Condoleezza Rice certainly knows how to fill the Meghan McCain-sized void left on “The View.”
The former secretary of state offered controversial and right-leaning views on the Capitol riot and critical race theory as a guest co-host on the daytime talk show Wednesday.
Rice, a Republican, said during her appearance that the attack “was wrong” and that the events that transpired on Jan. 6 caused her to cry “for the first time since I was the national security advisor on Sept. 11.”
But Rice, who teaches political science at Stanford University, qualified that it’s time for lawmakers to “move on” from the domestic threat to democracy that left five people dead.
“What happened on Jan. 6 was wrong. I don’t know how much more strongly I can say that what happened on Jan. 6 was wrong,” she said. “I also know that as a government and as a country, we’ve got to be concerned about the things that are making life hard for Americans and hard for American families.”
She claimed that people in the United States were “now concerned” with what she called “kitchen table issues” like “the price of gasoline, inflation, [and] what’s happening to kids in schools.”
Sunny Hostin, a regular co-host of “The View,” countered Rice’s argument by saying that the “past will become prologue if we don’t find out exactly what happened on Jan. 6.”
Hostin later doubled down on her stance pointing out that a recent poll found that an overwhelming majority of Republican voters have indicated they’d like to see former President Donald Trump — who incited the riot — run again in 2024.
Rice shot down Hostin’s argument.
“Unless I can see the questions that were in that poll, unless I can see the assumptions that were in that poll, I’m not going to take for granted that that poll is correct,” Rice responded.
Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone — who was brutally beaten during the attack — responded to Rice’s comments to CNN Thursday.
“I would love to move on,” he said. “Until there’s real accountability ... I will continue to bring attention to the events of Jan. 6 and how we got here.”
Rice also had an opinion on critical race theory — an academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism — and whether or not parents should have a say in it being taught in K-12 schools.
“I think parents ought to have a say,” Rice said, even though the subject is typically taught in law and graduate schools, and K-12 teachers have largely insisted that they do not teach CRT.
“One of the worries that I have about the way that we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past — I don’t think that’s very productive — or Black people have to feel disempowered by race,” Rice said.
“I would like Black kids to be completely empowered, to know that they are beautiful in their Blackness, but in order to do that I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white,” she added.
Rice’s comments on CRT sparked a backlash on Twitter. Scroll down to read some of the responses.