HBO host Bill Maher weighed in on the controversy involving ABC’s “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg, who is currently suspended from the show after making an anti-Semitic remark about the Holocaust, by saying that people need to get past trying to cancel others who say the wrong thing.
“Whoopi Goldberg getting suspended by ‘The View’ isn’t karma, and I wouldn’t want it if it was. People have to learn to disagree in this country and not hate for it,” he said. “Whoopi said I was flippant and immoral for saying it’s time to chuck the masks and get back to normal. Well, are 43 states here in America and the entire nations of England, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland flippant? Because they’re saying the same thing now. COVID is so much more complicated than just, I’m for more safety than you are, therefore I’m a better person. But Whoopi is misinformed on many aspects of the COVID debate. After she got it recently, she said that being vaccinated ‘doesn’t stop Omicron, and that’s the problem with a variant because it gets stronger.’ Actually, it usually gets weaker, as is the case with this one.”
“But that’s okay. She’s allowed to be wrong. F***, it’s 11 a.m. Who can think clearly at that hour? I’m still in REM sleep,” he continued. “And as I mentioned last week, how could a nation like America have maintained an apartheid state for the vast majority of its history, and expect the views of the races to match on all matters? It’s amazing they match on any. Whoopi Goldberg shouldn’t have to conform to or apologize for her views on race, as much as I disagree with them. And she certainly shouldn’t have to sit out like a child and think about what she did.”
“‘The View’ suspending someone for sharing a view is like firing Pat Sajak for selling a vowel. We have got to get past this endless, unforgiving, zero tolerance mindset bent on punishing and disappearing anyone caught saying the wrong thing. The right response to speech you don’t like is more speech, not the lazy, cowardly response of canceling people,” he concluded. “This is a big country with lots of people who don’t think like you. We all only need to agree on free speech itself. That’s my religious belief. That’s the timeless principle I live by. I don’t like what Whoopi said about race, she didn’t like what I said about COVID, so what? The real essence of karma, by the way, is non attachment, letting s*** go, it’s very zen. Oh, and by the way, no one knows what that means either.”
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TRANSCRIPT:
And finally, new rule stop saying that Whoopi Goldberg getting yanked from “The View” right after she attacked me on “The View” is karma. There’s no such thing as karma. Sorry. Sorry, but life is random. The only word to describe it when a big game hunter gets trampled by an elephant and then eaten by lions is “hilarious.”
Now, I mentioned this karma stuff on the show last week because I was relating how many texts and emails I got from people congratulating me on receiving a karma-gram from the universe in the form of Whoopi Goldberg’s chastisement. So, I thought this would be a good time for a little tutorial on karma, which, as Americans understand it, is nothing more than an extension of the common logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc, which means after that because of that; it’s the fallacy that happens when someone assumes that if one thing follows another, then the first thing must have caused the second thing, like, I wore green socks every day last year and I never got into a car accident; green socks must prevent car accidents.
People make this mistake all the time. But honestly, washing your car doesn’t really make it rain; if it did, we would have tried it here by now. This is how Americans see karma. But karma is not a system of reward and punishment — that’s Catholicism.
…
Whoopi Goldberg getting suspended by “The View” isn’t karma, and I wouldn’t want it if it was. People have to learn to disagree in this country and not hate for it. Whoopi said I was flippant and immoral for saying it’s time to chuck the masks and get back to normal. Well, are 43 states here in America and the entire nations of England, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland flippant? Because they’re saying the same thing now. COVID is so much more complicated than just, I’m for more safety than you are, therefore I’m a better person. But Whoopi is misinformed on many aspects of the COVID debate. After she got it recently, she said that being vaccinated “doesn’t stop Omicron, and that’s the problem with a variant because it gets stronger.” Actually, it usually gets weaker, as is the case with this one. But that’s okay. She’s allowed to be wrong. F***, it’s 11 a.m. Who can think clearly at that hour? I’m still in REM sleep. And as I mentioned last week, how could a nation like America have maintained an apartheid state for the vast majority of its history, and expect the views of the races to match on all matters? It’s amazing they match on any. Whoopi Goldberg shouldn’t have to conform to or apologize for her views on race, as much as I disagree with them. And she certainly shouldn’t have to sit out like a child and think about what she did.
“The View” suspending someone for sharing a view is like firing Pat Sajak for selling a vowel. We have got to get past this endless, unforgiving, zero tolerance mindset bent on punishing and disappearing anyone caught saying the wrong thing. The right response to speech you don’t like is more speech, not the lazy, cowardly response of canceling people.
This is a big country with lots of people who don’t think like you. We all only need to agree on free speech itself. That’s my religious belief. That’s the timeless principle I live by. I don’t like what Whoopi said about race, she didn’t like what I said about COVID, so what? The real essence of karma, by the way, is non attachment, letting s*** go, it’s very zen. Oh, and by the way, no one knows what that means either.
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