Following the dueling speeches between President Biden and former President Trump on the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol attacks, legal analyst and ABC’s The View co-host Sunny Hostin dismantled the actions of ultra-nationalist, far-right advocates, who she believes are siphoning the soul of America.
On Tuesday, she began her rhetoric by recollecting that she voted for Biden because she believed he would work to save the soul of America.
“It resonated with me and that’s how he got my vote,” Hostin said during a taped recording in front of a live audience, then added that when Trump said he would save our democracy, she heard a different tune.
“Unfortunately [Trump] didn’t save the soul of this country because we’re more divided now than we’ve ever been before,” she said. “What we’re seeing by the Republican party is a long game. We’re seeing that they’re starting to dismantle institutions. All of a sudden, we’re starting to see the most elite colleges and universities in the world – those schools are not good enough anymore because now people that don’t look like them are getting in.”
She further went on to explain why the Supreme Court made two very controversial decisions within the past two years: eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) and effectively ending the use of affirmative action in college admissions Harvard, 600 U.S. 18 (2023).
“Affirmative action. No more. Why? So that people that don’t look like them don’t get in. Women don’t have reproductive rights anymore. Why? So they can have control over women.”
She continued: “Why are French and Mandarin and Spanish being taken away from our public schools? So we can be a monolingual society and can’t compete globally. The Republicans are intentionally dumbing down our electorate and erasing history so that past can become prologue and so that they can remain in power.”
Her thoughts come on the heels of the recent resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black woman president who stepped down on January 2 after her presidency had become overwhelmed in calamity over allegations of plagiarism and what some called an inadequate reply to antisemitism on campus at the height of the Israel-Hamas war.
In a note sent to the Harvard community, she wrote, “It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries.”
She continued: “But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
She has since penned an Op-Ed stating that “the campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.,” she wrote in The New York Times. “Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.”
