After careful deliberation, I’ve come to the conclusion ABC’s “The View” is little more than a well-remunerated mainstream media troll farm.
Want to find the most incendiary, thought-free lefty hot take on the issues of the day? Don’t whip out your phone and hit up Twitter. Just wait until 11 a.m. rolls around in most markets and you’ll get some combination of Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Ana Navarro, Sara Haines and a guest ganging up on token Republican Alyssa Farah Griffin and/or common decency.
The only issue of the day anyone was talking about on Thursday and Friday, of course, was the death of Queen Elizabeth II; the monarch of the United Kingdom passed away on Thursday at her summer home in Balmoral, Scotland, after reigning for 70 years, effectively halting the coverage of other stories and prompting an outpouring of grief and sympathy.
Unless you’re somebody who takes “too soon” as a challenge, not a rebuke, there wasn’t a hot take to be found in Elizabeth’s passing. But lo — come Friday at 11 a.m., there was certainly a hot take to be had.
This time, the troll in question was Sunny Hostin, who told the audience they should “mourn the queen and not the empire,” then told them why they shouldn’t mourn the queen.
Hostin was responding to Haines’ pillorying of a Carnegie Mellon professor, Uju Anya, who has become briefly famous for tweeting that “the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
Rather than condemn Anya, Hostin, who lived in London at one point, tried providing context to defend her.
“I wanted to meet the queen because I think we all love glam and pageantry,” Hostin said.
“And I think, though, we can mourn the queen and not the empire.”
Should ‘The View’ be taken off TV?
What followed was an inverted version of Marc Antony’s funeral speech for Julius Caesar: She claimed had come to praise Queen Elizabeth, not to bury her. And, much like Antony, she intended to do nothing of the sort:
“If you really think about what the monarchy was built on, it was built on the backs of black and brown people,” Hostin said.
“She wore a crown with pillaged stones from India and Africa. And now, what you are seeing, at least in the black communities that I’m a part of, they want reparations.”
She also had a suggestion for King Charles III.
“Charles, now, is in a position, he, I think, has 14 colonies that he’s now head of state, including Australia and Canada, I believe, if I’m correct. It’s time for him to modernize this monarchy, and it’s time for him to provide reparations to all of those colonies,” Hostin said.
Never mind, of course, that Elizabeth reigned during the very period where Britain divested itself of almost all of its colonies. Never mind that the queen used the soft power the position of monarch allows to advance social progress in that department, famously dancing with Ghana’s black president in 1961, a time when race-mixing of that sort was considered heresy to many.
Never mind the fact the voices for reparations that Hostin seems to hear so loudly are just a whisper being amplified by her daily troll-farm platform. Or never mind simple decorum. Sunny Hostin plans to speak ill of the dead, goshdarnit. Don’t you tell her to do otherwise.
But lest you forget, she wants to “mourn the queen and not the empire.” Right, except her comments following that seemed to indicate she believed the queen and the Windsors were inextricably linked to the empire, and the only way their guilt could be extirpated was through reparations.
Hostin’s anti-queen screed was more delicately phrased than the blunt trollery you could find on Twitter, of course, where scads of folks with pronouns in their profiles decided they needed to prove how lefty they were by dancing on Elizabeth’s grave:
LETS GOO LMFAO RIP BOZO L https://t.co/0E0xTrGXB6
— ?Xavierillustrates? (@XavierILL) September 8, 2022
me eating a sausage roll outside of buckingham palace rip bozo pic.twitter.com/KI50Sz489U
— askel (@remember_2008) September 8, 2022
HAPPY QUEEN BEING DEAD DAY TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE
— barbara ghouls (she/her) (@orinocohoe) September 8, 2022
Lovely. While different in wording, it’s worth noting these individuals, like Uju Anya, don’t need to satisfy network executives with their trolling. Those who do need to adopt a more formal tack to their remarks — like MSNBC analyst Richard Stengel. Speaking to host Nicole Wallace on Thursday, the former State Department official said those who were mourning Queen Elizabeth II wanted to go back to the era of “hereditary privilege.”
Richard @Stengel on Queen Elizabeth II’s role in the UK’s legacy of colonialism & racism:
“You played a clip of her speaking in Cape Town in 1947… That’s the year apartheid took effect… British colonialism, which she presided over… had a terrible effect on much of the world.” pic.twitter.com/RtxgBxTRyi
— The Recount (@therecount) September 8, 2022
“I think there is a weakness in the American character that still yearns for that era of hereditary privilege,” Stengel said.
“I’m going to be the skunk at the garden party today, to use a British expression, and I also would pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth for her unrivaled service and dedication, but it was her great-great-great-great-grandfather George III who we rebelled from to start the United States of America.”
What Hostin and Stengel said was a restrained version of “LETS GOO LMFAO RIP BOZO L” — but restrained only, I’m guessing, because they like jobs.
To us, of course, these remarks may be inexcusably indecorous, even in their restrained form. To those behind the utterances, it’s just another day at the troll farm.
