I have always considered the injunction “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” a problematic teaching. But having been subjected to The View, the most popular talk show on daytime TV, leads me to suspect the Old Testament was on to something.       

The View is notorious for its liberal, sometimes well left of liberal, bias, although it usually promotes a token “conservative” among its five or six, all-female, regulars. It may be the biggest outlet for liberal/woke propaganda on broadcast television. Even the token conservatives conform to the dominant element on matters pertaining to race and LBGTQ+ issues. The ideas of the liberal regulars regarding the world and its history are, overwhelmingly, simplistic deductions from liberal/woke ideology, with interpretations of the contemporary scene that rarely rise above childishness. All despise Trump—the current conservative regular Alyssa Farah Griffin, is one of the hordes of former Trump administration figures allegedly disgusted by his conduct. Her predecessor, Meghan McCain had, of course, her own excellent personal reasons to hate the man.

What the rest believe is sometimes so delusional as to be almost funny: that the Biden administration has been a great success, and Kamala Harris was a brilliant choice. That everyone doesn’t share these views is a deep mystery to them. The danger of political violence in our country, they suggest, is owing solely to Trump and his followers. Anyone who supposes that it was already common, given the 2020 riots following the George Floyd killing, must be hallucinating. Though with one exception, Sunny Hostin, the panel has been vocally pro-Israel since Oct 7, the point that violence has become increasingly common in the “pro-Palestinian demonstrations” has not sunk in yet, and likely never will.

Of course, The View rarely deigns to notice the illegal immigration crisis. Except for Griffin, the automatic response when the issue does surface is ritualistically playing down the problem, with some notable hostility toward New York Mayor Eric Adams for his belated recognition that a disaster is underway.

Despite the generally narrow ideological range of the panel, the women on The View quarrel bitterly about quite minor matters. They are incredibly rude, and frequently interrupt one another, sometimes to the point that it is practically impossible to follow their arguments. While I am no connoisseur of talk shows, I have never seen people on similar shows behave this badly. This does not appear to be the fault of the chief host, Whoopi Goldberg, who seems increasingly scatter-brained, and sometimes downright incoherent, although, unlike certain others, she is not malevolent.

Sara Haines, the youngest panelist, does not stray far from the accepted ideology, but occasionally interjects a bit of common sense.

The competitors for first prize for nastiness on The View are Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin. Behar, supposedly a comedian, is sometimes actually funny, though she does not make a habit of it. What she is, predictably, is venomous on anything remotely political, though she is too stupid to really convince anyone of anything, so she can’t be our winner of the top prize for unpleasantness just because of her ineffectiveness.

Behar, like most on the left, is race-obsessed—she once referred to that “white man Putin” —but her skin fixation is nothing compared to that of “Sunny” Hostin, who easily beats her out for nastiness. Sunny is a nickname for Asuncion, which, she says, she uses because Americans allegedly can’t pronounce the Spanish name properly. It seems unlikely that it was inspired by her personality, at least as far as the viewer can tell.

Hostin was a federal prosecutor who had a good record in prosecuting sex crimes against children. In other matters, unfortunately, she is a good demonstration of the advantage of legal training in getting around annoying facts and ethics. She is the purest adherent of the woke religion on The View, indeed, on some matters—notably Israeli actions in Gaza—she is so extreme that she succeeds in offending the other hosts.

Quickest to detect racism, she is a fine example of a paranoid racist herself. Her hostility to whites oozes out in remarks that, if made about other groups, would be regarded as bigotry. She once compared white women who vote Republican to “cockroaches who like Raid,” and spews out a fully racialized version of American history; e.g., “this country was founded on racism” and “slavery was responsible for the very foundation of this country.” Although it might be supposed that a federal prosecutor would understand the Constitution, she peddles the notion that the “three-fifths” clause, which counted “other persons” (slaves) as three fifths of a free person for the purposes of apportionment, meant that blacks were regarded as just three fifths of a man. In point of fact, this was a compromise forced on the North (which preferred not to count slaves at all) by the South to compensate for the latter being overtaken in population by the North. It is a blinkered interpretation of events by people today who imagine things would have been better for slaves if they had been counted as equals in this respect. The only thing worse than the three-fifths clause, from the point of view of slaves, would have been to count them on a one-to-one basis with free persons. This would have given the states where the overwhelming majority of slaves lived even more power to enforce the institution of slavery!

Alyssa Farah Griffin, it should be noted, has gotten a lot of heat on the right for her remarks on The View. A lot of this seems to come from Trump loyalists who regard her as engaged in betrayal. This reminds me of a story about a sharecropper who had been given a bottle of cheap whiskey by his landlord. A while later, the landlord asked the man how it had been. The cropper said, “It was just right, boss.” Suspecting ingratitude, the landowner asked, “Just right?” The cropper replied. “Yes boss. If it had been any worse, I couldn’t have drunk it, but if it had been any better, you wouldn’t have given it to me.”

In the same sense, we may say that Alyssa Farah Griffin is just right!