Opening Thursday’s episode of “The View,” host Whoopi Goldberg began by discussing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks to the Washington Post that she felt House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was “singling out” freshman Democratic representatives based on their race.
“When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told the paper. “But the persistent singling out . . . it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”
Pelosi has been at odds with Ocasio-Cortez as well as Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley over a border funding bill that the freshman Democrats were the sole ones to oppose.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got,” Pelosi told the New York Times in an interview last weekend, which prompted Ocasio-Cortez’s race remarks to the Post.
“Ladies, ladies. It’s like —it’s disheartening. It’s like the enemy is the guy tweeting in his toilet,” “The View” co-host Joy Behar says in response to the two congresswomen’s infighting.
“I don’t know about going to race right away — it’s like really? That’s where you go right away? I thought that that was a bit much, frankly,” Behar added.
For Goldberg’s part, she said she has an issue with how the freshman Democrats criticized the way older Dems supposedly were “not getting what needed to be done in the country.”
“Are you saying that the guys that are in now didn’t march across the [Edmund] Pettus Bridge [for civil rights in Selma, Alabama], that wasn’t important enough? So, for me, when you start telling people that they don’t know what they’re doing and to get out of the way, it’s annoying to people.
“I don’t think this had to do with color, I think this is more BS because really, Nancy Pelosi and [Sen. Dianne Feinstein] have both been there a zillion years fighting this cause of making life better. … Please remember, that the people who are here now — all you young people — you’re on the shoulders of people who came before you.”
