The View kicked off Election Day 2022 with hosts Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farah Griffin repeatedly clashing over the former’s recent comment that white women who support Republicans are similar to “roaches voting for Raid.”
Last week, Hostin sparked intense backlash from conservatives when she expressed frustration with recent polling showing suburban women gravitating toward GOP candidates in the midterm elections—despite the Supreme Court recently overturning the federal right to abortion.
“I read a poll just yesterday that white Republican suburban women are now going to vote Republican,” Hostin declared on Thursday. “It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid.” At the time, Griffin called Hostin’s comments “insulting” to voters.
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Besides igniting predictable outrage from Fox News and right-wing media, Hostin’s remarks also resulted in former View conservative host Meghan McCain penning an op-ed grousing about conservative women being “described as ‘roaches’ and ‘Nazis’ for valuing their best judgement over the orders of Democrats and the liberal media.” (Since her dramatic exit from the show following an acrimonious four-year run, McCain has repeatedly trashed the show and her ex-colleagues, claiming she was “bullied” during her tenure.)
At the top of Tuesday’s broadcast of the ABC chatfest, Griffin—a former Trump White House aide who has filled McCain’s old role on the show—said she worried that “some of the far-left has become so negative” with its rhetoric about conservatives.
After Hostin shot back that “the far-left did not storm the Capitol,” Griffin brought up her colleague’s recent remarks. “Last week, you called white Republican women cockroaches,” the conservative co-host declared. “You said they were acting like cockroaches.”
After Hostin insisted that wasn’t the case, the two began to argue over each other, leading host and longtime show referee Whoopi Goldberg to step in.
“Here’s what I’m going to ask you all to do,” Goldberg shouted the pair down. “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."
With Goldberg briefly restoring order, Hostin then defended her comparison by first noting that her mother is white and asserting she “wouldn’t say” white women are bugs.
“Second of all: What I used was a metaphor, really more of a simile,” she said. “I said white women Republicans—I just read a poll that the suburbans are now voting Republican, that is like roaches voting for Raid.”
Hostin added amid crosstalk: “Let me finish. That was John Leguizamo's joke, a joke I used on this show a few weeks ago referring to Latinos, and no one had anything to say about it. The last thing I’ll say is, I continued by saying, ‘Do they want to be in Gilead [from The Handmaid’s Tale]? Do they want to lose their rights?’ You are actually twisting what I said.”
Griffin, however, continued to interject, telling Hostin she was “trying to make you reconsider” because “that’s what you said.” The pair once again sparred over whether she directly compared white women to roaches.
“We’re going to break! I can’t take it,” a frustrated Goldberg eventually interjected, tossing the show to commercial.
The following segment, though, found Griffin issuing a bit of a mea culpa to Hostin as she clarified her own position.
“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," Griffin stated. “I think the point I was trying to make is part of the left—not the entirety, some of my best friends worked for Barack Obama, I love many Democrats—but some on the left though have taken such a negative approach to people who view things differently.”
