"People often say that Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves. The slaves basically emancipated themselves because they wanted freedom and they fought for their freedom." That was Sunny Hostin on ABC's "The View" this week, delivering what she apparently believes is a history lesson. On Veterans Day, no less.
Even Whoopi Goldberg wasn't buying it.
"Yes, but you have to give it to Abe," Goldberg pushed back. "You have to give it to Abe, because he busted his butt to get this done." When the moderator of "The View" is the voice of reason at your table, you've wandered somewhere nobody should follow.
The Daily Wire reported on Hostin's November 11, 2026 remarks, which came during a Veterans Day segment that somehow became a platform for Civil War revisionism. Hostin's argument went further than just discounting Lincoln's role. "Even the Civil War — the enslaved left and joined the Union Army because they wanted to fight for this country and for their freedom," she continued, as though the 360,000 Union soldiers who died fighting to preserve the Union and end slavery were background characters in someone else's story.
Then came the kicker. "He wanted the enslaved to go back to Africa," Hostin said of Lincoln. "That's just a little-known fact of history." Goldberg's response was immediate: "Initially. It is a well-known fact of history. No." Lincoln did explore colonization proposals early in his presidency. He also abandoned them, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress, and got assassinated for it. Hostin apparently stopped reading after page one.
This is who ABC puts on national television to honor investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — which Hostin did in the same segment, praising the 1619 Project architect as someone "empowering the next generation of truth seekers." The framework writes itself: Lincoln wasn't really anti-slavery, the enslaved freed themselves, and the real historians are the ones repackaging that narrative for school curricula.
Hostin has a pattern. Back in February 2025, she told viewers, "I'm one of the 92% of black women that voted for Kamala Harris, and so I'm sort of in a resting place right now because I voted to save the country and the country didn't vote with me." Last May, she used a Memorial Day segment to editorialize rather than honor. Veterans Day got the same treatment — not a day to acknowledge sacrifice, but a runway for whatever lecture she had loaded.
The colonization claim is the move that reveals the technique. Take a real historical detail — Lincoln did briefly consider resettlement proposals — strip it of every piece of context, and present it as the hidden truth that overrides everything else the man did. The Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the war itself, 360,000 dead Union soldiers — all of it shrinks to a footnote next to one abandoned policy idea from 1862.
Abraham Lincoln took a bullet at Ford's Theatre. The war he prosecuted killed more Americans than any conflict before or since. The constitutional amendment he championed ended legal slavery permanently.
Sunny Hostin read a paragraph about colonization and thought she found the whole story.