The Gutfeld Monologues

by Greg Gutfeld

  So that’s where the idea of this book came from: loads of people telling me to do this damn book.

  How can I track down all these monologues? After all, I’m a busy guy with lots of hobbies (basically I sit home in a bathtub and read Dilbert). Then I came up with an answer! Hire someone to do it for me! One of these millennial thingies everyone is talking about. Then when “Sean” finds all my monologues, I’ll go through them and pick my favorites!

  But this book will be more than your usual run-of-the-mill anthology. Because unlike most anthologies, for this one I’ve found the original work and feverishly improved on it. I’ve updated, edited, and updated some more. The monologues are still there, but now they’re steroidal. (Note: I didn’t change any monologue to make a wrong prediction appear correct in retrospect—that would be an immoral act, and I don’t need more of those in my life. But I did cut out any stuff that appeared garbled in transcription.)

  My monologues are designed to do one thing: tackle one subject clearly and concisely. Whereas most essays take their time, mine cut in line and grab you by the scruff and say, “You must hear this now!”

  Like me, they are short, straight, and usually done in under eighty-five seconds.

  They don’t mess about. They tackle a subject—whether it be Trump, Obama, drugs, guns, crime, race, terrorism, feminism, progressivism, or pandas—in under a few hundred words, and they do it in a way that makes sense of the world, so you don’t have to.

  My goal is to do the thoughtful thinking early in the morning, and deliver it to you like a philosophical Domino’s—so you can get on to other important things (like buying my books or sending me pastries shaped like a unicorn’s head).

  When I write monologues, my goal is to make politics bite-size and delicious. I think of Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi as Milk Duds. And Steve Bannon is a Circus Peanut left out in the sun on a minivan dashboard.

  It’s not enough to complain about how bad something is, you’ve got to make it fun, smart, and persuasive. One thing I’ve learned in my tumultuous life: The left is great at selling bad ideas; the right is awful at selling good ideas. My monologues are an attempt to help the right have a fighting chance in the battlefield of ideas. (Yes, that’s a bit Napoleonic—but heightwise, I am sort of qualified, no?)

  My goal in these monologues is to be funny and clear—not angry and bitter. Mad, after all, is short for “madness.” So I look for ways to deal with a topic that I might try to articulate at a bar, to a friend (were I to have one). I want it to be memorable—and the only way to do that, in my mind, is to make it relatable.

  Hence, this awesome book.

  If you’re a regular viewer of The Five and The Greg Gutfeld Show, these should sound wonderfully familiar. However, they should also sound amazingly new, for I’ve drenched the monologues in additional material and personal afterthoughts—marinating them in my toasty brain pan and augmenting the original material with stuff I wish I had said, or explanatory material that’s necessary now that the monologues are without all those lovely accompanying television visuals. It’s like discovering your favorite album remixed by someone who might be on mushrooms.

  On The Five, I took aim at progressive politics, as well as the members of the left-wing media, academia, and entertainment industry who push such inane politics. My recurring themes?

  • Obama catered to the antipolice sentiment.

  • The Democrats champion bureaucracy over the individual—a bureaucracy could therefore be well armed and protected; not so much the individual.

  • The Dems, including Hillary, championed the group over the individual—identity over the kind of rugged individualism that made us ALL Americans.

  • Obama championed issues du jour of his fellow liberals (such as climate change) while belittling the fear of terror (he might tell you that you’re more likely to get struck by lightning—leaving out the fact that lightning does not plan night and day to kill you—the way al Qaeda, ISIS, and tequila do).

  So after many requests, I finally decided to gather up the best monologues and put them together in this fat, glorious book. However, I realized this job isn’t as easy as I expected it to be. In fact, it was brutally hard. First, out of a thousand-plus monologues, I had to pick the very best two hundred—which is like choosing your favorite two hundred children from a thousand (I imagine this is how Genghis Khan and Kirk Douglas must have felt).

  But beyond even that, I was faced with some scary propositions!

  What if the monologues didn’t hold up over time? What if times have changed so abruptly and monumentally that today makes a fool of yesterday’s perspective? (Right now I am deleting all the monologues on what a great president Martin O’Malley would be.)

  What if people I harshly criticize are now dead? Would it be fair or right to include those?

  Well, yes and no.

  See, I needed a solution that went beyond packaging these monologues willy-nilly (an underused word, if you ask me). I needed to point out where my monologues proved prescient or idiotic. (So far that ratio is about 75/25.)

  So, I’m not going to make it easy on myself. In fact, this kind of book is actually way harder than simply writing a fresh book about the current political landscape. Instead, I’m reading a book and writing one at the same time—marking my words as an editor might. I am you, trying to make sense of me—a job I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

  So, that’s the book. I’ve broken down the topics into their own chapters and put the monologues in chronological order. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to follow, even as I make it as confusing as possible to read.

  But in doing so, I’ve stumbled back into a realization I made during the 2016 election season. And it’s one that should be a topic for my next book—that the confusion, anger, and disbelief from the last five years are the result of the death of ideology. The conservative vs. liberal paradigm crumbled—seemingly on both sides. Trump’s entrance helped create this dissolution. His past of floating above both political parties—switching allegiances, playing off the expectations and greed of both sides—led to a present candidate who had little time for the old game of ideology. He just wanted to win. He’s the guy who didn’t get the memo. There was no right, left, Republican or Democrat. You could be anything, at any time, as long as you were persuasive, brutal, and funny. Only a creature like this could be so audacious to think he could destroy ISIS and solve North Korea. No typical politician could be this crazy . . . and this savvy. Or so willing to try anything.

  So, in short, this is not your grandmother’s anthology. Hell, it’s not even your step-great-uncle-who-sells-meth-under-a-bridge anthology.

  This is the first anthology in which the writer picks apart his own work, and admits when it works and when it sucks.

  But this was a weird process. The transcriptions culled for these monologues were sometimes muddled. At some point, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the things I was purported to have said. There’s a section where the transcript claims I say, near the end of a monologue, that “it sucks balls.” If I truly said that, I would have been sent home for a month without pay (now, it could be that I was, and I don’t remember!). So forgive me, I used a little artistic license when cobbling these “Gregalogues” together. Sometimes it’s impossible to get anything word for word. I either smoothed something over that seemed confusing or eliminated some car crash of words that made my head hurt every time I tried to type it out on these pages.

  So, with that, I say good luck and enjoy!

  CHAPTER ONE

  IDENTITY POLITICS

  If there’s one issue that sank the Democratic Party, it was identity politics. It permeated everything they did—the idea that the person matters less than the group. Even as I write this now, identity politics is still spreading its venom all over the world. Wherever there is fun, identity politics shows up to ruin it. It’s an antifun fire hose. It’s cancer of the funny bone.

  Consider how identity
politics destroyed all the traditional fun to be had at an NFL game.

  Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the National Anthem may be textbook identity politics—driven by a desire to achieve a temporary sugar rush of progressive respect from the virtue-signaling vultures in the media. By injecting identity politics into what normally would be a Sunday afternoon three-hour scoop of fun, he poisoned the entire sport with a divisive toxin one normally experiences on noisy campus quads. And that led to a massive backlash that Trump capitalized on. If Colin really was pissed about the cops (especially those who protect him daily), he could have just picketed a police station. But that never would have gotten him prime real estate on the cover of GQ. I’ll paraphrase what I said on The Five—turning on football to find a political statement would be like turning on The Five and finding us playing badminton.

  Identity politics didn’t infect only sports. Look at what it did to the entertainment industry. You can’t watch award shows without being lectured by Hollywood on gender and race. Meanwhile, as they lecture you, they turn a blind eye to assorted sex pests in their midst—or standing at the lectern with them. Yes, the #MeToo movement has finally made them look inward, to a degree, but only because they were finally forced to. And imagine this irony: If Hillary had become president, do you think we would have heard about her greatest supporter, Harvey Weinstein? Fact is, the only reason Hollywood started publicly paying penance for its perversion is because finally the spotlight was on it. You become noble once the options for alternatives disappear.

  Look at any college campus: Identity politics has irreparably damaged academia. If you’re not part of the aggrieved group of the month, chances are you’re going to be made uncomfortable at least three times a day. If you do not apologize for being born who you are, God help you.

  If you’re invited to speak at a college, and you’re not a vetted social justice warrior, good luck getting a word in edgewise, as mobs of misery merchants will chant for your silence, likely on their mommy and daddy’s (and the taxpayer’s) dime. Worse, they will advocate violence in order to silence. Speeches by Ben Shapiro (a fairly polite kid, if you ask me) now require hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of security to maintain his safety.

  College used to be an education soaked in beer; now it’s indoctrination drenched in fear. The cult is identity politics, and it’s bloomed into a full-time religion, complete with sins, indulgences, high priestesses, and punishments.

  No one is safe from identity politics—including those who push it themselves. See the Democratic Party as it devours its own. Meanwhile, Hillary ran on identity and little else.

  Hence, she lost. She treated everyone else the way she treated the help, and depended on her chromosomal makeup to carry the day. It didn’t. Now her party reviles her. They detest her. She rigged the damn thing, then she lost. As I used to say when I played Monopoly in juvenile detention (up until 2015, actually), if you’re going to cheat, you better win. She couldn’t even do that. What a ferocious loser. She screwed her party the way her husband screwed the intern—without a local path of egress. And now her party is devouring her, like an idiot cannibal gnawing on his own gangrenous foot.

  Identity politics, like water, flows in the path of least resistance. Which is why, if you don’t fight back, you’ll likely drown.

  Note to Readers: This is where the Monologues start. Forgive me if I interrupt here and there. I get as bored as you do.

  January 13, 2014

  In a new essay, Hillary Clinton claims that America doesn’t do enough for women. Translation, America doesn’t do enough for Hillary. And you can fix that by electing her. It’s a smart but predictable move.

  I take back that “smart” part.

  In 2007, she was the most qualified Democrat for president, and she got tossed aside for a little-known grad student with a résumé thinner than Kate Moss’s septum.

  In the spirit of equality, I would like to replace that metaphor with “Brian Stelter’s hair.”

  So, why was she dumped like an aging first wife for a younger model?

  Well, in the highly competitive world of identity politics, black trumps female. Voting for Obama became historical instead of hysterical.

  Maybe Hillary should’ve claimed to be part Cherokee, too? The car, not the nation.

  So, Hillary realizes for her to win now, what was once about color must now be about chromosomes. A vote for her is a vote for all women. And even better, criticism of Hillary will now be viewed as sexist, the way criticism of Obama was seen as racist.

  But if she claims America doesn’t help women, then what country does?

  Holy crap—did I call this one or what? Let’s review this. I stated that:

  • Hillary would run primarily—or rather, only, as a woman.

  • If you denied her the right to be president, you denied her this on the basis of gender.

  • Therefore she really didn’t have to try to win your vote. Instead you had to win immunity against accusations of sexism by voting for her.

  • That’s how you got Trump! Sure, a lot of women voted for Hillary, but a lot of women voted for Trump, too—women who had previously voted for Obama—and in places that mattered more.

  October 28, 2014

  Right now, America is a barroom brawl, populated by exhausted drunks, tearing each other to pieces. Why are they fighting? All we know is the bar is trashed and it’s time to stop, shake hands, and clean the damn place up. That’s the endpoint of identity politics, an emotionally charged, bitterly driven ideology that operates solely on anger and retribution. For if one identity must be pursued, another must be accused. But what has this pernicious behavior brought?

  A torn, distracted, angry country. We are that ruined bar, with our enemies outside laughing at our internal turmoil. Strange that it’s Bill Clinton echoing this sentiment, at the human rights campaign dinner on Saturday. Behold his majesty. . . . “I believe in ways large and small, peaceful and sometimes violent, that the biggest threat to our future children and grandchildren is the poison of identity politics that preaches that our differences are far more important than our common humanity.”

  He really said this! If Hillary hadn’t hated him already . . .

  That is amazing—and from a member of the party that mastered identity warfare. This is their sport.

  I suppose the good news is that in a world besieged by division, even some liberals are tapped out. Perhaps they realize that obsession with race and gender has made this country more obsessed with race and gender.

  Identity, once reflected by achievement, has now assumed cultish malice.

  The result: misconduct, masked as empowerment.

  Now, perhaps Bill is saying all this stuff for the benefit of Hillary.

  Meaning, he gets to be the bad cop, the sober adult in the face of juvenile rantings of identity finger-pointing that Hillary indulges, but really doesn’t mean.

  It’s clever that he’s condemning a practice still extolled by Sharpton, Holder, and Jarrett, all White House darlings. But I don’t care, I’m so desperate for a new patriotism, a happier union based on the American idea, that I don’t care who’s with me, even Bill.

  Although I’m not touching the cigars.

  Yes, a cheap joke at Bill’s expense—but I’m allowed this, since I spent the previous paragraphs praising him. And also, if the Clintons won’t go away, Bill’s “indiscretions” remain fair game. By the way, “Indiscretions” should be the name of his boat, if he ever chooses to have one. And he should. Something about the idea of having Bill adrift in international waters surrounded by jaded supermodels puts me at ease.

  October 29, 2014

  In the Washington Post, a dad explains why he isn’t paying for his kids’ college. He says it’s better to teach them the value of work, which then teaches them about money while also pointing them toward professions that they might like. It makes sense: College doesn’t corner the market in education.

  Did I
learn anything there? I’m not sure. I was drunk.

  It’s true. I don’t remember much from Berkeley, other than how little I remember. I’m not even sure I went to college. Actually, that’s a copout. I remember college. And I remember how I really missed out on an opportunity to actually learn stuff. Remember that line by Oscar Wilde—that “youth is wasted on the young”? I’m beginning to think education is wasted on the young. Or at least, a young me.

  That’s my point. You should help your kid figure out what he loves, because all college teaches him to love, is college. Four years of fooling around, stumbling home drunk—what’s not to love? I loved it so much, I did it until I was forty.

  Worse: College teaches you to love yourself. Take the current novelty of identity as achievement, which values “being” instead of “doing.” A shtick on the self—college becomes therapy that champions internal infatuation. The result: self-righteousness that’s inversely proportional to one’s own naïveté.

  The same thing happens when a young actor becomes politically relevant in Hollywood. The self-righteousness masks his ignorance.

  No longer an incubator of ideas, the classroom becomes an impenetrable bubble where only the mold of grievance grows. Real-life experience, which brings you into contact with actual real people, matters not at all.

  But we know that real work leads to true independence, not this phony rebellion advocated by pierced TAs. We used to call it the school of hard knocks. It is the lost art of self-reliance. If we bring that back, we might rescue this country from the incubated elite currently in charge.