Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and his orbiting panelists relentlessly mocked the weight of a rural middle- and high school band teacher and Democratic candidate for the Iowa legislature in a viral three-minute national broadcast last week.
The barbs aimed at Dunlap City Council member Benjamin Schauer were incessant and cruel, and the piece has generated comments in a range of online forums, including The Daily Caller.
“You know something I don’t think anyone’s touched on is that guy’s penis,” one of the Fox commentators, Jamie Lissow, said, with another panelist adding that Schauer’s weight is so great it would be hard to see his genitals.
“I never expected that part of my body to be discussed on national television, but here we go,” Schauer said in an interview with The Iowa Mercury.
Lissow also referred to Schauer as “Benjamin Broken Buttons.”
“I have a mirror, I’m well aware I’m overweight,” Schauer said in The Iowa Mercury interview.
The segment on “Gutfeld!” just kept going and going with comments about Schauer, a little-known candidate even in his home state.
“He could be our next Pritzker,” host Greg Gutfeld said, referring to the governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker. “I need new blood. I lost that guy in New Jersey.” (An apparent reference to former New Jersey Governor Chris Chistie).
The panel made nasty jokes about Schauer being heavy enough to take down an airplane if he boarded.
“The pilot said, ‘We’re going to be flying in an altitude of ‘oops, maybe not.’”
There is much cackling from the panelists after this with plenty of background laughter in the segment from the audience.
The show catalyzed online comments in the thousands. Here is a sampling from the YouTube post of the segment:
His blood type is “Gravy.”
I’m glad we got a picture before PETA pushed it back into the ocean.
Get’s his clothes at Iowa Tent and Awning.
Give Him a Break! He was Able to Stand for 15 seconds!!
Schauer, 32, is an alum of the University of Iowa, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He later received a master’s degree at Drake University where he is now working toward a doctorate. He lives in the western Iowa city of Dunlap (Harrison County), between Missouri Valley and Denison along U.S. Highway 30, a federal highway that runs from New York to California.
He’s running in the decidedly Republican Iowa House District 15. Schauer ran in the district, which includes all of Harrison County and a slice of rural Pottawattamie County, in 2024 and lost to Republican State Representative Matt Windschitl by 69 percent to 31 percent. There is a Republican primary for the seat this cycle. Windschitl is running for Congress in the fourth district, where current U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra is running for governor.
For his part, Schauer said that despite the online shaming, the students he teaches in grades 5 to 12 in the Boyer Valley Community School District have been supportive and kind, as has the broader Harrison County community. The posts will likely trail him for the rest of his life, since the social media algorithms feed on virality.
“The community has really rallied around behind me,” Schauer said. “It’s been a wonderful testament of just how much support people have for me, and also just the fact that people don’t tolerate that type of behavior. They think it’s just awful on both sides of the spectrum. I’ve gotten so much support from people saying, ‘This is not OK.’”
In short, the national ugliness has been met with what is generally local kindness. Residents of Dunlap, and other small towns near it, know Schauer as an educator and local government official. They can see the effects of viral internet toxicity and cruelty on someone they know to be a good person, a man they see around town at local stores and regular school functions, Schauer said.
“It’s really opened some people’s eyes to how a lot of the media whenever they do these things how they operate and when it impacts someone that they actually know how devastating that can be for some people,” Schauer said. “So there’s been a lot of good out of it despite the terrible jokes.”
Schauer is 6’5” tall. He does not disclose his weight because he said he understands who he is—and sees his overweight status as a work in progress.
“I am comfortable with who I am,” Schauer said.
Schauer, who grew up in Oklahoma before moving to Iowa City as a teenager, said many people in his family are overweight.
“We grew up poor,” he said in the interview with The Iowa Mercury. “We know that poverty often leads to obesity.”
Schauer said he’s looked at measures to cut weight. He went to a medical facility in Omaha, Nebraska, not far from Dunlap, to investigate weight-loss procedures that he learned were not covered by his health insurance.
In fact, Schauer was advocating for improved health care for all Iowans in the video endorsement he received from Iowa Congressional candidate Stephanie Steiner, which sparked some of the online banter that led to the Fox News national pickup. Gutfeld began his segment with a clip from that endorsement video.
Even in the best of cycles for Democrats, Schauer would be a long shot to win the western Iowa House district where he teaches. So the mockery on Fox was an extraordinary act of punching down, a battery of adolescent-level bullying with no likely effect on what is widely viewed as a locked-down, solid red district.
Schauer said Democrats might perform better in the district than political analysts think.
“Honestly, this story I think will also impact that race as well because a lot of these folks are seeing that these are the type of people that are uplifting our current administration, that they are the type of people that are basically being the cheerleaders for the current people that are in charge of our state and our country,” Schauer said. “And if they’re willing to do it to me—for a lot of people that was really an eye-opening thing.”
Segment from “Gutfeld!” show, which Fox News shared on YouTube with the title, “Gutfeld: This could be our next Pritzker…”
Map of Iowa House district 15; in the 2024 presidential election, voters here preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris by a margin of 66.8 percent 31.5 percent.
