Can You Be Canceled for Stupidity? Asking for Whoopi Goldberg
The View host's stunningly ignorant Holocaust comments haven't gotten her canned yet
**NOTE: Since this article’s publication, ABC has suspended Whoopi Goldberg from The View**
ICYMI, Whoopi Goldberg recently espoused perhaps the dumbest and most ignorant opinion ever expressed in the history of television. While discussing the Right’s plans to ban books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus from academic curriculum, Goldberg proclaimed, “The Holocaust isn’t about race.”
When her co-hosts attempted to push back on this shockingly ludicrous claim, she re-asserted it a second, third, and fourth time, explaining that Nazis and Jews “are two white groups of people.” The exchange can be watched in the video below.
Now I never mistook Whoopi for the sharpest knife in the drawer. Remember, this is the woman who aggressively asked Bernie Sanders if he intended to tax corporations if elected President as though she were grilling him on a topic that made him uncomfortable.
Her actual quote: “Andrew Yang was here, and made perfect sense to me. And I haven’t heard really anybody else in the party, whatever party we’re talking about, say ‘Hey, do you realize that if Facebook and Amazon and all the other gigantic corporations pay any tax, we can find some relief for regular Americans?’ Do you agree with that?”
She asked that question to Bernie Sanders with a straight face, and when he said “Of course I do, I’ve been talking about that for years,” she insisted that she hadn’t heard such a sentiment from him before (again, full video breakdown listed below).
Stupid as that was, these recent Holocaust comments are on a whole other level. After making them, later in the day, she appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to further explain her position. Despite Colbert’s attempts to help pull her out of the hole she dug herself into, she only kept digging:
Finally, between the taping and the airing of the Colbert show, Goldberg tweeted out a formal apology, citing the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt.
What this tweet implies is that Whoopi Goldberg had, in her 66 years on this planet, never once read or heard that Nazis considered Jews an inferior race. Yes, you read that correctly. She was apparently unaware, until yesterday, that Nazis considered Jews an inferior race of people.
For an eighth grader not to know this would be concerning. For a high school student: alarming. For a college graduate: highly alarming. For the host of a top-rated political talk show: unfathomable.
Ben Shapiro, one of the last people on Earth I’d like to agree with, tweeted out a statement (only half correct) that had a conservative made this same point, they’d have been fired.
Notice in that tweet, however, he mentions Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar as if they could get away with making a similar statement, which we already know isn’t true. Omar and Tlaib have taken repeated drubbings from Democratic Party leadership and their media spokespersons for simply affirming the humanity of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and would surely be driven out of politics if they had said that the Holocaust “wasn’t about race.”
The lesson here is that center-left establishment-aligned liberals like Whoopi Goldberg and Stephen Colbert will always have each others’ backs, and only seek to censure, censor, or cancel their political opponents on both the Right and the Left.
If a conservative had said anything approaching this level of idiocy and insensitivity about the Holocaust, Stephen Colbert would devote his entire opening monologue to skewering that person, and his audience would surely have signed a petition to banish them from all future public discourse. If an actual anti-establishment Leftist had said it, they might not get the same late night comedy pillorying because it’d be a tad off brand for the shows themselves, but they’d surely take a brutal and likely career-ending beating in print and television media.
Instead, Goldberg, a loyal and unthreatening middle-of-the-road liberal whose politics are perfectly in line with those who sign her checks, gets to sit on Colbert’s couch and attempt a mea culpa of sorts that, despite being just as insufferable as her initial comments, was apparently enough to keep her in good standing at The View.
Now personally, I’m not for cancelling anybody, and as a Jewish man myself I can forgive her for her statements. But cancel culture aside, can a political talk show host not be fired simply for being a historically illiterate moron? I mean, how can an audience be expected to take seriously the opinions of a 66 year-old woman who just found out in 2022 that Nazis were racist against Jews?
Again, I don’t think Goldberg should be canceled outright. She’s an EGOT winner, and if there’s a great acting role out there for her, I’d encourage her to take it and have a ball with it. But her days as a political commentator have to be over. They just have to be. How can being so uninformed about junior high school-level history not be grounds for termination on a politically themed program?
I know The View isn’t exactly the Algonquin Roundtable, but even they can do a lot better than this.