Greg Gutfeld, the smug little court jester of Fox News, looked dead into the camera and asked America to imagine a world where white folks can greet each other with “What up, my Nazi?” as casually as Black folks say the n-word.
Yes, really.
He wants white folks to skip over the SS, concentration camps, eugenics labs, gas chambers, and the millions dead so they can dap each other up with Holocaust greetings, as if genocide can be gentrified.
He was dead serious. It wasn’t a joke. It was a call to arms for white fragility. Gutfeld was daring viewers to look past the blood-soaked history of that word and inviting white America into the next stage of their victim cosplay by embracing a delusion where being labeled a fascist is somehow equivalent to Black people surviving racial terror by reshaping a slur into a shield.
During a segment on The Five, Gutfeld and the panel were discussing the backlash against being called “Nazis” in political discourse. In response to criticism of far-right extremism, Gutfeld argued that the term Nazi had lost its meaning due to overuse by liberals, claiming it’s just used now to insult conservatives.
He claimed the label “Nazi” no longer has “the power” it used to, and then he fixed his lips to say: “We need to learn from the Blacks.”
“The Blacks?”
That phrase alone tells you everything. You can always tell a white man’s about to say some racist nonsense by the way he pluralizes us. Every time they do it, a dusty plantation ghost somewhere high-fives itself and lets out a YEEHAW!
Only a man drunk on white delusion and cheap bourbon would reduce centuries of resistance, grief, survival, and linguistic creativity into a fetishized monolith: “The Blacks.” Like we’re a product line at Target. In this moment, he was trying to co-opt Black survival as a branding opportunity for white grievance. According to Gutfeld, being called a Nazi hurts just as badly as being called a n****r.
He continued: “The way they were able to remove power from the n-word by using it. So from now on it’s ‘What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? What’s hanging, my Nazi?”
“What’s hanging?”
See, now that’s some white man mess. Ain’t no Black person ever greeted a friend like that since we learned how to speak English.“What’s hanging?” sounds like something your Confederate uncle says right before polishing his rifle and reminiscing about “the good ol’ days.” That’s some lynching innuendo, not greetings between Black homeboys.
And then, the equally smug and insufferable Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery, who just last week called Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett a “mental defective” and a piece of “recalcitrant garbage,” decided she wanted to play linguistic hopscotch too.
She tossed out “Nazi.”
And Gutfeld quipped: “Thank God you used a hard ‘i.’”
That was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the way Black folks distinguish between the n-word with an “-a” and a hard “-er.” One is reclamation, the other is racial terrorism. One gets used in kitchens, ciphers, and coded survival. The other gets screamed from lynch mobs and police cruisers. That distinction carries generations of pain and power.
So, when Gutfeld said “hard ‘i’,” he was mocking that very distinction and suggesting that “Nazi” could get the same linguistic glow-up. That maybe if you say it with the right inflection, a little flair, a friendly tone, suddenly it’s no longer a slur, it’s just a vibe.
Except it’s not. It’s a word soaked in genocide. And he knows that. This wasn’t wordplay. This was white supremacy in a pun costume.
Gutfeld framed it as a kind of twisted empowerment by arguing that conservatives, like Black people, need their own version of that linguistic reclamation to defang criticism. He followed it with a half-hearted attempt to laugh it off, but the intent was clear: to position white conservatives as the real victims of name-calling and cancel culture. This wasn’t satire. It was an open rehearsal for fascist rebranding by masking historical amnesia as edgy humor and drawing a grotesque false equivalence between surviving racial violence and being criticized for stoking it.
The irony is thick. Gutfeld wants to claim that Black folks “removed the power” from the n-word, but notice he didn’t actually say it. Not once. He danced around it. Skipped over it. But he could only say “the n-word,” like a scared little boy testing boundaries.
If the word’s supposedly defanged and harmless now, Greg, why won’t you say it? Say it with a hard ‘r’ bruh. You’re on a network that calls Black congresswomen garbage, flirts with white nationalism daily, and still can’t bring yourself to say the word you claim has no power?
Because he knows. He knows that word still carries the weight of whips, chains, bullets, nooses, and badges. He knows it’s a weapon. But instead, he reaches for “Nazi.” A word he can say. A word he wants to normalize. Because it lets racist white folks feel edgy without consequence. That’s the performance of whiteness trying to inherit the aesthetics of Black pain without ever having to pay the price for it.
Greg Gutfeld and his Fox News cronies are not confused. They are not engaging in satire or free speech experimentation. They are building something. Testing something. Floating a trial balloon to see just how far white America is willing to go in its delusions. Because we are no longer in the age of dog whistles. Brothas and sistas, we are now in the era of overt reclamation. Of fascist nostalgia. Of white folks fantasizing about being victims so hard, they start convincing themselves that “Nazi” is just another misunderstood identity waiting to be rebranded.
And this isn’t just about Gutfeld. It’s about what the current socio-political moment represents.
Fox News, with its endless appetite for disinformation and culture wars, has never truly denied being racist. They just frame it as patriotism. Or Christian values. Or “common sense.” But now, they’re not even pretending. What Gutfeld did was symbolic: he put on the white hood and dared you to flinch. Because in their eyes, racism is no longer a moral failing, it’s a lifestyle choice. And being called out for it is oppression.
This is the white backlash metastasized.
The same people who tell Black folks to “get over slavery” are now demanding sensitivity training because someone called them a Nazi on Twitter. The same folks who giggle at deadnaming and misgendering others are now demanding language boundaries because “Nazi” feels too mean.” They’ve become the thing they mocked, except their hurt feelings are grounded not in structural harm, but in the inconvenience of being told the truth about themselves.
And let’s talk about false equivalency.
The n-word isn’t just a slur. It is the soundtrack of centuries of Black death. “Nazi” is a descriptor. A factual one. An ideology. A political identity that people chose. A label that represents architects of genocide. Of eugenics. Of world war. “Nazi” is not a slur; it’s an indictment.
And now, white conservatives want to equate our survival slang with their historical shame.
They want what we have. Not our pain, of course. But our resistance. Our swagger. Our ability to turn degradation into defiance. They saw some Black folks take the n-word, branded into our skin and psyches, and remix it into something survivable. Into poetry. Music. Culture. Community. And they got jealous. So jealous, in fact, they started imagining what it would look like to turn “Nazi” into their version of the n-word. Not because they suffered, but because they hate being reminded that they caused suffering.
This is the commodification of Black resistance. Again.
These white folks don’t want to dismantle racism. They want the aesthetic of being Black. They want to feel edgy, dangerous, and silenced. They want to be able to throw up a Nazi salute and get the same cultural pass they think rappers get for saying the n-word on stage. But no rapper ever said “n***a” while sending six million people to gas chambers. The attempt to draw a parallel is not just ahistorical, it’s genocidally stupid.
“We need to learn from the Blacks.”
Oh, so now you want to learn from us? Learn what exactly?
You want to “learn from the Blacks” even as y’all are out here whitewashing history, banning books, dismantling DEI programs, criminalizing Black thought, rewriting AP African American Studies, and throwing temper tantrums every time a child learns the word reparations. You don’t want to learn from us. You want to loot our linguistic agility and emotional alchemy. This isn’t about reclaiming words. This is about white people trying to reclaim impunity. They want the right to say whatever racist, violent, genocidal nonsense they want and face no consequences.
And the fact that Fox News greenlit this segment, aired it, and clipped it for the web says everything about the direction we’re headed.
Because it’s not just Gutfeld. It’s not just one unhinged host. It’s a network strategy. We need to stop pretending this is just culture war noise. We need to stop treating Gutfeld and his ilk like clowns and start recognizing them as mouthpieces for mainstreaming fascism and white supremacy. Because once they start laughing about genocide, they’re already halfway to justifying it.
We must name this for what it is: a racial bait-and-switch. A campaign to invert history. To turn perpetrators into victims. To take the power and creativity of Black survival and reverse-engineer it into an excuse for white cruelty.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
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