Whoopi Goldberg Says the Holocaust Wasn’t About Targeting Jews. Here’s Why That Matters.

Whoopi Goldberg, a former actress who won awards and a highly-respected blowhard made sloppy jokes this week. This came as no surprise; Goldberg does that quite regularly on “The View.” The good news for Goldberg is that no one notices — trying to identify which fatuous host takes the cake for most imbecilic comment on any given day is an exercise in multivariate calculus, so Goldberg often tends to meld into the wallpaper of daftness.

Goldberg stood out on Monday. 

Discussing an obscure Tennessee school board deciding to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from a Holocaust unit for eighth-graders, Goldberg launched into an explanation of the Holocaust dazzling in both its ignorance and its malignity. 

Joy Behar, the usual top contender for the Crown of Idiocy, led off by explaining that the Tennessee school board members “don’t like history that makes white people look bad.” Then Goldberg got going: “Maybe. It’s white people trying to do it to white people. Y’all go fight amongst yourselves.” 

This comment would have been insanely insulting, in and of itself: Here was Goldberg, referring to Nazis and Jews as “white people doing it to white people.” But Goldberg was just getting started. “If we’re going to do this,” Goldberg said, “let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race. No. It’s not about race.” Behar correctly said, “They considered Jews a different race.” But Goldberg would not tolerate the dissent: “It’s not about race. It’s not about the race. It is about the inhumanity of man to man. That’s what it’s about.” 

Ana Navarro tried to stop this train by intervening. “But it’s about white supremacy,” Navarro said. “It’s about going after Jews and gypsies.” No, said Goldberg. “These are two white groups of people … You’re missing the point. It becomes a race when you make it so. Let’s look at it the way it really is. This is how we treat one another. This is a problem. It doesn’t matter if you are black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”

This is a case of asininety that cannot be understated. It is absolutely clear that the Nazis targeted Jews as a race; Hitler wasn’t exactly hiding the ball when he stated in “Mein Kampf”: “Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race?” Hitler repeatedly referred to the Jews as a race of parasites, and targeted Jews on the basis of ethnicity rather than religious adherence. 

So, the question is: What was Goldberg actually thinking? Goldberg believed that she was supporting the intersectional theory on race and racism. This theory states that society is built in a hierarchical system of victimized or victimizing groups. Groups that are more successful than others are victims, while those who are less successful are the ones that are targeted. Jews are more successful than others, so they’re white. And, intersectional theory posits, racism is not defined as a belief that any other race is superior or inferior to another; instead, racism means — as the Anti-Defamation League recently defined it — “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” 

Combining these two concepts means that Jews are not victims of antisemitism. They are successful and they are white. Therefore, they can’t be part of an oppressed minority. This is why the mainstream Left is so reluctant to recognize the antisemitism of Hamas (Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, for example, condemned Israel for defending itself against rocket attacks by Hamas by decrying “Black and brown bodies being brutalized and murdered”); it is why the mainstream Left is complicit in the lie that the only true antisemitism springs from white supremacists, ignoring actual acts of Jew-hatred by members of minority populations. Antisemitism is inextricably intertwined with the conspiracy theory of the intersectional Left, which holds that society has been controlled by a group of white victims (including Jews and Asians).

Goldberg’s remarks are not an exception. They are the latest manifestation of a pernicious, perverse theory on power in politics – a conspiracy theory regarding groups and the systems they work in. 

Ben Shapiro, 38, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps,” “The Right Side Of History,” and “Bullies.”