The View’s studio audience was not on board with this week’s Republican host making an outlandish comparison between COVID and federal immigration officers.
The audience audibly jeered at Elisabeth Hasselbeck when she said on Wednesday, “This is the party of masks,” about Democrats in response to Whoopi Goldberg’s calling attention to ICE’s face coverings.
“There have been efforts made by both sides to figure out how to do this,” Goldberg said, referring to ICE’s sweeping detainments. “This is not the way to round people the way that they do,” she added. “If somebody comes at me with a mask on, running, talking about, ‘Hey,’ and didn’t show me they were a cop?”
Hasselbeck replied, “You guys forced masks on everybody in the United States,” prompting the crowd to gasp in disapproval. The conservative was a long-time View host who was asked to leave the show in 2013 after 10 years and then hopped over to Fox News. She returned for a guest appearance in March 2020.
Mask mandates were implemented at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak to limit the spread of the virus—a point many conservatives claim was an infringement on their personal freedoms.
The former Fox News host added to Goldberg, “Like, I don’t want to hear, ‘You can’t see my face.’ I just can’t. I love you, but I can’t.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin replied that Hasselbeck’s point is “different” than Goldberg’s.
Goldberg clarified that she was specifically talking about law enforcement wearing masks and “people walking down the street with their kids on their way to school” and then find themsevles in the middle of an ICE raid. Hasselbeck conceded that the distinction was “fair” to make.
Hasselbeck’s discordant hot take drew her backlash from View fans who were trying to give her a chance this week, after boycott threats plagued the week’s last conservative fill-in, Savannah Chrisley. Guest hosts will continue to rotate until the show’s permanent conservative host, Alyssa Farah Griffin, returns from maternity leave.
“I was trying to give grace to Elizabeth Hasselbeck this week but after she said ‘you’re the party of masks’, in reference to an ICE convo, the grace is gone,” one social media user wrote in a post to X on Wednesday.
Another called out show producer Brian Teta directly, writing in a post, “Do better @BrianTeta. Hasselbeck ain’t it. Spirited discourse is fine. Differing opinions are fine. She’s outright pushing lies, and her equating COVID masks to ICE masks is disingenuous and dangerous.”
Hasselbeck has been taking hits from all sides, as she picked a fight with conservative firebrand Megyn Kelly on Tuesday over the latter’s comments breaking with Trump over his attacks on Iran.
After the show played a clip of Kelly saying that U.S. troops “died for Israel and Iran,” and not the United States, Hasselbeck told the View camera, “How dare you, Megyn Kelly? How dare you tell a military person who has sacrificed their lives for our nation, in our uniform, when they are sacrificing their lives in our uniform—how dare you tell them or their families or our nation what they died for?”
Kelly told Daily Mail in response to Hasselbeck’s comments Tuesday, “No one gives a damn what this know-nothing has to say.”
“Elisabeth was too weak to handle the ladies of The View and even the morning set on Fox and Friends. She ran from the public square into exile so she could avoid mean people saying unflattering things about her—and there are many to say,” Kelly continued.
“Now she thinks she’s going to come back for a day and be the arbiter of appropriate conversation around the war we just launched in Iran? Please.”
