The Dark View

Sunny Hostin isn’t typically the smartest person in the room. Sometimes not-so-smart people do foolish, even bad, things. Children, for example, are too rough with small animals because they don’t know that other creatures are delicate or can be scared by bigger, fast-moving creatures. It’s not that kids want to hurt animals. It’s just that they don't understand that the cute kitty doesn’t want to be yoinked by a strange mammal they just met. (Which is not unreasonable if you think about it.)

Sadly, there are some kids who don’t care if the animals are hurt. That is a much more difficult problem to deal with. I am beginning to think that Sunny Hostin might be more like the sociopathic kid rather than the ordinary ignorant one.

Sunny Hostin is a co-host of The View, one of those ladies who usually say incredibly dumb things once every two weeks. Recently, Hostin bragged about forcing a jury to find a killer insane so he could be put in a mental asylum rather than a regular jail. That’s not an exaggeration. Daniel Rakowitz was known as the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” who killed his roommate and then fed her body to the homeless. He was not all there mentally, but he did exhibit levels of planning in how he tried to hide his murder.

But whether Daniel Rakowitz was insane or not isn’t the point. (Sunny probably lied about her influence on the jury, but that’s not important either.) What mattered to Sunny Hostin is that, in that moment, finding criminals insane rather than guilty was the correct attitude to show your liberal bona fides, so she accommodated the prevailing morality. The moral truth of the matter is entirely immaterial; the right posture is everything. Conservatives like harsh punishments for criminals, so giving lenient sentences to criminals is automatically good. In her mind, the evil underlying conservative judgement far supersedes murder and the desecration of a corpse.

Justice for the abused victim, some semblance of satisfaction to the family who had to read about their daughter being cannibalized, doesn’t count. Mercy must be given to the criminal, but justice for the victims is not essential. Conventional sentiment about morality doesn’t help Sunny Hostin show she is above normal people.

Hypocrisy is better than luxury beliefs

People have been preening morally since leaving Eden. What’s unusual about Sunny Hostin’s preening is that it is the inverse of morality. Somehow being against conventional morality separates them from the hoi polloi.

I prefer conventional moral preening, the kind you got back in the day when people boasted about how good they were and paid tribute to common moral values. There were once commendable acts of hypocrisy, like in the Renaissance when merchants, as rich as they were, corruptly paid artisans to create beautiful works of art and put them in churches to show off. It's hard to know how serious they were about the whole religion thing, but they knew what brought status. So they supported public and private morality and the religious order while funding great beauty.

Supporting the Church didn't wash away the sins of rapacious philanthropists, but even if some who funded churches were morally suspect, they at least paid lip service to moral virtues. The decency that maintained society was subtly strengthened by hypocrisy. Hypocrisy isn’t ideal, but it is among the least destructive expressions of vanity.

Sunny Hostin’s grandstanding is much worse. She is promoting a horrible philosophy to elevate herself above the types of people who want butchers of women to get the chair or spend the rest of their life in a very unpleasant prison cell.

As a fan of both Jesus Christ and Socrates, I can respect strong and principled disagreements against the consensus. But both Christ and Socrates based their serious disagreements on natural law and the highest principles of their civilizations. The impulse to let criminals go is not that. It is a prideful attempt to place oneself above regular people. Though George Orwell did not personally write this, he did indeed believe that “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”*

We all rely on rough men and violence to protect us. The hard left in America has found this inalterable reality offensive since the 1960s. After George Floyd, a movement to abolish the police was proposed. This entirely asinine idea would, if implemented, have hurt poor people in high-crime locations. By promoting this idea, the promoter shows she is beyond the civilized roughness that others gratefully accept.

They are like a Brahmin in India who is so spiritually clean that if his shadow touches the shadow of an untouchable, he would be contaminated. Sunny Hostin feels that prisons in America hurt her purity. Clearly, she does not need rough men. Even the shadow of her beliefs cannot touch conventional morality or regular people.

Most of leftism emerges from compassion that isn’t thought out. They feel bad for poor folks but have never read serious books about how government interference backfires. The damage from this was considerable in the 20th century, but the left has taken a more hateful turn in the last two decades. A left not interested in the working class or easing the burden of the sick, but a left motivated by hatred for moral order itself. A left not concerned with the rights of the innocent but a left that hates cops so much that it will excuse the guilty criminal.

I doubt that Sunny Hostin has thought through her beliefs. I doubt she is willing to think through much of anything. But the philosophy she has adopted, even if she cannot articulate it, is based on hatred and pride, not compassion or mercy. I suspect that people who are attracted to this ideology often have traits of sociopathy and were not nice to cats in their youth.

*George Orwell wrote an essay on Kipling where he said that violent men were necessary. Another writer, Richard Grenier, summarized him and did such a good job that his quote is now used to explain Orwell instead of Orwell.