You probably think of The View as a harmless mid-morning TV talk show (if you think of it at all), the kind of mild TV that unemployed people use to keep themselves company while folding laundry, but ABC’s long-running talk-fest has a different meaning to a subset of fake-news consumers/spreaders. Shady fake news websites like SpaceXMania.com and America’s Last Line of Defense seem to have concluded that its readers want stories about how The View is a uniquely evil entity in our culture—like Tom Hanks but in talk show form—and has finally met Justice.
Hardly a day passes when The View isn’t the subject of widely spread Facebook lies. Today’s fake The View news: “Shaq Throws Joy Behar Out Of His Restaurant, Bans Her For Life.” Yesterday’s was “Elon Musk is Going to Buy ABC to Cancel ‘The View’. Fake stories about The View are so prevalent (on weird Facebook groups, anyway) that there’s an entire The View alternative reality.
Unlike other fan-fiction universes, the one surrounding The View wasn’t created by overly enthusiastic fans. Fake news websites, I assume, craft their AI-generated stories based on analysis of reader engagement, then hone in on what excites its readers the most, giving us a unique window into the collective unconsciousness of the dreams and fantasies of the dumbest people we went to high school with. Here are a few of the most prevalent fake themes.
The View has been cancelled
If you look back at over 20 years’ worth of The View fantasies, themes emerge. The main one is that the show has been, or will be, cancelled. Sometimes it’s because Elon Musk bought ABC, or “billionaire entrepreneur Vincent Marquez” bought ABC. Sometimes it’s because Roseanne Barr’s competing show (that doesn’t exist) got such high ratings, or it was due to entertainment industry strikes, or its low ratings. The reasons don’t matter; the important part is that The View has been finally cancelled.
A host has been banned from a restaurant
Another prominent theme: A host of The View has been banned from a restaurant. In the extended The View-verse, Whoopie Goldberg has been banned from both Guy Fieri’s and Gordon’s Ramsay’s restaurants, the latter resulting in a (totally fake) lawsuit, while Joy Behar has been banned from all of Shaquille O’Neal’s dining establishments. Fieri has also banned Megan Rapinoe, Garth Brooks, and Tom Hanks. (Poor Robert DeNiro has been banned by Fieri, O’Neal, Ramsay, Paramount Pictures, the Screen Actors’ Guild, and others. I’m sure he can’t find a table anywhere.) The overall picture of people furiously masturbating (I assume) while reading about the celebrity they hate being banned from a restaurant run by Guy Fieri is hilarious. Based on his reviews, he’d be doing them a favor.
A host has been “destroyed” on the show
Another common theme for The View-haters is one of the hosts being deeply humiliated on air; for example, in 2023, conservative opinion-haver Candace Owens was hired as a co-host on The View, and the first thing she did was throw Joy Behar off the set of the TV show she’s hosted for over 20 years. She also replaced Whoopi Goldberg. Tom Selleck made Goldberg “beg for mercy.” She was shamed by her co-hosts after getting the show canceled. She “panicked” after being “destroyed” by Rosie O’Donnell. Goldberg also panicked after “losing everything” in a lawsuit brought by Jason Aldean.
What does it all mean?
It would be easy to take shots at the kind of people who are idle enough to spend time watching The View instead 70s exploitation movies on Tubi like I do. But the more I think about the kind of people who are moved to comment “it’s about TIME!!1” on a Facebook post about Joy Behar being fired, the sadder it seems. These analytically chosen fake stories paint a picture of an alienated population that spends more time with talk show hosts that they don’t even like than with anyone else. They’re like the monster under the floorboards of America, banging on the trap door with Facebook comments like that zombie in Evil Dead.
The reason Behar and Goldberg are singled out for these kinds of stories is easy to see: they have criticized Donald Trump openly. Robert Deniro, Tom Hanks, and other frequent fake news targets have also been publicly critical of Donald Trump, and have been permanently prohibited from enjoying the Trash Can Nachos at Guy Fieri’s Flavortown Kitchen.
The way they imagine revenge against their enemies is telling. They don’t fantasize about Whoopi Goldberg being arrested (usually). Instead, they want to see her kicked out by Guy Fieri and Gordon Ramsay. Maybe they know what it feels like to be banned from chain restaurants. Maybe they know what it feels like to be humiliated at work, to be “destroyed,” to be cancelled, kicked out, excluded, and to panic out of fear of losing everything (not in a lawsuit to Jason Aldean, but same difference).
Editor’s note: The original version of this article stated that Joy Behar is Jewish. She is not. It was updated at 7 p.m. ET on July 11.
