Joy Behar Responded to Hegseth’s West Point Speech With a Line She Cannot Take Back

Pete Hegseth stood in the rain at West Point on Saturday and told America's next combat officers exactly what they needed to hear.

Joy Behar watched the clip three days later and fired back on The View.

She picked the wrong week to do it.

What Hegseth Said to the Class of 2026

Standing at Michie Stadium on May 23, Hegseth – a Princeton ROTC graduate who earned two Bronze Stars across deployments in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan – didn't come with a bureaucrat's talking points.

He came with a verdict.

"You are not an army of one. You are certainly not an army of woke."

"We saw woke and weak leaders trying to make West Point look like woke Princeton," he told the graduates, calling out his own alma mater by name.

"They embraced the DEI craze and tried to introduce diversity and inclusion studies. They hired professors who advocated for anti-American ideologies right here in these halls, but no more."

"You can't throw your pronouns at the enemy."

The cadets – America's next lieutenants – erupted.

Hegseth also dropped a dead-on Trump impression midway through, granting "a complete and total pardon" to any cadet who had committed minor infractions, bringing down the house before the real message landed.

What The View Said Instead

Two days later, Whoopi Goldberg opened the segment by asking her co-hosts whether Hegseth is "just dumb" or simply doesn't "know his history."

Joy Behar delivered her line: "He seems to be at war with pronouns instead of Iran."

Sara Haines called him "willfully ignorant, probably combined with just regular ignorant."

Sunny Hostin jumped in to remind viewers that Hegseth once quoted what he thought was a Bible verse – only to be told it came from Pulp Fiction.

Alyssa Farah Griffin – the show's conservative co-host who has made a career of giving left-wing attacks a bipartisan gloss – predicted the generals are simply waiting him out.

That's the full panel.

The Number That Destroys Behar's Entire Argument

Behar said Hegseth is "at war with pronouns instead of Iran."

Here is what was happening at the same time she said it.

The U.S. Army surged past its 2026 recruiting goal four months early.

Four months early.

This is the military she's been mocking since September 2025 – accusing Hegseth of "fat-shaming" when he demanded fit generals, then joking on live television that Iran gave Trump "herpes" as a gift, now calling him distracted by pronouns while troops sign contracts ahead of schedule.

The left's theory was that ripping out DEI programs and demanding combat standards would break the force.

Young Americans just answered that theory at the recruiter's office.

Hegseth ended the gender ideology training. He removed the pronoun requirements. He stood at West Point in the rain and told future officers their job is to win wars, not manage diversity portfolios.

The Comparison That Ends the Debate

Behar is 83 years old and has been making jokes on a talk show since 1997.

Pete Hegseth is a Bronze Star recipient who served three active-duty deployments, retired as a Major, and now oversees the campaign that – according to the White House – has driven Iranian retaliatory attacks down by 90 percent and destroyed Iran's ballistic missile capabilities.

Joy Behar has never served a day in uniform.

Neither has Whoopi Goldberg.

Neither has Sara Haines.

The women of The View sat in a Manhattan studio the week after Memorial Day and told a combat-decorated officer that he doesn't understand the institution he spent his adult life serving in.

Meanwhile the Army just hit its recruiting target ahead of schedule for the first time in years.

The cadets who cheered Hegseth's speech at West Point will one day lead soldiers in combat.

The View panel will be on television calling whoever comes next a fascist.

Only one of those groups gets to decide what the U.S. military looks like.

It's not the ones with the studio audience.

Sources:

• Radhamely De Leon, "'The View' Responds To Pete Hegseth Claiming The Army Is 'Not An Army Of Woke,'" Decider, May 26, 2026.
• Kiara Moore, "Whoopi Goldberg responds to Pete Hegseth's military comments," Washington Examiner, May 26, 2026.
• "Hegseth praises West Point cadets as 'not an army of woke' in commencement speech," Washington Examiner, May 23, 2026.
• "This Is the Way: Hegseth Blasts Woke Leaders in Epic West Point Commencement Speech," RedState, May 23, 2026.
• "The View co-hosts accuse Pete Hegseth of 'fat-shaming' military," Fox News, September 30, 2025.
• "White House Explodes at Joy Behar After Trump Joke on The View," HuffPost, March 26, 2026.