Greg Gutfeld absolutely destroyed Jessica Tarlov on The Five on Thursday, and boy did things get crazy. It was the kind of television that makes you put down your phone and actually pay attention. The two went back and forth, screaming at each other over the question of whether the American right-wing threat narrative has always been overblown, ginned up, or an outright fabrication.
And boy did Gutfeld come in swinging… and he never really stopped, either.
It started when Tarlov pushed back on Gutfeld’s characterization of hate crime hoaxes, demanding examples. Gutfeld was ready.
“Jussie Smollett, anyone?” he fired back. “How about the banana peel on the bench?”
Tarlov, never one to care about facts, tried to pivot to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as evidence that the white supremacist threat is real. “You don’t think that hundreds of people showed up at the Unite the Right rally that weren’t this informant, that weren’t persuaded by his vehicle that got them there,” she said. But when Gutfeld pressed her on exactly who that informant was, she stumbled.
“You don’t know,” Gutfeld said. “Was it the leader? An informant is not a leader.”
From there, the exchange got really tense. Tarlov rattled off group names — Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys — while Gutfeld challenged her framing of the whole event.
“So you’re saying this wasn’t created. You’re saying this just was an organic event, just like every left-wing event. It just happened. All these right-wingers showed up,” he said.
Tarlov tried to split the difference, insisting the people were real even if the event was organized. Gutfeld acknowledged as much, but turned the whole argument on its head with an analogy that was equal parts devastating and sharp.
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“Let me do the simplest analogy. This is like when somebody says, ‘On average, men are taller and weigh more than women.’ And then one woman goes, ‘But what about her?’ And they point to a WNBA player. Yes, Jessica, I’ll give you, there probably is a bigot somewhere. But you guys created a false flag that there was this immense movement going on in this country that then put targets on people like Charlie Kirk’s back, and he’s dead.”
And he kept going, making clear this goes well beyond one rally or one incident.
“A lot of other people were either threatened, physically attacked because of a false flag, which painted … basically millions of people as white supremacists,” he said.
He still wasn’t done. Gutfeld went to a darker hypothetical — what happens to a country that keeps getting fed this narrative without any correction?
“You guys ran with it. Imagine if Trump had not won and Kamala Harris had won. Imagine where the SPLC would be now. Imagine how torn apart this country would be. And by the way, I hope that this thing mends, but I don’t know. Because there are people like you, Jessica, who have such a sunk cost in this belief that you were tricked into believing, to think that there’s all these racists hiding behind every Cracker Barrel.”
Then came the sharpest line of the whole segment — a pivot that reframes the entire racism debate in a way that the mainstream media has spent years desperately trying to avoid.
“No, you know where the racists were?” Gutfeld asked. “They were the anti-racist black activists who saw this as a way to go after whites. This racism that you created was designed to allow for a different kind of racism.”
He closed by drawing a contrast that was clean, blunt, and genuinely hard to argue with: “We don’t have to defend our racists because we don’t know who they are because you create them. Meanwhile, we don’t have to make up your racists because you’re standing there with Hasan Piker. These guys are right there in our face.”
HOLY MOLEY! Greg Gutfeld lays into Jessica Tarlov and Dems for “creating a false flag” for bigotry and starting a “hate crime hoax.” “They put targets on people like Charlie Kirk’s back, and he’s dead!” #TheFive pic.twitter.com/4sq73QWVFE
— Diamond Joe (@ItsDiamondJoe) April 23, 2026
Tarlov desperately tried to hold her own, but couldn’t. It was brutal.
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