Sunny Hostin, co-host of ABC's "The View," told her national audience this week that driving through a neighborhood full of American flags makes her feel "threatened." Not figuratively. Not in some abstract academic sense. The woman looked into the camera and said the flag of the country that made her a multimillionaire television personality gives her the creeps.
"When I drive into a neighborhood, and it's not July 4th, and I'm not in a predominantly military household neighborhood and there are flags, American flags, everywhere, alongside Trump flags, alongside flags with stars in a circle, I feel threatened," Hostin said during Monday's broadcast.
That would have been enough to earn the segment a permanent spot in the cable news hall of shame. But Hostin wasn't finished.
The conversation centered on a viral photograph taken on the Washington D.C. Metro on July 4th. Shot by Reuters photographer Cheney Orr, the image shows a Black woman seated on a train car surrounded by masked members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front, who were heading to a march in downtown Washington. Hostin seized on the photo as vindication of everything she's been saying for years.
"That, for me, was a defining image of modern America for Black Americans," Hostin declared. Then came the escalation that BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales called "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard." Hostin pointed to the American-flag-style insignias on the Patriot Front members' caps and said: "You might as well have a hood on, because that's what it looks like, that's what it feels like."
The American flag is now a Klan hood. That's the argument. On network television. In the year of America's 250th birthday.
Hostin insisted she'd been making this point for years, telling the panel: "There are times when I walk into a community and I see American flags all over the community and I suddenly feel unsafe because there's a section of this country that has co-opted the American flag, and they equate being an American or an American flag with White supremacy and that should never be the symbol of White supremacy, but they have weaponized."
Guest co-host Michelle Buteau, the comedian and actress filling in on the panel, piled on. "When you say 'this is the best nation,' the best nation for who?" Buteau asked. She followed that with: "If we are celebrating 250 years, what are we exactly celebrating?" She described the Metro photo as representative of how minorities feel "walking into many rooms, down the street."
To her credit, co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin pushed back with the only sane take of the segment: "The flag belongs to all of us."
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville shared the clip with a two-word caption that probably speaks for about 200 million Americans: "Mental illness."
Here's what nobody on that panel mentioned. Patriot Front is a fringe group that most Americans had never heard of before this photograph. They number in the low hundreds. They are universally condemned across the political spectrum — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called their beliefs something he "could not possibly agree with" while defending their right to free speech. Using a few hundred masked extremists to indict every flag-flying household in America is like using a shoplifter to indict everyone who walks into a grocery store.
But the real tell is Hostin's timeline. She admitted she's felt this way for years. Long before this photograph. Long before Patriot Front showed up on a Metro car. The photo didn't create the sentiment — it gave her permission to say what she already believed about her neighbors.
A woman who has spent her entire adult career on American television, protected by American law, paid by an American corporation, living in American prosperity, looked at the symbol of all of that and called it a hood.
The flag didn't change. The person looking at it did.
