Walking onto The View as a conservative is not an interview – it's an ambush.
Ted Cruz walked into the lion's den.
And Whoopi Goldberg came out swinging and stepped in it.
The View Audience Tried to Boo Cruz Before He Said a Word
Texas Senator Ted Cruz is making the rounds promoting his new biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The View was one of the stops on his media tour.
When producers announced Cruz as an upcoming guest, the crowd groaned.
Goldberg stepped in and scolded them.
"Look, this is a place where Barbara Walters made sure that anybody who wanted to come and have a good conversation could come," she said, shutting down the reaction.
Just swallow it back down, she told them.
Cruz came on anyway – to promote his new book, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas, the instant No. 1 New York Times bestseller built on 9.5 hours of exclusive interviews with the justice himself.
The book traces Thomas's life from Pin Point, Georgia – abject poverty, a grandfather who woke him before dawn to work – to the United States Supreme Court.
Thomas arrived at Yale having come from nothing.
In college he protested in Harvard Square in camouflage pants and combat boots.
Malcolm X was on his dorm room wall.
He became the justice the Left has spent thirty years trying to destroy.
Cruz came to The View to tell that story.
Sunny Hostin went after Thomas on affirmative action.
Thomas believed, Hostin argued, that the program diminished his achievements by letting people assume he had not earned his place at Yale.
Her counter: affirmative action existed to give qualified black students a shot at schools that had historically kept them out.
So why, Hostin asked, was the lesson from Thomas's experience that the remedy should be eliminated rather than the racism?
Removing barriers and expanding access – Thomas supports all of that, Cruz said.
But racial quotas are a different matter: "Justice Thomas has been the clearest defender of the principle that the Constitution prohibits the government discriminating based on race."
The Argument Whoopi Would Not Let Cruz Finish
Hostin pressed harder: why did Thomas feel his Yale degree was diminished?
Cruz traced it back to graduation day at Yale Law School.
Thomas had earned his degree but big law firms across the country turned him away anyway.
"Not a single law firm would hire him," Cruz said.
Thomas documented that experience in his own memoir – and placed a 15-cent sticker from a cigar package on his Yale diploma.
Racial preference, he wrote, had robbed his achievement of its true value.
That story cuts straight through every argument Hostin was making.
Goldberg didn't let it land.
"Welcome to being black," she cut in.
She asked how Thomas, a constitutional scholar, could overlook that black Americans were not originally included equally under the Constitution.
Cruz had the answer ready.
The 13th Amendment ended slavery. The 14th guaranteed equal protection. The 15th protected the right to vote.
Goldberg responded with one question.
If all of that is in the Constitution, why is the country still fighting about it?
Goldberg called it there.
In 2023, Thomas joined the 6-3 majority that struck down race-based university admissions nationwide, writing that those programs were "rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix" – and that the Constitution had always forbidden them.
Goldberg asked why the country is still arguing about the Reconstruction amendments if they protect everyone.
She asked that while cutting off the man trying to answer the question.
Thomas has spent three decades writing the opinions that dismantled affirmative action.
The Left cannot say why he is wrong.
They can only say "welcome to being black" and run out the clock.
https://twitter.com/WritingLeeman/status/2097726454452601034
By 2028, Clarence Thomas will be the longest-serving justice in the history of the Supreme Court.
Cruz documented his life in 336 pages.
The View had twelve minutes with Ted Cruz.
Goldberg used every one of them to make sure he never finished a thought.
Sources:
- Hanna Panreck, "Ted Cruz battles 'The View' on Clarence Thomas and affirmative action, as host says 'Welcome to being Black,'" Fox News, September 9, 2026.
- "Justice Thomas Mocks Value of Yale Law Degree," Fox News, January 13, 2015.
- Ted Cruz, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas, Sentinel, August 25, 2026.