Joy Behar and the World of Liberal Privilege

December 8th, 2018 4:00 PM

Joy Behar was furious. Furious!

Why? 

It seems that following the death of President George H. W. Bush, View co-host Joy Behar  wanted to say something nice about the late president, and settled on a comment about his signing of an amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1990. Said she, as reported here in on NewsBusters

 'I want to say one thing about him that was not picked up really, because as a candidate he said, "Those who think we're powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect, are forgetting about the White House effect.”

So far…so good. But of course, there was the inevitable more. Her real objective was to use the late president to bash the current president, whom she famously despises. So, she added this: 

“This president that we have now is trying to unravel everything that he did and Obama did, and if I ever become a one-issue voter it will be about pollution and the greenhouse effect…..”

And right there, before her sentence was finished, co-host Meghan McCain interrupted to say: “Can we focus on the president, please. I don't want to talk about Trump, we're honoring a great president.”

Cue the outrage. In a flash ole Joy was indignant. Mightily indignant. The heated back-and-forth went this way: 

 

 

JOY BEHAR: “Excuse me a second, please. I want to talk about…” 

MEGHAN MCCAIN: “We're honoring a great president who passed and I'm not interested in your one-issue voting.”

BEHAR: “I don't care what you're interested in. I'm talking!”

MCCAIN: “Well I don't care what you're interested in either, Joy!”    

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg quickly called for a commercial break. The Daily Mail explained

“Behar was then seen slamming her cue cards on the table and turning to sound off on McCain just as producers cut to break. Producers muted Behar's microphone so that her expletives would not be heard on air. 

But the source told DailyMail.com that Behar threw her hands in the air, yelled 'My God!' and 'Get this b***h under control.' 

Producers ran to the stage in an attempt to deescalate the situation, but Behar continued to rant, the source said. 

But to the point here? Forget McCain. What this snapshot of the mind and attitude of liberal Joy Behar captures perfectly is what can be called “liberal privilege.”  In today’s America,  liberals have an innate belief that they and they alone get to define and determine the terms of success and failure and just about anything else. Liberalism is the norm and everyone is required to live by the liberal rules - or else.

This dust-up on The View in reality has nothing at all to do with Joy Behar and Meghan McCain. It has everything to do with Joy’s innate belief that the world out there has to abide by the rules set by liberal privilege. And, of course, Joy is far, far from being alone in this view. Recall these quotes or events? 

Hillary Clinton: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Chuck Todd of NBC News: “Some of the wealthiest members of the media are not reporters from mainstream outlets. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people.… From the very beginning, (Roger) Ailes signaled that Fox News would offer an alternative voice, splitting with the conventions of television journalism.”

James Damore of Google: The Google software engineer fired because, as described here in The Washington Post,  he “was the author of a 10-page internal memo at Google in which he argued that the company’s current diversity initiatives were “discriminatory” against those who weren’t women or people of color, that the company should focus more on “ideological” diversity, and that the underrepresentation of women in some engineering and leadership positions in Google’s staff was better explained by biological gender differences rather than by institutional bias.”

Brendan Eich, CEO of tech company Mozilla: As reported at Hot Air (and many other places) there was this: 

…In an interview this morning, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker said that Eich’s ability to lead the company that makes the Firefox Web browser had been badly damaged by the continued scrutiny over the hot-button issue, which had actually been known since 2012 inside the Mozilla community.

“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting,” said Baker, who added that she would not and could not speak for Eich. “The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.”…

One could go on endlessly with similar quotes and stories. The common denominator is that they all boil down to liberal privilege. Joy Behar is Hillary Clinton who is Chuck Todd who is Google who is Mozilla who is the NFL’s Colin Kaepernick who is…pick one from an endless list. They all are a version of this or that liberal saying “How dare you?!!!” to what they universally perceive as a challenge to their liberal privilege.

It is liberals who set the norms and rules for America and Americans - period, end of story. It may be on The View with Joy Behar or with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton or in journalism with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. It may be at Google or Mozilla or any of a thousand other private sector companies, not to mention is it to be found in places as seemingly different as colleges and universities, the NFL or the media.

But at its core, in a snapshot from a television show, what was on display with Joy Behar was the innate belief that, by God, liberal privilege rules on her television show (not to mention everywhere else.)

Whether Americans watch events as seemingly different as the success of Fox News, the election of Donald Trump, or empty stands at NFL games resulting from fans responding to players taking a knee at the national anthem, these and so many more events in and out of the media are in reality all part of Americans rejecting the idea that liberals and liberalism are naturally entitled to set the rules by which everyone else must live. 

In an instant snapshot, Joy’s reaction to Meghan McCain illustrated exactly the real underlying problem with liberal privilege. Plainly, Meghan —  no Trump fan she —  had had enough of Joy’s liberal privilege and had the audacity to speak up.

Good for Meghan McCain.