Donald Trump Jr.'s Comment About Whoopi Goldberg Has Twitter Fuming
It's been little more than 48 hours since Whoopi Goldberg came under fire for making widely criticized comments related to the Holocaust on her daytime talk show "The View." And it's only been a day since the ABC network suspended Goldberg for two weeks over it — but it looks like the controversy is far from over.
As outlets like The New York Times have covered, the story began on the January 31 taping of "The View," during a segment in which Goldberg and her castmates discussed a Tennessee school banning the graphic novel "Maus," which tells the story of a Holocaust survivor. While on-air, Goldberg stated that the Holocaust was "not about race" or a byproduct of white supremacy à la Nazism, but "man's inhumanity to man" — and that the genocide of 6 million Jews by Nazis was between "two groups of white people."
The entire affair seemed to be a misunderstanding of the social construct of race, the history of the Holocaust, and the history of Jewish oppression. (The murder of 6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust was rooted in the Nazi belief that Jews were of an "inferior race.") An additional complexity added to the situation is that Goldberg, a person of color, has identified as Jewish in the past and has claimed Jewish heritage. And now, it looks like none other than Donald Trump Jr. has, by way of Twitter, thrown himself into the situation — and could possibly make things even worse for Goldberg.
Don Jr. compared Whoopi Goldberg's incident to another celebrity scandal
As the Independent reported on February 1, social media provocateur Donald Trump Jr. seemingly harnessed Whoopi Goldberg's two-week suspension from ABC in order to go after the left and criticize "cancel culture" by comparing the incident to a previous controversy. Yes, you may have guessed it: The 2018 decision made by network executives to fire Roseanne Barr from her own show after Barr posted a series of reportedly racist tweets.
"Consequences only go one way folks," Donald Jr. tweeted, accompanied by a link to a Daily Mail article on the incident and a graphic with a tweet referencing Barr's 2018 racist tweets, which she blamed on Ambien, and her firing. "You should know this by now." Of course, as the Independent pointed out, there are a number of differences between both controversies. Unlike Barr, Goldberg was only suspended by the network, and will only be off-air for two weeks. Goldberg also seemed sincere when admitting wrongdoing for her initial comments, apologizing in an official statement and in interviews, whereas Barr denied wrongdoing and took no accountability.
This distinction was immediately outlined by Twitter denizens in response to Trump's false equivalency. "She immediately apologized," one user wrote. "She didn't try to justify or double down. There's a difference. Others pointed out the irony of Don Jr. tweeting about "consequences" as a member of the Trump family, whose organization is currently under scrutiny for alleged misdeeds.