Real Time host Bill Maher is on to something when he said before leaving for a summer hiatus, “We need to do something about The View.” He knows that for MAGA, Republicans, and conservatism, NBC’s morning kvetch-fest is a gift that keeps on giving. I won’t characterize host Whoopi Goldberg and her soul sisters as imbeciles, because there’s already right-leaning voices doing that. Besides, I want them to keep it up.
Ostensibly on air to reflect some element of distaff/progressive political analysis, they never fail to exceed low expectations. When Goldberg recently opined, to paraphrase, that women in Iran have it better than Black Americans, and Joy Behar questioned whether President Trump had overstepped by not tipping off the mullahs about the oncoming “bunker busters,” every informed and intelligent woman in America—wherever their position on the political spectrum—must’ve winced at the rank stupidity on display.
The exposure I get to The View’s unrelenting dunderheadedness comes by way of conservative media, which never misses an opportunity to highlight the hosts’ knee-slapping cluelessness and dependable derogation of the country that somehow made them “celebrities.”
There are millions of women like the ladies of The View in our national midst. Women of every race, color, and creed, who hate Trump, hate Republicans that have the gall to support the current president, and are terminally dyspeptic about the tide of public sentiment and electoral fortune that has rendered the Democratic Party a shadowy fringe of anger and resentment. Enough of them to keep a show like The View on the air. But at what cost to the Democrats’ hoped-for phoenix-from-ashes narrative?
The show is damaging to progressivism, let alone liberalism. It’s worse than “woke,” because at least with the wokesters there’s some subterranean, academically-warped philosophy in play. The impression is that the ladies of The View are parroting left-wing talking points handed down from their masters, ideological precepts they “believe” to be true, but whose larger implications and real-world impact they don’t fully grasp.
Real Time guest and Democrat strategist Paul Begala laughed at Maher’s quip, but behind his mirth was a worried knowingness about the skewed perceptions and hateful blather promulgated by the morning talk show. These women are nowhere near the mainstream electorate. The Democrats have inextricably lost men. Just ask Maher, a man who is TDS-afflicted and genuinely worried about the trajectory of his party. The View has the potential to contribute by its awfulness to a slow-drip erosion of female alignment with the left.