Liberals Hate When Women Think for Themselves
By Caroline Downey
On the 2016 presidential campaign trail, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton made a gaffe that still haunts her and her political credibility today.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?,” she said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it. Some of those folks, they are irredeemable.”
Saying the quiet part out loud, Clinton demonized millions of conservatives, not even pretending to want to earn their support. We know how that turned out.
A roundtable discussion on The View last week felt like deja vu. All four of the progressive hosts on the five-person panel took turns disparaging voters for identifying with the GOP’s midterm messaging, especially on inflation and crime.
“GOP candidates’ big messages are blaming Biden for inflation and that Democrats are soft on crime. I mean, who knows what’s resonating now, I’m so confused by everything I’m seeing,” Whoopi Goldberg said in exasperation.
“You would think, there used to be a way to stamp out the lie, but I guess lie’s the new it,” she said.
With record household commodity prices and poor perception of public safety in major cities, these issues have hit home for many Americans. Faith in the Biden administration’s ability to manage them is underwater. People are too preoccupied with affording groceries and gas or avoiding assault while jogging to worry about the impending demise of “democracy” under a GOP-dominated Congress, which Biden and The View have incessantly warned about.
Those who plan to vote red on Tuesday are buying into propaganda, the anchors taunted. Taking a page out of the old liberal playbook, they insinuated that Americans are too stupid to vote responsibly for their families and interests. The people have been susceptible to misinformation, they lamented. They don’t know better, they suggested.
While The View hosts think Americans should vote their way or the highway, voting based on real experiences and feelings of neglect by the current leadership is valid and reasonable. Since when was insulting the intelligence of voters and minimizing their concerns a winning campaign strategy?
The View then took a shot at conservative women. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Democrats have tried to stoke fear on abortion to distract from their other policy failures. Co-host Sunny Hostin said that women who vote against ‘reproductive rights’ are voting against themselves, tone-deaf to the fact that many women find the procedure morally reprehensible.
“I read a poll just yesterday that white Republican suburban women are now going to vote Republican. It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid,” Hostin said.
Except, Hostin is a self-professed anti-abortion Catholic. So Hostin knows that many women, some religious and some not, are deeply committed to defending life and opposed to the federal government sponsoring or facilitating the slaughter of the innocent unborn in the womb. She’s gaslighting and betraying women of her own ideological position, which requires a lot of bravery and resilience to publicly hold and advance.
While every chair on the show is filled with a woman, The View does not represent all American women. Conservatives have always been excluded from the table. Meghan McCain, daughter of the former Republican senator, and current panelist Alyssa Farah Griffith, former official in the Trump administration, were only invited on because they are liberals disguised as “good conservatives.” Disingenuous Republicans are acceptable on the show because then the progressive majority can point to them and say: “look, here are women who converted to our way of thinking after spending time in that awful party.”
The freeze out of conservative women is two-fold. First, the token ‘conservatives’ who join the cast are fake, so they will never be a true mouthpiece for conservative values. Second, if anyone utters a contrarian, even remotely counter-narrative opinion on the air, they will be shouted down by Goldberg, Joy Behar, and the others.
Griffith learned this last week. While she is typically comfortable throwing her party and the former president under the bus, Griffith objected to Hostin’s derision of Republican women.
“That’s insulting to the voter. Do we love democracy or not? People make decisions on what’s right for their family,” she said.
Because of Democrats’ contempt for voters’ concerns, whether the quality of K-12 education or gun violence, “there’s going to be a red wave,” she predicted. Her colleagues booed her.
Caroline Downey is the Editor-in-Chief of The Conservateur and an education reporter at National Review. She can be found on Twitter @carolinedowney_.