Whoopi Goldberg Intervenes After Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farrah Griffin Get Into Heated Spat

While discussing the midterm elections on Election Day on Tuesday, Griffin brought up a comment Hostin made last week, in which she appeared to compare white, Republican women to “cockroaches,” saying their voting is “almost like roaches voting for Raid.”

“Last week you called white Republican women cockroaches. You said they were acting like cockroaches,” Griffin said to Hostin, who interrupted, saying, “Actually, I didn’t. I used a simile. I used a metaphor.”

After the two women attempted to continue talking over one another, Goldberg interjected, saying, “Here’s what I’m going to ask you all to do.” She then raised her voice as it appeared her words weren’t being heard, and repeated loudly, “Here’s what I’m going to ask you to do. I’m going to ask you to tone it down a bit because I can’t hear anything. No one can hear what we’re saying.”

Hostin calmly noted that she wanted to respond to Griffin, which Goldberg agreed to.

“My mother is a white woman, I wouldn’t say that,” Hostin noted, adding, “Second of all, what I used was a metaphor, really more a simile. I said white women Republicans, I just read a poll that the suburbans are now voting Republican, that is like roaches voting for Raid.”

Griffin attempted to get a word in, but Hostin kept speaking. “Let me finish. That was John Leguizamo’s joke, a joke I used on this show a few weeks ago referring to Latinos, and no one had anything to say about it,” she said. “The last thing I’ll say is I continued by saying, ‘Do they want to be in Gilead [from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’]? Do they want to lose their rights?’ You are actually twisting what I said.”

Griffin continued to try to interrupt, and Hostin didn’t stop talking either. The two ladies kept speaking over one another, making it hard even to know what they were saying.

It was at that point, Goldberg seemingly had enough, and cut to commercial. “We’re going to break, I can’t take it. We’ll be right back,” she said.

After the break, it appeared that things had calmed down. Griffin explained why she brought up Hostin’s comment and admitted that she “misquoted” her.

“I do want to clarify. I misquoted Sunny, I think she clarified what she said: It was a simile, it was an analogy, it was not saying that white Republican women are bugs,” she said. “Now, I think the point I was trying to make is part of the left — not the entirety, some of my best friends worked for Barack Obama, I love many Democrats — but some on the left though have taken such a negative approach to people who view things differently.”

“We talk about democracy at this table,” she added. “My vote, my perspective, my voice, my lived experience matters as much as anyone else’s at this table, and this idea that because someone disagrees with you, we should be name-calling, we should be getting into low blows … the fact that we’re not comfortable with our kids watching our politics, that says a lot about all of us. I just think that we all have a duty — and I’m sure I’m guilty of it — of taking the tone down.”

Joy Behar then weighed in, assuring Griffin that she isn’t the type of Republican they are calling out.

“You are not the people that we’re talking about. You are not the Trumplicans who want to kill the vice president,” she explained. “The Trumplicans who want Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be injured … and who are denying the election results. You are not that, and the left is responding to the first shot fired. We are not on the left, the name-calling initiators.”

Griffin — who was a member of the Trump administration — cited Michelle Obama’s famous catchphrase.

“I think the Michelle Obama quote rings very true which is like, ‘When the other side goes low, we should go high,'” she said. “And I try to hold my party to that standard when they go low, I try to go high. I don’t always do it.”

Hostin noted that “it doesn’t work with this,” while Goldberg quipped, “Your arms are not long enough to do that.”