ABC Suspends Whoopi Goldberg for Typical Liberal Ignorance

CLAY: Whoopi Goldberg, two-week suspension, Buck Sexton, at The View. There now are reports that Whoopi is furious that she has been suspended for two weeks, and I’m sort of torn on this, Buck, because on the one hand, I abhor cancel culture more than anything other than identity politics. I think those are the two pillars of the Democratic Party right now.

So whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, independent, I hate to see somebody lose their job for something that they say, even if it’s stupid like what Whoopi Goldberg said, because it just further reinforces the precedent of cancel culture. On the other side, Buck, I understand the argument from people out there who say, “Hey, if they’re going to insist on cancel culture rules, then we have to apply them as steadfastly as possible to left wingers as they try to do to right wingers,” whether it’s Gina Carano getting fired by Disney for The Mandalorian or Roseanne Barr getting fired by Disney as well. Both of those women were fired, and now Whoopi Goldberg gets two weeks. Where do you kind of come down on the larger cancel culture battle yourself?

BUCK: I think it’s a great question because I go back and forth. I mean, you’re essentially — and a lot of people I know on the right, because we want essentially Mutually Assured Destruction that then transitions into a society that allows for grace, forgiveness, and some sense of just decency toward each other. But where do you draw that line?

So I don’t think there’s a simple answer, right? I don’t think there’s a straightforward we let the — ’cause the left will let the left get away with so much more. By the way, Whoopi Goldberg, if she were… First of all, to say that if she were a conservative, it’s almost… She wouldn’t be where she is in so many ways. She’d be fired. She wouldn’t be suspended.

CLAY: If one of us had made the… First of all, we’re not as dumb as Whoopi Goldberg, at least not on that issue. If one of us had made the exact same argument that Whoopi Goldberg’s made, Whoopi Goldberg would demand that we be fired. If Joe Rogan had said it, if Tucker Carlson had said it, if Sean Hannity had said it, all of them on The View would have their long knives out, and they would demand that we be fired.

BUCK: Right. Look, I want to play rough with the commies, but I don’t want us to become the commies, if you know what I mean. I think that they should suffer consequences, but I also don’t want us to turn into the ideological infant that the left represents these days in so many ways. So here’s my sense of the Whoopi…

Oh, you know what we always say about facts, by the way? ‘Cause I said a bunch of numbers we’ve been discussing. We did our actual history when we talked about this as soon as it broke. All my numbers were correct: Over six million Jews, over 11 million killed, about eight or 900,000 — they don’t know — Europeans formerly known as Gypsy, now known as Roma.

I said 1.5 million Polish Catholics killed in the death camps. I believe it’s actually closer to three million. So just, again, if I ever get any number wrong, I want to update it right, ’cause I went back to check that ’cause I don’t know all the numbers offhand and I was doing that from the top of my head. But, Clay, to me there’s two issues here’s. There’s Whoopi Goldberg, the person saying these things and then there’s the ideology that led her to say these things at some level.

What I mean by that is — I sounded like Clay there for a second. “What I mean to say,” that’s a Clayism, is she just doesn’t… I think at some level she just doesn’t know the history of the Second World War at all, really. I mean, you know, the very, very, very baseline truth of it. So it’s mostly, if we’re breaking this down… I think it’s mostly ignorance on her part of the history, and so, you know, when people just don’t know, I’m more likely to say, “All right, they didn’t know.”

Remember, I said at the time I don’t think that she meant to be — and I truly believe this still. She didn’t mean to be disrespectful. She’s not going on The View and saying, “I’m going to antagonize the Jewish people not just in America but around the world and make them think that, like, I have maybe some kind of an anti-Semitic bent.”

I don’t think that was her intent at all. But why would she say something so wrong? And it is because — and we touched on this as well — the American left has created a paradigm where the only racism, in their minds, is white against nonwhite and primarily and overwhelmingly white against black racism.

There is no other historical framework for analysis of racism between different races, by the way, that don’t involve European whites at all. There’s no analysis of racism that involves the Jews as a race that have been discriminated against still to this day and, of course, in the genocide of the Holocaust, but going back to the time of the pharaoh and Egypt and the Bible.

CLAY: It’s kind of a big deal that the Jews have not been treated well if you’ve done any sort of historical research.

BUCK: But the left has this campaign of, you know, everything gets fit into this mold. There’s no easy overall descriptor for it, but it’s almost like the way that the 1619 Project defines all of American history. White-on-black racism is the only race issue that comes to mind for a Democrat leftist in good standing today, and I think that is part of what pushed Whoopi Goldberg to say something that would obviously be…

I know people who are friends with her. I will say that. They say she’s a nice person, you know, personally, and I will give her credit for that. And I don’t think she meant to be disrespectful. I just don’t think she knows any better and I think the left is brainwashed on this issue. You know what I mean? That’s how I see it, and what she said is really bad, as a result of those two things.

CLAY: Yeah. To a large extent, it is a form of historical illiteracy that has allowed to flourish in the United States. And one of those ideas is, for instance, that the United States was the only place that ever had slavery. Right? To your point on the 1619 Project, slavery existed all over the world for tens of thousands of years. Virtually every person at some point in their lineage — whether you’re white, black, Asian, or Hispanic — had slaves in your background, right, because slavery…

Whether it was in Rome, whether it was in Greece, whether it was all over Africa, all over Asia, if you beat another tribe of people, you very often took the men as slaves and you took the women as either wives or slaves as well. That is a historical reality from all over the world, right? And so I believe what has happened with the Democratic Party is they have embraced both cancel culture and identity politics.

They have allowed America to be exclusive based on race, and that is based on slavery and racism, which is almost exclusively, Buck, being seen as white to black, right? There’s no racism of black to Hispanic or Hispanic to Asian, even though my argument — and I think this would be a revolutionary argument if a political party would adopt it — is that racism exists in all races.

And, by the way, it exists inside of racial groups. Consider the way that, for instance, Hispanic, which is a broad categorization. How different groups of Hispanics see each other, how different groups of Asian and black people and white people initially…? Look at the big battles that were fought in the United States, Buck, over immigration when it was Italians and Germans and people who didn’t speak English coming into this country.

BUCK: My ancestors came into Brooklyn from Ireland during the potato famine, and there were “Irish need not apply” signs in stores’ cause the Irish were considered a criminal underclass and they were the less-thans in Europe. By the way, all the Italian-Americans listening right now are like, “Oh, you think you had it bad?” By the way, all the Jewish-Americans listening now are saying, “You think you had it bad?” Polish?

CLAY: All of these different European ethnic groups were discriminated against if they didn’t speak English or if they came from particular caste systems if you want to describe it as that way. So this has been the story of American life, and what typically happens — and this is why the melting pot idea used to be a liberal idea, right — was we bring everybody to America, we’re one big melting pot.

We all end up ending up with the same values of lionizing American multiculturalism and everybody can have success regardless of what your background is. Now what the Democrats argue is America is fundamentally broken and no one who is a minority can have success here because of the systemic racism and white supremacy which underlies everything.

That’s the argument they make, and it’s one that I reject wholeheartedly, and ironically enough (laughs), it’s one that even Barack Obama rejected wholeheartedly! If you go back and read his 2008 presidential campaign, it wasn’t about cancel culture and it wasn’t about identity politics at all.