Whoopi's Unhinged Rant About Tucker Carlson Derailed After Co-Host Reads Fact Check from Lawyers
Whoopi Goldberg is having a moment, as the kids like to say.
On Tuesday, the co-host and de facto moderator of “The View” went apoplectic over the fact that Fox News host Tucker Carlson showed viewers unseen footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion. In the footage, which Carson described as “mostly peaceful chaos,” both police and individuals in plainclothes can be seen letting protesters into the building, almost as if they were matadors ushering the bulls past them. The bulls, to be fair, seemed a lot more dangerous.
Goldberg described the decision to allow viewers to see the footage and make up their own minds as “Orwellian.” As further evidence she doesn’t really understand what “Orwellian” means or what British writer George Orwell actually wrote, she had this to say about the footage: “You know, I don’t know what he’s playing at, but people saw what they saw. They saw what they saw. And they’ve seen what’s gone down with it, and no matter what, you can’t put this monkey back in the cage.”
In other words, people shouldn’t have seen what they saw on Tucker Carlson’s show — and what they did see proved exactly the opposite of what it seemed to show, according to Goldberg. (Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. I’m holding up three fingers on my left hand. There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?)
NEW—The View’s Whoopi Goldberg claims Tucker Carlson “took a page from George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and told his viewers to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears…They saw what they saw.”
Actually Whoopi, we never saw any of this footage before. That’s precisely the point! pic.twitter.com/zOqsuUv2D3
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 7, 2023
Anyway, that should have been enough Whoopi weirdness for one week, and it wasn’t even hump day yet. However, she saved the best for Wednesday, when she again attacked Carlson and Fox News in an unhinged, reality-challenged rant that had the first among “The View’s” chattering equals implying that Tucker Carlson and Fox News ought to be shut down and/or prosecuted because they weren’t protected by the First Amendment.
The segment focused on a lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News. Dominion claims that Fox is guilty of defamation for even bothering to report on accusations from prominent figures around then-President Donald Trump that mass voter fraud involving their machines allowed Joe Biden to win the 2020 election.
The lawsuit is of incredibly dubious merit, given that the accusations about Dominion — unproven and still very unproved though they may be — were arguably the single major news event of the period between the election being called for Biden and the certification of the Electoral College.
Dominion’s position seems to be that these claims shouldn’t have been covered at all or that proponents of the theory should be shouted down by Carlson and Co., the same way guests on “The View” get verbally abused by the panel if the guests’ political views fall to the right of, say, George McGovern.
However, the major news that comes out of the lawsuit may come from the discovery portions of the legal proceedings. On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that texts from Carlson obtained by lawyers for Dominion revealed Tucker wasn’t the biggest Trump fan in the world after the election — saying in one message, “I hate him passionately.”
In another set of texts, Carlson said “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights” and that “I truly can’t wait.”
However, it’s also worth noting that the texts show Carlson believed there was the plausible possibility of fraud in the 2020 election, just that Trump’s lawyers had discredited the case, something he said was “infuriating. Absolutely enrages me.”
Bear that in mind, because Goldberg used Carlson’s texts to argue the government could step in and shut down both Fox News and Carlson.
Whoopi Goldberg suggests that the government should shut down Fox News and prosecute everyone there for “recruiting” domestic terrorists.
And she also claims the First Amendment has limits: “[It] doesn’t allow you to willingly lie.”
Meanwhile, The View is a cesspool of misinfo. pic.twitter.com/7RkUjBWoZN— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) March 8, 2023
“How come this is not thought of as being recruiting?” Whoopi asked. “Why is this not being scrutinized in the way they scrutinize other things? To me, this should be against the law. You should not be able to lie to the American [people] knowingly.”
When token sorta-conservative Sara Haines broke in and noted the First Amendment guaranteed the right to free speech, Goldberg responded that “the First Amendment doesn’t allow you to willingly lie.”
I know there’s a pretty good joke in here about “The View” being in serious trouble if that’s really legal precedent, but never mind: The evidence being cited doesn’t prove Carlson or anyone at Fox News was willingly lying. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that Carlson and Fox News were reporting — not endorsing — some of the more outlandish claims being made in the wake of the 2020 election.
The texts that Whoopi seems to think are a smoking gun actually seem to point to Carlson being frustrated at the then-president and his legal team, not giggling and snickering about the dissembling he was getting away with.
And somehow, things got worse from there. Co-host Sunny Hostin — a lawyer, by the way, which makes this all the worse — seemed to endorse Whoopi’s interpretation that Fox News was actively recruiting domestic terrorists.
“You had the FBI director, Chris Wray, say the number one threat to our country is domestic terrorists,” Hostin said. “How do you recruit domestic terrorists? How do you do that? Misinformation, having these kinds of rallies, saying these things.
“And someone with Tucker Carlson — you would know better than I — how many millions of viewers, 3 million on this show?” she continued. “That’s a lot.”
She later asked, “Is [Attorney General] Merrick Garland listening?” [8:45]
This is a stunningly irresponsible statement, one that manages to stand out in an already stunningly irresponsible segment: Here’s a show built around the freedom of flighty, loud, uninformed political expression urging the Department of Justice to crack down on Fox News, as if this were Vladimir Putin’s Russia and “The View” was broadcasting on RT. Irony is apparently dead to these women.
Near the end of the segment, Hostin read a “legal note” — the term the show uses about communications from its legal team — regarding Fox News’ position, which was virtually the only time that an opposing viewpoint was proffered, even as a straw man.
“I have a legal note,” she said, then apparently read from a teleprompter: “In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson says Dominion’s lawsuit is a violation of the First Amendment, and they were covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting president.”
And — though no one on the panel acknowledged it — that amounted to a fact check that derailed the whole case Goldberg and her co-hosts were trying to make.
Fox is not arguing it has a right to “knowingly” lie to the American people. The network’s argument is that it has a right — implicitly an obligation — to cover the inarguably newsworthy statements of an American president regarding the conduct of an American presidential election. The personal beliefs of anyone involved in the coverage are irrelevant.
That’s an argument that shouldn’t even raise an eyebrow for a thinking American, no matter how much squawking air time the topic might consume on a show like “The View.”
This legal note, by the way, was read over nine minutes into a segment in which the panelists on “The View” said to heck with the First Amendment, since Fox News tells lies and radicalizes domestic terrorists.
Of course, their characterization of the lawsuit’s discovery phase was grossly misleading and, by insinuating Fox News was creating conservative terrorists, one could argue “The View” is radicalizing a whole nation of liberal women who have nothing better to do between 11 a.m. and noon Eastern.
Is Merrick Garland listening?
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