was a perfect snapshot of where the political debate stands right now. The left keeps reaching for a weapon that’s out of ammunition. Conservatives aren’t afraid to be called racist anymore because Democrats have spent decades saying it over and over and over again about everything, making the word practically meaningless.
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