I corrected myself as a failing. Failing. That's what I was going to ask.
So, you still have hope? I think yeah, I have hope. But the notion that in 2026 my children have less sorry, my children have less civil rights than I had.
Maybe the problem isn't that America isn't worth defending. Maybe the problem is that lots of [music] people today are entitled whiners who have no perspective and no idea how good they have it. [applause] Bill Meyer just went [music] straight at Sunny Hoston, co-host of The View, former federal prosecutor, one of the most influential faces in American daytime television.
She sat on national [music] TV, earning nearly $2 million a year and called America a failing experiment. Her reason, her children somehow have fewer civil [music] rights in 2026 than she did. A woman living in a mansion working on one of the biggest shows in the country is telling millions of viewers that the system failed her kids.
Bill Maher didn't [music] soften it. He didn't play polite. He looked at that mindset and said exactly what a lot of people were thinking.
Maybe the problem isn't that America isn't worth defending. Maybe the problem is a group of entitled people who have no idea how good they actually have it. If you want the full breakdown of how he tore her argument apart, stay with me.
So you called America a failed experiment when you were on Friday. Well, and I I corrected myself as a failing. Failing.
That's what I was going to ask. So you still have hope? I think yeah, I have hope.
Mhm. [music] But the notion that in 2026, my children have less sorry, my children have less civil rights than I had. That's horrible and terrifying.
That is terrifying. Yeah. And so any scientific experiment that you would take, you know, um because I've discussed this with my husband cuz apparently he heard some of the blowback and I said it's a failing experiment.
Listen carefully to how this argument is built. Sunonny Hoston uses a scientific metaphor experiment, but never gives a single hard number to prove failure. No poverty rate, no press freedom ranking, no global index, just [music] a personal feeling upgraded into a verdict on a nation of 340 million people.
Her kids, she says, have fewer civil rights in 2026. Her son is 22, her daughter is 18. They grew up behind iron gates in a neighborhood she herself once described as all white.
She even went to the local police station to introduce her son so officers wouldn't profile him while jogging. [music] That is the civil rights crisis she is describing on national television while earning nearly $2 million a year. Meanwhile, US citizenship and immigration services still has more than 12 million pending cases and over a million green cards are issued every year.
Tens of millions of people around the world are still waiting in line to enter the same failing experiment. Bill Mayer saw the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and he refused to pretend it wasn't there. And is it possible for a country to lose itself so much that leaving it is justified?
Yes. [music] But we're not there yet. Not by a long shot.
And we don't need quitters. [applause] We need people who will stay and fix it. Maybe the problem isn't that America isn't worth defending.
Maybe the [music] problem is that lots of people today are entitled whiners who have no perspective and no idea how good they have it. [applause] Bill Mayer never denied America has problems. He said it clearly.
[music] What he attacked was the frame, turning every flaw into a death sentence for the whole system instead of a reason to fix it. The [music] numbers back him up. USCIS still carries more than 12 million pending cases.
Over a million green cards are issued every year. According to Kato Institute data from early 2024, roughly 34. 7 million applications were waiting at the start of the fiscal year.
up from about 10 million in 1996. Only around 3% or [music] 1. 1 million people got one that year.
The rest keep waiting, some for decades. These figures come from a libertarian think tank that actually supports more immigration. [music] Even they show tens of millions still lining up to enter the country.
Sunonny Hoston calls a failing experiment. Recent polls reveal the same gap. Black and Hispanic Americans are often more likely than white progressives to say America is among the greatest countries.
Many liberals say they have considered leaving. Yet, they still demand every immigrant get in to chase the American dream. Mayor's point is simple and brutal.
We don't need quitters. We need people who stay and do the [music] hard work. The loudest voices calling America a failure are often the ones who benefit from it the most.
Here is the contradiction. Tens of millions of people are waiting, [music] some for decades, just to live inside the same failing experiment Sunny Hoston describes. USCIS still carries more than 12 million pending cases.
Over a million green cards are [music] issued every year. That does not mean America is perfect. It does force one question.
Failing compared to what? An imaginary ideal that exists nowhere on Earth or the real options most of the world's population actually faces. If America is not the number one global power, it's not going to be Denmark.
It's going to be communist China, a country that right now the government is imprisoning weaguer Muslims in concentration camps. It is a deeply racist government. It's a human rights violating government.
It is a government that if they are the leader of the free world, we are not a free world the way that we are right now. The notion of patriotism and the notion of the of America and the American flag has been co-opted by the right as if they are true patriots. But when I listened to Christopher Ray, the president the the head of the FBI, he said white [music] supremacy is the biggest domestic threat to this country.
And so as a woman of color with a 6'2 black kid in college and a 5'7, 5'8 black kid in high school, I don't see that part of American exceptionalism. I'm sorry. I think this country has a lot of problems that could be solved.
Yes, maybe they're putting uh Muslims in jail in Afghanistan, I think you mentioned, and China. They're putting a lot of black more black people in jail. Stop right here.
Sunny Host admits China runs concentration camps for weaguer Muslims and calls it a deeply racist, [music] human rights violating government. Then in the same breath, she suggests America is somehow worse because more black people are in prison here. That is not balance.
That is a false scale. According to [music] the Weaguer Human Rights Project, roughly one in every 26 Weaggguers and other non-Han people in Shing Jang is imprisoned, the highest known imprisonment rate on Earth. Weaguers make up about 1% of China's population, yet account for roughly 1th3 of its formal prison population.
Hundreds of thousands more have been held in re-education camps. [music] America has a real incarceration problem. No serious person denies it, but US prisons still operate under public law, defense attorneys, appeals, and a [music] free press.
Sunny Hoston can say all of this on national television, collect nearly $2 million a year, and walk home untouched. Bill Maher refused to [music] pretend those two systems weigh the same. One has flaws.
The other runs camps. Look, we all know China [music] does bad stuff. They break promises about Hong Kong autonomy.
They put weaggguers in camps and punish descent. And we [music] don't want to be that. But it's got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that [music] can't do anything at all.
[applause] [applause] In two generations, China has built 500 [music] entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and [music] pharmaceuticals. Mayhor's 500 cities line is television exaggeration. The core fact is not.
The World Bank estimates China lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty in four decades of economic reform, the fastest large-scale poverty reduction in human history. At the same time, the US State Department, the United Nations, and multiple human rights organizations confirmed that Chinese authorities have detained hundreds of thousands to over a million Weaggguers in re-education camps in Shing Jang. The Weaguer Human Rights Project puts the formal imprisonment rate for non-Han people there at the highest known in the world.
Both things are true at once. That [music] is exactly Maher's point. Do not treat a noisy, flawed democracy as the moral equal of a system that runs camps and punishes disscent.
[music] America built the smartphone Sunny Films herself on the airlines that fly her around the world. [music] And the network that pays her nearly $2 million a year to call the country a failure. Every tool she uses to attack America was built by America.
Weaponized her husband against Hillary Clinton. And the Obama did all those things. This country is a misogynistic country and this country is a is a country that out of all of the first world countries hasn't been able to elect a female president.
This is the most dangerous kind of argument. True on the surface, false [music] in the conclusion. Yes, America has never elected a female president.
Blaming that entirely on misogyny ignores the rest of the record. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by more than 2. 8 million votes.
She lost the electoral college, a constitutional mechanism that has nothing to do with the candidates's gender. Kla Harris became the first female vice president in 2021. As of recent years, more than 10 women [music] have served as governors, including in major states like New York, Michigan, and Arizona.
Look abroad. Britain, Germany, India, Brazil, and Argentina have all had female leaders. France, Japan, and South Korea still have not elected a female head of government through direct popular vote either.
This is a pattern across many developed democracies, not a unique American disease. Meanwhile, one of the biggest daytime shows in the country is run by five women, including multi-millionaire Sunny Host herself. The claim that the entire nation is simply misogynistic collapses under its own selective math.
I said this on this show many many years ago because this is my 10th year on the show and I said there are times [music] when I walk into a community and I see um American flags all over the community and I suddenly [music] feel unsafe because there is a section of this country that has co-opted the American flag and they equate uh being an American or an American flag with white [music] supremacy. Sunonny Hoston says the American flag makes her feel unsafe because a section of the country has co-opted [music] it and linked it to white supremacy. That feeling may be real for her.
Turning it into a national diagnosis is another matter. Extremist groups have always tried to claim national symbols [music] that does not rewrite the meaning of the flag for the rest of the country. Most Americans still see it as the banner of a constitutional republic with free speech, contested elections, and the right to criticize the government on live television.
exactly what Hust is doing while earning nearly $2 million a year. Recent polls show large majorities of black and Hispanic Americans [music] still express pride in the country at rates often higher than white progressives. The flag has not been permanently captured by any fringe.
Treating every display of it as a threat is not analysis. [music] It is selective fear elevated into a political argument. I know that as a country [music] it's very difficult for people to to believe that racism and misogyny [music] they're just alive and well.
I think that we don't want to think that about ourselves, our [music] neighbors, our friends. Um but it it's my lived experience [music] tells me that it does still exist even if your lived experience doesn't tell you that it exists. And you know the facts support that.
I think we have a graph. If if you look at the there's [music] a clear racial divide in who voted for the the uh uh Trump as opposed to who voted for Kla Harris. On the raw election data, Sunonny Hoston is not wrong.
Post-election surveys [music] from Pew Research and AP Votecast in 2024 confirmed clear divides by race and education in how people voted. That is a statistical fact, not an opinion. [music] The problem is what she does with the fact.
She treats the voting gap as automatic proof that racism and misogyny still define the country. Correlation is not the same as the sweeping moral conclusion she draws. Bill Maher and later Greg [music] Gutfeld went after exactly that leap.
A racial or educational split in the electorate does not automatically mean the nation is [music] irredeemably bigoted. It can also reflect differences in priorities, economics, culture, and trust in institutions. Hoston presents one interpretation as the only uncomfortable truth.
That is where the argument stops being data and [music] starts being narrative. A bunch of privileged mean girls complaining about privilege and [music] trying to make fetch happen. What a shocker that the people who [music] see everything through the lens of race and sex see their election loss as a result [music] of racism and sexism.
Yes. If only we weren't so irredeemably [music] unenlightened, we would have elected a black president by now. Oh, what we did?
Oh. Oh, right. And then reelected him.
This is the core of the whole fight and it deserves to be stated without the laugh track. America elected a black [music] president twice. In 2008, Barack Obama won 69.
5 million popular votes, [music] the highest total any Democratic candidate had ever received at that point. He was reelected in 2012. That is not a minor detail.
It is a historical fact the irredeemably racist narrative has to keep stepping around. Does one election erase every remaining gap in incarceration rates, wealth, or housing credit? No.
Federal Reserve and Brookings research has documented those disparities for decades. But treating every election loss as proof of permanent national bigotry while ignoring the twice-elected black president is not analysis. [music] It is selective memory.
The people who see everything through the lens of race should at least account [music] for the biggest racial milestone in modern American politics. Many of them simply refuse to. Do we think the vast majority of Americans are racist?
That's what I'm trying to help me. I think that there is a significant portion [music] um that are racist and you can't dismiss my lived experience. And I never would I would never lived experience.
That's what they like to say. They like to say my lived experience so they can lie to you and you can't verify it. Your your lived experience.
How do we how how you gonna give an anecdotal? This woman is giving an anecdotal [music] experience. Meaning my lived experience dictates the vast majority of what happens in America.
That's completely stupid. You can't give an anecdotal experience and say that's the majority of the how America operates. And you can't ne neglect my anecdotal experience.
Therefore, I'm right about the vast majority of people in America because my [music] anecdotal experience nutty. When I say that there are a lot of racists in this country, [music] I just experienced my son walking down the beach being called the n-word several times in Florida. This is where the debate leaves data and enters personal emotion.
A painful experience is real. It is not a national statistic. Sunny Host takes one ugly incident on a Florida beach and treats it as proof that a significant portion of Americans are racist.
One story [music] is not a sample of 340 million people. Crime data, hate crime reports from the FBI, and long-term polling all show racial hostility [music] exists and also show it is not the defining condition of daily life for most [music] Americans. Lived experience matters.
It does not automatically scale into a verdict on the entire country. That leap is exactly what her critics keep attacking. A single insult on a beach does not outweigh the broader record of a nation that elected a black president twice and still draws millions of people [music] from every background who choose to live here.
Bottom line, she managed to take a general observation [music] that spouses of any stripe stick together and make it only about whites. [music] And why? Cuz what else does she have?
Nothing. She's not funny or smart or interesting, but [music] she's an expert in calling people racist. So, congrats on that.
This is the moment the critique turns purely personal. Greg Gutfeld stops arguing the data and goes straight at Sunny Host's abilities. He says she has nothing left except calling people racist.
The line is harsh. It is also pointing at a real pattern. When every disagreement is framed as racism or misogyny, the argument eventually runs out of new evidence and starts repeating the same charge.
Host has built a high-profile career on that framing while earning nearly $2 million a year on one of the biggest daytime shows in America. Personal insults do not prove [music] or disprove the original claim about America. But the frequency with which race becomes the default explanation does reveal something.
When the [music] only tool left is the racism label, the analysis has stopped expanding and started shrinking. In Russia, just referring to the war in Ukraine as a war can get you 15 years in the fabulous prisons made famous by some of the world's most famous novels. You think America's [music] evil because we didn't nominate Margot Robbie for an Oscar?
Just wait till you get thrown out the window of your very own dreamhouse. [applause] Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Sudan still cut the hands off of thieves. So, if you're coming from San Francisco, do your shoplifting at home.
[applause] And you might also want to do your protesting before you go because protesters are ruinely shot in lots of [music] places. Gosh, it almost seems like the world is full of suffering, intolerance, and oppression on a scale we can't imagine. But that can't be true because if it was, [music] we'd be protesting it.
This is the strongest reality check in the entire exchange. Maher's examples are not jokes. They are documented.
In Russia, [music] laws passed after 2022 make it a crime to call the war in Ukraine a war instead of a special military operation. Human rights groups and [music] the US State Department confirm prison sentences can reach 15 years for what authorities call false information [music] about the military. Saudi Arabia still retains corporal punishments under Sharia law for serious theft, even if applied less often in recent years.
[music] Amnesty International and Freedom House regularly reports severe restrictions on protest and speech across multiple countries. Maher [music] named the core point stands. Criticizing America is a right that exists precisely because the system still protects it.
Sunonny Hoston can call the country a failing experiment on national television, keep her multi-million dollar salary, and go home safely. That single fact is the difference between a flawed democracy and the alternatives she pretends are comparable. [music] 59% of self-identified liberals say there have been times when they considered leaving America for good.
[music] Like after NBC canceled the West Wing. I don't get it. You want so badly for every immigrant to come to this country and experience the good life, but somehow it's so terrible you want to leave.
Mayor's 59% figure tracks with a real pattern. Multiple surveys from Yuggov, Axios, and others in 2024 [music] 2025 found large shares of voters, especially on the left, saying they had seriously considered leaving the country after contentious elections. The contradiction is obvious.
The same voices that demand America open its doors wider for every immigrant still talk about packing their own [music] bags. They want the world to experience the American dream while describing that dream as so broken they might abandon it themselves. This is not unique to one side.
[music] Some conservatives said the same after 2020. But the loudest failing experiment rhetoric still comes from people who enjoy the highest living standards, the strongest legal protections, and the [music] biggest platforms that system provides. Wanting everyone else to come in while threatening to leave is not principle.
It is selective despair. The most revealing moment in this whole story did not come from Bill [music] Maher or Greg Gutfeld. It came from inside the view itself.
After Sunonny Hoston's failing experiment comments spread, her longtime co-host Whoopi Goldberg said on air that she is really proud to be an American and forever grateful to this [music] country. That is a rare public split between two hosts who usually share the same political lane. Even on the same set, the America is failing line did not go unchallenged.
Sounds like me. Actually, I'm a former federal prosecutor. He knows he's a Harvard grad who teaches fourth grade geometry to kids.
God bless you. This is not a kid who's ever in trouble. It's an innocent mistake.
I understand you have whatever. This clip shows a different side of Sunny Host that most attack videos ignore. She gives a young person the benefit of the doubt, stresses [music] his clean record, and refuses to turn a single mistake into a character assassination that matters.
Reducing anyone to only [music] their most controversial statements produces a cartoon, not a real person. Host can be both the co-host who calls America a failing experiment and the person who shows measured judgment in a specific case. A serious [music] argument has to deal with the full picture, not just the lines that confirm the preferred narrative.
But a poll last year asked if America is the greatest country in the world. [music] More blacks than Hispanic Americans agreed with that than the white progressives. It asked if racism is built into our society.
White progressives agreed with that at higher levels than black and Hispanic [music] people. It asked if government should increase border security. Same result.
Hispanic Americans are less okay with illegal immigration than whitey. [laughter] The poll Maher referenced reflects a pattern seen in multiple surveys, including data similar to earlier Yuggov and Echelon Insights findings on questions about American greatness, systemic racism, and border security. Black and Hispanic respondents often diverge from white progressives.
The exact [music] percentages shift by pollster and wording, but the gap keeps appearing. So, after [music] everything, who is right? Sunonny Hoston is not inventing every problem.
Real disparities in wealth, incarceration, [music] and opportunity still exist and are documented by serious research. But calling the entire country a failing experiment goes far beyond the evidence and ignores the global comparison. Bill Maher and Greg Gutfeld are right to attack that overreach.
At times, they also swing into personal shots instead of staying on the argument. Is America a failing experiment or an unfinished one that is still [music] worth defending and improving? Drp your answer in the comments.
If this breakdown helped you see the full picture, [music] hit like and subscribe. The next one is already on the way.
