Senator Scott of South Carolina, who recently announced his candidacy for president, has tried to offer himself up as the candidate of the future, looking forward rather than backward. His attempts to woo a liberal audience on “The View” was met with pushback, though, when he defended Governor DeSantis’s fight with the Walt Disney Corporation. 

“Disney and Ron have been in a combat zone over what I thought is the right issue, which is our young kids and what they are being indoctrinated with,” Mr. Scott said, eliciting boos from the studio audience.

He did receive some backup. “Do not boo. This is ‘The View,’” host Whoopi Goldberg said, admonishing the crowd. “We accept, we don’t have to believe everything people say, but you cannot boo people here, please.”

When he was pressed about whether he thought it was appropriate for a government to target a corporation for stating its opinion, Mr. Scott said that “if people don’t like what’s happening with a corporation, stop shopping there,” taking a different approach than the Florida governor. 

Mr. Scott, during the mostly cordial conversation, also took issue with some of the hosts’ past comments about race and systemic racism. He said that while his life was exceptional and not the typical path of a Black southerner, it is not constructive to fill children’s minds with the idea that the only way to be successful is to be exceptional. 

“Let me answer the question this way,” Mr. Scott went on when asked if he thought “systemic racism” exists. “One of the things I think about and one of the reasons why I’m on the show is because of the comments that were made, frankly, on this show, that the only way for a young African American kid to be successful in this country is to be the exception and not the rule.”

“That is a dangerous, offensive, disgusting message to send to our young people today, that the only way to succeed is by being the exception,” he told host Sunny Hostin. “I will tell you that if my life is the exception.”

While he contends that his life is exceptional — the son of a single mother and a Black man who grew up poor in South Carolina, only to become an alum of the U.S. House of Representatives, a member of the U.S. Senate, and a candidate for president — he sees progress “measured in generations.”

“Every kid today can look,” he told the hosts. “Just change the stations and see how much progress has been made in this country. ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, CNN, Fox News all have African American and Hispanic hosts. So what I’m suggesting is that yesterday’s exception is today’s rule.”

Conservatives have not found “The View” to be a hospitable environment, especially during the Trump administration years, but the election of President Biden has many of the hosts — even the supposedly conservative ones — aggressively praising the president. One opinion writer from the New York Times, Megan Stack, recently took the pages of the paper to detail the show’s descent into an abashedly pro-Biden platform with little room for dissenting voices. 

“They’d lavished praise on President Biden for leading the country out of the pandemic and overseeing what they described as a thriving U.S. economy,” Ms. Stack wrote. “They’d downplayed scandals and investigations involving Mr. Biden and his family members. They’d also taken extraordinary pains to disqualify as ‘ageist’ questions of whether he is simply too old to run again.” 

“Mr. Biden would be 86 by the end of a second term, but when the Democratic strategist David Axelrod expressed mild concern, the comedian Joy Behar snapped that he ‘should keep his mouth shut,’” Ms. Stack writes. 

“If you ask me, the co-hosts don’t argue nearly enough. At least, not substantively,” she added, saying she had watched the show for years before its current iteration. “Not anymore. The freewheeling discussions that once evoked a spectrum of American opinion on everything from reproductive rights to foreign policy — those have mostly fallen silent.”