Neither Whoopi Goldberg Nor Joe Rogan Should Be Punished

Whoopi Goldberg is not an anti-Semite.

It is stupid to think that she is. What Goldberg is guilty of is “presentism.” She is too wrapped up in judging history by present norms and has lost the honest and true context of the Holocaust.

Goldberg claimed that the Jews were not a race and the Holocaust amounted to white on white violence. She doubled down on this in an interview with Stephen Colbert where she said the Nazis were lying about the Jews being a different race.

This is ignorance of history, not anti-Semitism.

Today, many people would consider Jewish people an ethnicity. But ethnicity as we presently understand it is a newer concept than race. Race has predominated history going even into the middle of the twentieth century when the Germans believed all races except the German people were inferior and particularly blamed the Jewish race. Ethnicity is, basically, a broader term but by saying what the Nazis did was “white on white” shows an ignorance of how the people of the mid-twentieth century viewed things.

But it is decidedly not anti-Semitism. Goldberg needs some education and context, not punishment. She works on a show where the hosts are trained to dig in their heels and argue, which she did. She was wrong. But she was not showing hatred. And now she’s being punished for behaving as the show incentivizes.

This idea circulating out there that we need to punish everyone we disagree with is getting out of hand.

Ilya Shapiro is punished at Georgetown and students want to cry because he made an argument that, only in bad faith, could be read as racist. His actual point was that there is a clearly superior pick for the Supreme Court, therefore anyone other than that person, including black females, would be an inferior pick.

The left wants Joe Rogan silenced and taken off Spotify because they hate the guests he spends hours talking to. But they are only agitated because Rogan’s media competitors made a really big deal about it to generate that outrage.

Y’all, social media and hysterics on all sides are strengthening cancel culture and the perverse effect is that it causes the ideas of those canceled to settle further into the minds of fans.

Whoopi Goldberg should not be suspended from ABC, as they have done. Rogan should not be hounded, silenced, or punished for having on heterodox voices. Give room for more voices. Do not curtail current voices. Doing so makes the heterodox ideas stronger and the heretics turn to martyrs.