It’s hard out there for the token not-quite-Republican on “The View.”
It’s basically like being the drummer in Spinal Tap: You’re going to go one way or another, and it won’t be pretty. Of course, the show needs at least one person willing to say they’re nominally conservative to function, even if they agree with the rest of the panel most of the time. However, even these Caspar Milquetoasts end up getting shown the door in some tale of woe.
Between Meghan McCain, Candace Cameron Bure, Jedediah Bila, Nicolle Wallace, and Abby Huntsman, the tenure for the token RINO is usually (to quote a certain big-government conservative who slightly predates television gabfests) nasty, brutish, and short.
Nevertheless, one might have thought Alyssa Farah Griffin would have had a better time of it. A hand-wringing former official in the first Donald Trump administration, Griffin has forged a post-Jan. 6 career by offering a mea culpa to every interviewer, podcaster, and brick wall and engaging in pusillanimous punditry from a position slightly to the left of Mitt Romney. This, at long last, is the kind of “conservative” that “The View” has been looking for.
And apparently, it’s so hard for her that she ends up crying backstage.
The remarks came during Wednesday’s episode, where the ladies were discussing an article from Vice — usually given to informative journalism like December 2024’s “We Need to Try a Little Harder to Keep Our Pets Away From Our Cocaine” — about “bathroom camping” to escape stress at work.
“Bathroom camping,” for the unaware, is apparently Gen Z’s term for retreating to the loo at work every time you, well, don’t want to do work. This being Gen Z, it’s not because they’re lazy, of course, but because they need a safe space — or, to use the terminology the inimitable folks at Vice employed, “emotional bunkers.”
(It’s in the freaking headline, even; I’m not sure who had the supremely misplaced confidence to put that neologism out there, but their pets aren’t the only ones we need to try a little harder to keep away from recreational substances.)
While covering news-making ridiculousness on “The View,” I’ve never had the opportunity to use these words, but Sunny Hostin was somehow the voice of reason: “I’ve never felt the luxury to be able to cry at work. I just try to get my work done, be as excellent as I can, and go home and chill out,” she said.
Do you think Griffin is actually “conservative”?
Griffin was, uh, not the voice of reason, alas.
“I cry at work, but I hide it. My bosses will never know,” she said during the segment. “I have cried at this job at least half a dozen times.”
Co-host Joy Behar was skeptical and asked for an example.
“This is a very hard job to do, and I oftentimes have the only opinion that’s different at a table of five people,” she said.
She wasn’t the only one who admitted to being lachrymose; lefty-ish panelist Sara Haines admitted she cried at work, too, but, as Hostin pointed out, “You cry at Starbucks.” So that one doesn’t count.
And don’t worry: Griffin gets plenty of emotional support.
“I would like to state, for the record, this is a great job,” she said. “And every time I’ve cried, [show producer Brian Teta] gives great hugs.”
Words fail me. Which has never stopped a co-host on “The View” — but I have a Y chromosome, self-respect, and dignity, so I’m not getting that gig.
It’s worth noting that, while other token sorta-conservatives on “The View” have alleged there was a toxic environment (especially McCain and Huntsman), they were more identifiably conservative. Griffin’s version of pseudo-right-wing ideology is so close to a watered-down version of Jeb Bush’s that you halfway wonder why she doesn’t have an exclamation point after her name.
And even Jeb(!) might protest her full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, which had Behar treating her like a puppy who’d finally learned to fetch a bone, responding “good girl” after the endorsement.
Yet things are so tough for her that she’s crying at work? Somewhere underground in a tunnel that straddles the France-Switzerland border, you can hear the world’s tiniest violin — comprised of exactly 82 technetium isotopes — playing a tune for Griffin deep in the Large Hadron Collider. It won’t last long, because technetium isotopes are just as unstable as Alyssa Farah Griffin apparently is.
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