MSNBC host Joe Scarborough criticized ABC for suspending “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg, making it clear during his Wednesday broadcast of “Morning Joe” that he believed her apology had been enough.
Scarborough noted that he had been taken aback when he heard Goldberg’s initial comments from Monday’s broadcast of “The View” — when the longtime co-host had claimed repeatedly that the Holocaust had not been “about race.”
As The Daily Wire reported:
“If we’re going to do this, let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race. No. It’s not about race,” Goldberg said.
“They considered Jews a different race,” Joy Behar pushed back.
“It’s not about race. It’s not about race,” Goldberg insisted.
“What is it about?” Behar asked.
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” Goldberg replied.
“But it’s about white supremacy,” Navarro objected. “It’s about going after Jews and gypsies —”
“But it’s not about —” Goldberg interrupted. “These are two white groups of people. How do we —”
“They came after black people too,” Behar pointed out, noting that the Nazis had not considered Jews to be “white” either.
“But you’re missing the point. You’re missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley,” Goldberg was insistent. “Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you are black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”
“What am I missing here?” he asked.
“I was, like, what is she talking about? She made a terrible mistake. We all make terrible mistakes. She apologized for it immediately and took corrective actions,” Scarborough said in response, arguing that Goldberg’s willingness to take responsibility for what she had said and learn from it should have been enough to show that she was sincere and did not need to be suspended as well.
“Who is so frail over at ABC? Who was so frail out there that they can’t understand when somebody makes a mistake, apologizes for the mistake, and takes all the corrective actions that can be taken for that mistake, and they’re still suspended for two weeks?” Scarborough added.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski blamed the move on “cancel culture,” adding, “If you don’t know her heart, then you haven’t been watching.”
MSNBC’s @morningmika Brzezinksi: “Everyone knows Whoopi Goldberg. She’s been on TV for decades … If you don’t know her heart, then you haven’t been watching … This cancel culture is getting so out of hand!” pic.twitter.com/lFaNt87xHP
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 2, 2022
Scarborough’s guest, Eddie Glaude Jr. — James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University — attempted to explain away Goldberg’s comments then, arguing that her perspective addressed the “racial hierarchy” in which Jews are considered to be white in certain comparisons.
Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro addressed that philosophy when he critiqued Goldberg’s comments earlier in the week, saying, “Anti-Semitism, in this theory, is only present when it springs from actual white supremacists. Other acts of anti-Semitism are just a reflection of the dispossessed lashing out against those who have more institutional power. The attempt to abstract the causes of the Holocaust from Jew-hatred to ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ is actually a way of obscuring and covering for anti-Semitism.”