The View’s Election Day episode spun out of control, when two partisan co-hosts got into a heated screaming match over Sunny Hostin’s remarks about conservative white women.
Hostin and former Trump White House aide, Alyssa Farah Griffin, butted heads when the latter said she was worried that “some of the far left has become so negative in how they talk about the other party.”
“Who are these far left people,” Hostin interrupted. “Because the far left did not storm the Capitol, so lets talk about that.”
“Last week, you called white Republican women cockroaches,” Griffin shot back. “You said they were acting like cockroaches.”
Hostin triggered her co-host’s ire on Thursday, when she complained that white women were planning to vote Republican, despite the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn federal abortion rights.
“What’s also surprising to me is the abortion issue. I read a poll just yesterday that White Republican suburban women are now going to vote Republican,” Hostin remarked. “It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid, right?”
“They are voting against their own self-interest. Do they want to live in Gilead? Do they want to live in The Handmaid’s Tale?,” she continued.
“Do we love democracy or not because just saying that, it’s insulting to the voter,” Griffin said at the time. “People make decisions about what’s right for their families.”
Their Tuesday rematch resulted in an incomprehensible argument that Whoopi Goldberg had to yell over to silence.
“Here’s what I’m going to ask you to do. I’m going to ask you to tone it down a bit because I can’t hear anything. No one can hear what we’re saying,” she shouted.
“She just said I called White women roaches,” Hostin complained. “Which my mother is a White woman, so I wouldn’t say that.”
Hostin went on to argue that she didn’t name call white women, she just “used a metaphor, really more in a simile,” when she made the “roaches voting for raid” jab, and then claimed it wasn’t her “joke.”
“That was John Leguizamo’s joke. It was a joke that I’ve used on this show a few weeks ago, referring to Latinos and no one had anything to say about it,” she continued. “The last thing I’ll say is, I continued by saying do they want to be in Gilead? Do they want to lose their rights? So you are actually twisting what I said.”
Griffin continuously tried to make her rebuttal, but Hostin wouldn’t let her get a word in. Goldberg cut to a commercial in frustration. “We’re going to break! I can’t take it,” she said.
When the show returned, Griffin said that the point she was trying to make was that liberals “have taken such a negative approach to people who view things differently,” but acknowledged that Hostin didn’t call white women roaches.
“I misquoted Sunny, I think she clarified what she said: It was a simile, it was an analogy, it was not saying that white Republican women are bugs,” she concluded.
In the same episode, Goldberg called out Hostin for using her phone during the broadcast. “Put that phone down girl,” Goldberg scolded.
Hostin said that it was her son, who wanted to make sure she sent in his absentee ballot. “I had trouble actually voting for him on the absentee ballot today and that made me very concerned,” she added.
“I was told to put it in an orange bag on the floor and the orange bag looked to me like a Target bag or something, and I said isn’t there a formal election box that says absentee ballot or something like that and then she said ‘let me check’ and then found it. So that concerned me,” Hostin remarked.