There’s really no vetting process for people who get to speak into microphones on TV, is there?
If there was, then The View‘s Sunny Hostin likely would not have been able to give this absurd take on the solar eclipse. And that’s saying something, considering that some people on Facebook thought the eclipse that took place yesterday was going to suck people into the sky in a mass human sacrifice (go look it up, your uncle probably reposted it).
We’re unfortunately past the point in the history of mankind where something can just happen and there not be 1,000 conspiracy theories birthed from it. If you can believe it, sometimes things happen, and there’s a very reasonable explanation behind it, and that’s all there is to it.
That’s actually how eclipses work. As described by the University of Texas, it isn’t a guessing game for astronomers or an all-of-the-sudden event when the moon’s path aligns perfectly and temporarily blocks the sun:
“Using a combination of the Earth-Moon distance, the Moon’s precise shape, Earth’s rotation and its distance from the Sun, and other factors, astronomers can predict the timing of an eclipse to within a fraction of a second many centuries into the future.”
Unfortunately, I’m guessing that more people watch The View then read university research. I know Sunny Hostin didn’t read that excerpt above, because she said this during the show that aired the day of the eclipse linking the spectacular event with recent earthquakes and cicadas set to emerge in the near future:
“We’ve got a solar eclipse, we’ve got the earthquake, and then also I learned that cicadas are coming for the first time in 100 years…
I will say, all of those things together may lead one to believe that either climate change exists or something is really going on.”
Holy smokes.
The only reasonable, logical voice in the panel was Whoopi Goldberg, who challenged Hostin on basically every point she made. She pointed out that cicadas comes out every 17 years, earthquakes happen under the ground and are the result of tectonic plate movements (so they aren’t affected by the climate), and that scientists know when solar eclipses will happen because… sometimes they happen.
It’s just really concerning that things like this are being aired on national television:
Also… how do you not know what a cicada is?
