OUR KIND: General Washington chooses war!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2025

As does the Fox News Channel: We're going to start with Colby Covington, just as we did in Saturday's endless report.

Covington is known to many people, not known to many others. We're scoring him as a good, decent person. As part of a much longer discussion, the leading authority says this:

Colby Covington

Colby Ray Covington (born February 22, 1988) is an American professional mixed martial artist. He currently competes in the Welterweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), where he is a former Interim UFC Welterweight Champion. As of November 18, 2025, he is #13 in the UFC welterweight rankings.

Covington was born in Clovis, California, on February 22, 1988. The family moved from California to Oregon when he was eight years old. His father was a wrestler during his time at the Oregon Institute of Technology and Southern Oregon University.

As a wrestler at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, Covington lettered all four years and won the 171 lb. state championship as a senior in 2006.

[...]

Political views

Covington is an outspoken supporter of the Republican Party and President Donald Trump. After winning the Interim UFC Welterweight Championship, he stated he wanted to visit Trump at the White House to present him with the title, which he did on August 2, 2018. Trump phoned to congratulate Covington during his post-fight interview following his win over Tyron Woodley. Covington dedicated his win over Woodley to first responders and the military and criticized Black Lives Matter and LeBron James.

And so on, at length.

Covington is a high-level athlete. His political views differ from ours. Such differences do exist in the world, and this is of course allowed.

On Saturday morning, we featured Covington because of Thursday night. On a special Thanksgiving evening show, the Fox News Channel had decided to play tape of something Covington had said on an earlier program.

That earlier program had aired on Tuesday, October 21. On that evening, for whatever reason, Covington had been featured as a panelist on the Fox News Channel's Gutfeld! program—a primetime program which currently boasts the third largest viewership in all of American "cable news."

On that enchanted October evening, the Gutfeld! panel had been asked to discuss President Trump's recent demolition of the East Wing of the White House. Many people had said that they were upset by the president's action—but during that evening's discussion, no one on the Gutfeld! panel seemed to be able to understand why anyone would be upset. 

That discussion took place in late October. Now it was now being rebroadcast. Producers had chosen to re-air that segment as one of a set of outstanding discussions recently hatched on the Gutfeld! program.

Some of what had been said in that segment struck us as astoundingly dumb. Inevitably, Emily Compagno's remarks were remarkably coarse. (During his tenure as president, President Biden had been endlessly "shitting his pants," this lofty Fox News creature said.)

That's the way the segment struck us. But we were especially struck by what Covington had said in October—by what was now being re-aired..

It was 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving night, 7 p.m. on the coast. We Americans were still enjoying our national day. Top segments from Gutfeld! now aired.

Suzanne Scott is the CEO of this corporate weapon of war. Here's part of the October 21 segment—the segment she chose to re-air:

GUTFELD (10/21/25): So Colby, we're not paying for the remodeling—it's being handled privately. So why are the liberals so outraged?

COVINGTON: I mean, they're just outraged because they're outraged about anything, you know?

GUTFELD: Yeah.

COVINGTON: They're not— They're just despicable people and they hate America and they hate our country...

In the hands of the program's host, a demolition had somehow become a "remodeling." As for Covington, he had said this about "the liberals:"

"[The liberals] hate America...They hate our country."

 Right there, on Thanksgiving evening, that's what Scott chose to re-air.

General Washington once chose war. Almost two centuries later, Robert Frost wrote these lines about that very choice:

The Gift Outright

[...]

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward...

The deed of gift was many deeds of war! In our view—unfortunately—it also works that way on the Fox News Channel! 

Dear friend, please consider: 

Sunday morning, on Fox & Friends Weekend, there they went again! Co-host Griff Jenkins interviewed Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) about an upcoming special election in a Tennessee congressional district.

The Democratic candidate has come under attack. As you can see by clicking this link, this exchange occurred

JENKINS (11/30/25): I just can't get past how in the world a candidate who hates Nashville is going to get possibly elected by Nashville voters.

BURCHETT: It just shows you how for the left is. It just shows you how much the Democrat [sic] Party hates this country—hates our values.

I mean, she went over it right there. She's not a fan of Christianity? It ought to disqualify her just because she doesn't like country music—my goodness [chuckles]...

But the reality is, this is the current state of the Democrat [sic] Party in this country. This is not some— She's not some fluke. If you look at the Democrat Party today in Congress, this is what they represent. They want an open border. They disrespect our military. They hate our country...

The candidate is Aftyn Behn. She has made some unusual comments over the years. Also, she's said to be running two points behind in a famously gerrymandered district Candidate Trump won by 22 points last year.

We have no idea if Behn might win this race. But Burchett, a folksy and frequently likeable fellow, went where Covington had already gone.

The Democrat [sic] Party hates America, he said. They hate our values and they hate our country!

They won't even say the name of the party! It's been that way for at least thirty years. 

At any rate, there you see what Burchett now saw. In fairness, Burchett is a folksy fellow. Perhaps he thought no one was watching as he spread this poisonous claim at 6:48 a.m. (3:48 on the cost).

That said, his claim strikes us as a deed of war. Such deeds are remarkably common on the "news channel" run by Scott.

Thursday night's rebroadcast of Covington's comment seems to convey a message. The notion that "the liberals" hate our country is a message which is highly valued on Suzanne Scott's "cable news" channel.

Indeed, that general message has dominated Greg Gutfeld's "issue monologues" over the past several months. We'll guess that Covington felt free to voice that remarkably sweeping claim because he's seen a variant of that messaging so many times on this primetime program.

General Washington once chose war. War can have terrible consequences, a point we'll discuss tomorrow.

Covington is a high-class athlete. As best we can tell, he isn't a highly sophisticated political commentator. 

(There's no reason why he should be. Almost no one is.)

Covington isn't a typical journalist / commentator. On Thanksgiving evening, it seems to us that his rebroadcast statement was a poisonous message of war. 

On Sunday morning, there was Rep. Burchett. He was choosing war too—and now, we pose a pair of questions:

Is this what "our kind" tends to do? Have we Blues been doing this too?

We're quoting sacred Thoreau with that, but the time has come to ask those questions. Have we Blues also been waging war over the past dozen (or sixty) years? 

Have we Blues been choosing war? Is that simply what "our kind" does? Tomorrow, we'll visit some of the possible reasons for General Washington's choice, along with some of the consequences of the choice he made.

The deed of gift was deeds of war. We regard Gutfeld! as a poisonous show, but that isn't Covington's fault.

Tomorrow: "To the land vaguely realizing westward..."