Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld claims he’s a bigger fan of Whoopi Goldberg than some might think.
“I love Whoopi,” he told The New York Times in a wide-ranging interview published on Saturday.
The host of “Gutfeld!” and “The Five” made the comment while asserting he has no ill will towards people on the receiving end of his often harsh mockery.
“I genuinely like people that I tease,” he said. “In fact, if you want to know the people I don’t like, it’s the people that I don’t tease.”
“So you must love the women of ‘The View,’” journalist David Marchese replied.
Gutfeld has repeatedly derided the hosts of “The View,” widely considered a liberal talk show.
“Their brains are small, but who’s the dumbest one of all?” he asked in one clip from last year.
In another, in which he criticized Goldberg for controversial comments in which she likened life in Iran to living in the United States as a Black person, he said, “Whoopi once again has been caught, being even dumber than we thought.” (He likes to rhyme.)
Nevertheless, he indicated that Marchese’s sarcastic comment was actually correct.
“Yes,” Gutfeld said. “I adore — I love Whoopi.”
Whoopi Goldberg, left, may be surprised to what Greg Gutfeld had to say about her in a New York Times interview.
Bruce Glikas/Getty and Roy Rochlin/Getty
“Rosie O’Donnell, you must be a big fan of?” Marchese pressed.
“Yeah, Rosie, I love her,” the right-wing commentator said, before adding, “I make fun of everybody that I love, and relentlessly.”
As the conversation continued, Gutfeld claimed that the kind of derision he dishes out is different from the sort seen on the left.
“The teasing and the ridicule is not ‘You’re Hitler’ or ‘You’re a fascist,’ or an authoritarian,” he said. “If I’m to insult you over the top, it’s because it’s obviously a joke. But I don’t put a target on your back.”
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Marchese called that stance “a little disingenuous,” citing a line from one of Gutfeld’s own books that the interviewer quoted as, “The left are dumb, fascist mother-effers.”
Gutfeld said he did not remember the line, but stated, “I imagine that it was in some kind of, like, paragraph of hyperbole where I was having fun.”