The co-hosts of ABC’s “The View” recently reacted to actress and liberal activist Jane Fonda’s political speech during Monday night’s Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards in which she defended “woke” ideology. The panel heaped praise on the actress, who generated controversy for supporting communists during the Vietnam War, for her leftist sentiment.
During her remarks onstage, Fonda defended the term “woke,” stating, “Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. By the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.” She also noted in her speech, “Back to empathy, a whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way.”
Fonda added, “And even if they’re of a different political persuasion we need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us.”
Reacting to the statements co-hots Ana Navarro said, “It also gave me inspiration because, you know, there’s a lot of people that are older that have marched, that have protested in the past that are now saying, you know, we’re tired. It’s time that the young people do it, and Jane Fonda just reminded us that you are never too old, that you are never too successful.”
“This is a woman who has been protesting and standing up for her beliefs. Sometimes I’ve disagreed with her, and it has cost her at times. It has had great costs at her career, and you do not give up on America. You don’t turn your back on America. When America needs us to stand up, speak up, and show up, we have to continue doing it,” Navarro continued.
Sunny Hostin weighed in, arguing against the conservative criticisms of wokeness. “I was always a part of it, and so I’ve never been asleep, and so it angers me when people are, like, this woke stuff’s got to go. That tells me that you don’t care about my lived experience. You don’t care about the oppression of the LGBTQ community. You don’t care about the oppression of the disabled. You don’t care about the oppression of immigrants. You don’t care about your fellow neighbor, and that is ungodly. That is not Christian,” Hostin said.
Additionally, Whoopi Goldberg claimed that progress throughout American history has resulted from wokeness. “There have not been changes made in this country that were made without people being woke. We had to wake up and see that there’s nothing wrong with who you want to love as long as you keep me in mind when I say this is who I love.”
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She added, “All of these things were challenged by people who said, oh, maybe they didn’t say you’re too woke, but they used whatever the hip word of the time was. This has always been, it will always be. This is what change does, and it makes people uncomfortable. It scares people. It makes people think that they are losing their place. You’re not losing your place.”
Watch “The View” react to Fonda’s speech below:
Note: The featured image is a screenshot from the embedded video.