Commentary
Whoopi Goldberg speaks onstage at Storytellers: Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett during the 2025 Tribeca Festival at SVA Theater on June 13, 2025, in New York City. (Cindy Ord / Getty Images for Tribeca Festival)

Well, she’s finally done it, America. After 18 seasons on “The View,” it’s happened: Whoopi Goldberg has hit peak Whoopi Goldberg-ness.

In a conversation so unhinged that both Joy Behar and Sara Haines — usually reliably on the side of Whoopi and Co. — were trying to talk Goldberg and co-host Sunny Hostin into something resembling sanity on the Israel-Iran issue. Whoopi posited that being repressed by the regime in Tehran is exactly like being black or gay in the United States because “we’ve been known in this country to tie gay folks to the car” and “used to just keep hanging black people!”

The comments came in the context of a viral exchange on the volley of missiles between the two nations, as well as the prospect of regime change in Iran, between Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson during an interview conducted by Carlson. That’s another issue for another day, but Carlson’s point — he tends to be anti-war as a general rule for reasons that can be debated — is that regime change in Iran is unpredictable.

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The sides on Wednesday’s show were initially drawn with Behar, Haines, and former Trump administration official Alyssa Farah Griffin arguing that Iran wanted a nuclear weapon and was an existential threat to both Israel and the United States.

Hostin, meanwhile, said that “under international criminal law, you are not supposed to do this [attack Iran]” and argued that “President Obama, one of his foreign policy wins was that he had an agreement with Iran.”

That agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was scuttled by President Donald Trump during his first term for the logical reason that it wasn’t even worth the paper it was signed on and did little to stop Iran’s military ambitions. But that’s (again) another issue. The real fun started when Griffin pointed out that Iran wasn’t exactly, shall we say, woke.

“Let’s remember too, the Iranians literally throw gay people off of buildings,” she said. “They don’t adhere to basic human rights or international law.”

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“Let’s not do that! Let’s not do that,” Goldberg said in response. “Because if we start with that — we’ve been known in this country to tie gay folks to the car!”

Pardon me? This got applause, believe it or not, despite the fact that she appears to be mixing up the 1990s murders of Matthew Shepard (a self-described gay man who was tied to a fence in what was initially believed to be a hate crime but is now generally considered to be the result of a drug crime gone bad) and James Byrd Jr. (a black man who was killed in Texas by white men who dragged him behind a car).

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“I’m sorry, but where the Iranian regime is today is nothing compared, is nothing compared to the Unites States,” Griffin responded.

“Listen, I’m sorry! They used to just keep hanging black people!” Whoopi said, talking over Griffin.

I suppose that the whole point of “The View” is to try and win over the audience at home and not in the studio, but why Griffin felt the need to respond to this is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps those who tune into “The View” really believe we live in a state where black people are lynched every day or homosexuals are dragged behind cars on a weekly basis. After all, tune into MSNBC and this is a caricature of Trump’s America that holds more water than it should. Griffin went on to note that she couldn’t even go out in public wearing what she had on — indeed, none of the women on the panel could — but Whoopi didn’t buy the argument that “it’s not even the same.”

“Oh, no! That’s not what you mean to say. It is the same,” Whoopi said.

“I think it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is in Iran,” Griffin said.

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“Not if you’re black!” Whoopi shot back.

“Not for everybody,” Hostin interjected.

Again, Goldberg: “Not if you’re black!”

Yeah, because I remember how the government killed at least 500 people during the George Floyd protests back in 2020 and banned WhatsApp and other communications services to try and clamp down on the riots.

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Oh, wait, what? I’m sorry, that’s the death toll and government actions from the 2022 and 2023 Iranian protests, which were sparked by the death of a young woman who died in police custody for dressing with insufficient Islamic modesty — which is to say, her headscarf wasn’t worn properly. Which happens all the time for black and homosexual people in the United States, right?

No. No it doesn’t, and Whoopi should know better. She doesn’t and shoots her mouth off because this gets the ratings. Once upon a time, if this were a conservative, CNN would be wringing its hands over “misinformation” and talking about “deplatforming” her. Now, crickets. Funny how that works.

This may be the stupidest, least informed, most propagandistic, most America-hating comment Goldberg has ever made. And that’s saying something.