The daytime talkshow The View momentarily descended into chaos when climate protesters interrupted an interview with the Texas Senator Ted Cruz on Monday.
Cruz was in the middle of talking about inflation when chanting that sounded like “Government funding now!” began.
The Republican politician and panel of all-female hosts appeared nonplussed when people behind the cameras shouted in their direction. The show’s broadcaster, ABC, appeared to have cut the audio in the middle of the interruption, so much of what was shouted couldn’t be heard.
Former Donald Trump White House official and co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin replied to the protesters: “We do cover climate here, guys!”
Show co-host and actor Whoopi Goldberg added: “Excuse me! Excuse me! Ladies, ladies, excuse us. Let us do our job. Let us do our job. We hear what you have to say, but you gotta go.”
Cruz said he “didn’t even hear what they were protesting”. Co-host and lawyer Sunny Hostin explained to Cruz that the protesters accused the show of not covering climate.
Griffin joked to Cruz that the protests weren’t even about him.
The interruption is the latest in a series of direct actions taken against high-profile people and institutions across the world in the name of bringing awareness to the burgeoning climate crisis.
Earlier this month, climate activists from Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers painting at the National Gallery in London before gluing their hands to the wall. On Sunday, members of a German environmental group hurled mashed potatoes at a Claude Monet painting in a museum in the city of Potsdam.
The granddaughter of oil tycoon J Paul Getty, Aileen Getty, donated millions of her fortune to the Climate Emergency Fund, which grants financial awards to organizations like Just Stop Oil. She said she is “proud of the bigger conversation” that demonstrations like the art protests have started about the increasingly unlivable Earth.
While it’s not clear to which organizations, if any, the protesters at The View belong, the Climate Emergency Fund issued a warning that “more protests are coming”.
Neither ABC nor The View have commented on Monday’s protest.
