The view Sunonny Host claims American flags make her feel unsafe. I don't know if you've seen this clip. She's living in the wrong country.
The American flag and it's this is flags that we're talking about. She feels very uns he's a birther. Um the list he falsely accused the Central Park 5.
He is uh according to many people. I mean she the fact that is the single dumbest thing I have ever heard. Pat, if I could jump in on this one.
You're saying that the American flag is synonymous with what? Patrick Bet David walked into a discussion involving Sunny Host and somehow the conversation ended up looking less like political analysis and more like an unexpected roast session. He started with one criticism then pulled out a detail that changed the entire tone of the exchange.
But the funniest part came when he connected the dots and turned what seemed like a normal media debate into something Sunny probably did not see coming. Sunonny Host, her husband accused of committing federal insurance fraud in a lawsuit. Oh man, it's just the view.
Just a a person the the Sunny Hansen that we all love from one of my favorite shows. Uh on I admit I may not have spent as much time in a courtroom as you have. That's a good one.
I was also re the controversy started with something as ordinary as an American flag. But within minutes PBD had moved from patriotism to politics, family history, polling data, and one particularly awkward question about why someone would feel threatened by a symbol seen across the country. Do you think you'd get the job that you have if you were 80 lbs heavier?
Well, they give it to Do you think No, but but no, but Whoopi is actually a lot older, but Whoopi is a very very very very famous individual, an actress. She's made it. Okay.
But do you think Sunny gets the job if she's not that attractive? No. Do you think Sunny woke up one day and look like that?
How hard do you think Sunny works out? How hard do you think Sunny goes to the gym the way she takes care of her body? I'm sorry, Sunny.
How hard is it to look like you? So why shouldn't we have that expectation of them? Why are you playing a victim for these other guys?
I'm feeling sorry. Patrick Bet David did not exactly go looking for a complicated argument when Sunonny Hoston became the subject of discussion. He only needed one sentence from her, one American flag, and a few minutes of airtime before the conversation turned into a political roast that kept getting more uncomfortable.
Most important issue is education, guys. We got to get smarter, and there is no better professors than uh the ladies on the view to teach us about the solar eclipse. Play this clip because she's educating us that even Whoopi almost walked out.
Leaving. We've got a solar eclipse. Uh we've got the hallway.
She ran down the hallway. The rapture is here. Rapture is here.
And then also I learned that the sicatas are coming. Cicas John sicatas coming. Well, this is what I different kinds of every 17 years.
What began as Sunny explaining why seeing American flags in certain communities could make her feel unsafe quickly became a much larger debate about patriotism, political identity, and whether the American flag had somehow been promoted from national symbol to ideological warning sign. And Patrick Bet David was clearly not buying it. We have to we have to know that this is accused.
All accused. Yeah. All accused.
But he's in the RICO. This is a big RICO case that her husband's in. Tom, what are your thoughts?
Give you a different perspective. Well, well, I think date night was Sunny and her husband are being a little interested. How'd it go today?
Oh, it was terrible. I had to read this legal statement into a camera and I do what they told me. And her husband's like, "So did I.
I had the same day. " Now he's just accused. and the this accused in a lawsuit after some time of invest.
The comments came during a value tamement segment published in July 2026 when the show played a clip from the view in which host revisited a point she had made years earlier. She explained that there were times when she would enter a community covered in American flags and suddenly feel unsafe because she believed a section of the country had associated the flag with white supremacy and effectively weaponized it. That was the opening Patrick needed because his response was not exactly the kind of gentle disagreement you would expect at a neighborhood book club.
He immediately attacked the premise, arguing that treating the American flag itself as a symbol of white supremacy was absurd. His basic point was simple. There is a massive difference between a national symbol and genuinely extremist symbols.
And collapsing those things together creates a very strange definition of patriotism. And this is where the conversation became entertaining because Patrick did not approach it like someone trying to write a 40-page policy paper. He approached it like a guy who had just heard somebody complain that seeing a country's flag was emotionally threatening and decided the entire argument deserved to be put under a microscope.
His co-hosts joined in and the joke started arriving almost as quickly as the criticism. One of the funniest observations was that if you see an American flag outside a house, you may assume the people living there are conservative. Not because the flag itself belongs to one political party, but because conservatives have increasingly become more comfortable displaying it publicly.
figure out these days. At first, I thought because my ears I I thought she said American something else. I didn't think it was.
You thought it was missing the L. The only L that is going on here. How was the LGBT community responding afraid of Richard Simmons?
But she was talking about flag, the American flag. Countries have flags. And and by the way, when you see a house, you're driving in a community and you see an American flag.
What percentage of the time do you say that's a conservative fact? That distinction actually matters because the argument is no longer just about the flag. It is about what political groups have allowed certain symbols to become associated with in everyday American life.
Patrick and the value taintment crew were essentially arguing that liberals had surrendered some of the visual territory of patriotism and then become frustrated when conservatives occupied it. That is a much more interesting argument than simply saying one side likes America more than the other because political symbols do not exist in a vacuum. They become associated with movements, campaigns, protests, sports events, military ceremonies, holidays, and cultural identities.
And once a political group repeatedly adopts a symbol, the other side can start treating that symbol as belonging to the opposition, even when it technically belongs to everybody. That was the bigger contradiction Patrick was trying to expose. The American flag is not Republican property.
It is not Democratic property. It is not conservative property, liberal property, or the personal branding package of whichever politician happens to be standing beside it that week. It represents the United States, which makes the idea of being intimidated simply by seeing it an unusually complicated position to defend.
But Patrick did not stop there because apparently one controversial statement was not enough material for the episode. Sunonny Host, her husband accused of committing federal insurance fraud in a lawsuit. Oh man, it's just The View.
Just a person, the the Sunny Haw that we all love from one of my favorite shows uh on The View. And it's always Tom, what' you always say? It's always the people that always do the pointing and it's always it always comes back to them.
All right. So, when you said this is the largest RICO case ever filed in the state of New York, you guys put let wrap that wrap that around your around your brain. That's bigger than the mafia case.
Like the mafia one was number one. This one takes it over. So, he was scamming.
The discussion then moved into Hoston's own family history. And this was where the roast became considerably more personal. Patrick's team brought up a previous discussion involving Hoston learning that her family had historical connections to slaveolding in Puerto Rico and Spain.
Hoston had previously reacted with surprise to that ancestry and talked about how learning the information gave her a new perspective on her family's history. Now, this is where the audience has to separate two very different things. Hoston herself was not accused of owning slaves and the discussion was about historical ancestry, not some bizarre claim that she personally participated in slavery.
Even the value attainment transcript makes clear that she was not being implicated in such conduct herself. The point being made on the show was about the awkwardness of judging historical America through an absolutely spotless moral lens when almost everyone's family history becomes more complicated the further you investigate it. And that is where the comedy found its target.
Patrick's crew basically turned the situation into a giant exercise in narrative whiplash. On one side you have someone describing discomfort around American flags because of what the symbol can represent to certain people. On the other side, you have the discovery that her own family history contained uncomfortable chapters that she had not previously known about.
That contrast gave Patrick the perfect opportunity to make his larger argument about hypocrisy. Play one of the clips with the view with what Sunny is saying. Okay.
Not the other one. Play the one with what Sunny is saying. And this is very weird to the point that you know one of the co-hosts had to interrupt.
Rob, if you want to press play, go ahead. kind of weird into the demographics because uh black women tried to save this country again last night. 92% of black women voted for uh the vice president.
You have Latinas in the 70 percentile voting for the vice president. What we did not have is white women who voted about 52% right uh for Donald Trump. Uneducated white women.
The real disagreement is over whether acknowledging America's flaws should fundamentally change the way someone relates to its national identity. Patrick's position was essentially that a country's imperfections do not cancel the legitimacy of feeling proud of belonging to it. And that is where his criticism of Host became much broader than the original television clip.
The disagreement, therefore, was not really about whether the flag existed or whether America had problems. Both sides already knew the answer to those questions. The deeper disagreement was about whether political association should be powerful enough to change the meaning of a national symbol.
And that is where Patrick's criticism became particularly effective as political commentary. Because instead of simply dismissing Host's feelings, he challenged the logic behind them. If a symbol becomes uncomfortable because a particular political group uses it aggressively, does that mean everyone else should surrender the symbol to that group?
Or should the opposite happen with people reclaiming the symbol and refusing to let any political movement redefine it permanently? Patrick clearly favored the second approach and that gave the segment a much bigger theme than a simple disagreement between two commentators. She's allegedly doing something like this.
You guys would know if your wives were up to some nefarious stuff. And let's just not forget who she is. She's been for years lecturing America about morality, inequality, systemic failures, and look at her track record.
How many times has she had to go on in the past two months and look at the camera and do a legal apology for for all the stuff that she said on the show? And then she also on Trump's win calling uh the the the loss because of uneducated white women that Trump We have to we have to know that this is accused. All accused.
Yeah. All accused. But he's in the RICO.
This is a big Rico. Then just when the conversation seemed to have reached the limits of political symbolism, Patrick introduced something that probably was not on anyone's bingo card for an American flag discussion. Mice.
The segment turned toward research involving fear conditioning and whether certain responses could potentially influence subsequent generations with the discussion referencing experiments in which male mice were exposed to a particular scent while experiencing an unpleasant stimulus followed by observations of responses in later generations. Patrick used that research as a jumping off point for a much broader question about whether fear and anxiety can be transmitted through families and cultures. That transition might sound strange at first, but it actually connected to the larger argument more naturally than it initially appeared.
Human beings do not inherit only physical traits from previous generations. They also inherit stories, memories, warnings, grievances, and interpretations of the world around them. A child can grow up hearing stories about a particular group and develop an emotional response before ever meeting anyone from that group.
Communities can preserve memories of historical injustice for generations, while political movements can carry grievances long after the original events have passed. Those inherited narratives can help people understand where they came from, but they can also influence how they interpret symbols, institutions, and even strangers. That's a 2450.
It used to be $2400. Congratulations, everybody hates America. They've reduced the price to $450.
Talk about save that money. If you want to leave the country, now's a great time to get a great deal on a one-way trip out here. Let me tell you this story.
It's one of the best stories. Parents, this is very important for you and I to think about. There's a reason why I keep talking about the future looks bright.
In 2013, they did a study at Emory University. A guy named Brian Diaz and Carrie Wrestler did a That is where the flag debate becomes much more complicated than a simple conservative versus liberal argument. If someone grows up in an environment where a particular symbol is consistently presented as threatening, it is entirely possible for that person to develop an emotional response to the symbol itself.
The important question, however, is whether that response should determine what the symbol objectively represents. A person may genuinely feel uncomfortable when they see something without that discomfort automatically proving that the thing itself is dangerous. The emotional association and the objective meaning can be two completely different things.
Patrick's broader argument was essentially that American politics has allowed those associations to become so powerful that some people now see political identity before they see national identity. A flag appears and instead of seeing a symbol that belongs to an entire country, people immediately start trying to determine which political tribe is standing behind it. That is a remarkable transformation for a national symbol because the whole purpose of having one is to create some shared identity above individual political disagreements.
Unfortunately, politics has become extremely talented at turning shared symbols into membership cards. The flag is one example, but the same process can happen with language, historical figures, holidays, military traditions, religious references, and even ordinary phrases that suddenly acquire political meanings depending on who says them. Once that happens, people begin arguing over who is allowed to use the symbol rather than asking why the symbol mattered in the first place.
From um taxi drivers, Uber drivers, and lift drivers, he was performing unnecessary surgeries and then providing fraudulent medical services in exchange for the kickbacks. Here's a clip I want you guys to see of Sunonny Host on The View, Tom, basically implicating her husband. The dumbest person on the view is in trouble.
According to this article, Dr Amang Hol husband of the view co-host on that is why Patrick's criticism of Sunny Host resonated with his audience. His argument was not simply that she should like the American flag more. He was suggesting that if people who dislike certain political movements stop using the symbols because those movements have adopted them, they may unintentionally hand those symbols over to the very people they oppose.
If conservatives display the American flag constantly, while liberals become increasingly hesitant to associate themselves with it, the result is almost inevitable. The symbol begins to look conservative, even though it was never created for conservatives in the first place. The irony is that reclaiming the symbol does not require agreeing with everything the people currently displaying it believe.
Someone can oppose conservative politics and still proudly display an American flag. Someone can criticize the government and still love the country. Someone can condemn racism, acknowledge America's darkest chapters and still believe the flag represents something worth protecting.
Those positions are not mutually exclusive, although modern political arguments often make them sound as though they are. That is also why the discussion became bigger than Sunny Host herself. Her comments provided the spark, but the real subject was the increasingly complicated relationship Americans have with their own national identity.
A simple flag had suddenly opened a debate involving race, history, family ancestry, political polarization, patriotism, cultural memory, and the question of who gets to define what America represents. Suspended from the view for Holocaust remarks. This is a variety story.
Okay, this is a variety story. Um Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended from the view for two weeks after facing wide criticism for her remarks that the Holocaust was not about race. Goldberg suspensions suspension was announced in statement released uh by ABC News public relations Tuesday night.
Effectively immediately I'm suspending Whoopy Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments. Read the statement attributed uh to Kim Godwin president at ABC. While Whoopi has apologized, I've asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the At that point, Patrick was no longer simply criticizing one television personality.
He was challenging an entire way of thinking about national symbols. And there was something almost perfectly ironic about the way the segment developed. Patrick started with a disagreement over an American flag, moved into political identity and polling, connected the conversation to family history and inherited narratives, and eventually arrived at research involving mice and fear conditioning.
It sounds like the outline for the strangest political podcast episode ever assembled. But the underlying question remained remarkably consistent throughout the entire discussion. How much power should inherited fear and political association have over the way people interpret national identity?
That question is especially important because neither side has to pretend America is perfect to answer it. Patriotism does not require ignoring slavery, segregation, injustice, political corruption, or any other painful chapter of American history. At the same time, acknowledging those chapters does not require treating every symbol associated with America as morally contaminated.
What began as a discussion about feeling uncomfortable around American flags had become a debate about patriotism, political identity, historical memory, inherited fear, and the bizarre reality that in modern America, even a flag can apparently become a political controversy. And Patrick bet David was more than happy to wave that controversy directly into the spotlight.
