Maybe some topics are just too hot.
On today’s episode of ABC’s The View, co-host Joy Behar opened the show with a quick – very quick – reference to moderator Whoopi Goldberg’s two-week suspension over her comments about the Holocaust.
“You all saw the news,” Behar said. “Whoopi will be back here in two weeks.” The panel, including regulars Behar, Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines, along with guest conservative commentator Tara Setmayer, then moved on to the daily Hot Topics segment, today leading off with a discussion of abortion and the Supreme Court.
Goldberg’s suspension, announced last night by ABC News President Kim Godwin, followed the View moderator’s statements on Monday’s show that the Holocaust was “not about race” but rather “man’s inhumanity to man.” Her assertion was quickly condemned by the ADL and a number of other important organizations. Goldberg later issued a written apology.
On Tuesday’s episode, Goldberg said on-air that the Holocaust “is indeed about race, because Hitler and the Nazis considered the Jews to be an inferior race. Now, words matter — and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, was on the talk show Tuesday morning. “There is no question that the Holocaust was about race,” he said. “That is how the Nazis saw it as they sought the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people across continents, across countries, with deliberate and ruthless cruelty.”
While The View panel today didn’t tackle the issue, former co-host Meghan McCain, the show’s often controversial conservative voice, wasn’t so hesitant. In her column for The Daily Mail yesterday, McCain wrote, in part, “I was lectured to thousands of times on The View, there is a belief that ‘cancel culture’ is really ‘accountability culture’ among the woke left. Which seems to be a belief that’s quickly forgotten whenever it’s Whoopi who has to be held to account. I am not calling for Whoopi Goldberg to be fired, if only because I don’t believe there is any universe where she could possibly do anything that could get her fired – she is the crown jewel of The View and a pop culture icon. But I hope this can be used as a teachable moment to explain to millions of Americans why conflating the Holocaust as something that is specific and limited to ‘white people’ is insane, ahistorical and anti-Semitic.”
McCain tweeted her column last evening, noting, “it was very hard to write this.”