‘The View’s Whoopi Goldberg on Finally Addressing Jimmy Kimmel Suspension: ‘No One Silences Us’

The cohosts of The View finally addressed the elephant in the room at the start of Monday’s (September 22) live show. Moderator and cohost Whoopi Goldberg kicked off the day by addressing why she and the others hadn’t yet talked about ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! amid public pressure by the FCC chairman.

“Look, did y’all really think we weren’t going to talk about Jimmy Kimmel? I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons? So you know, no one silences us. And to all my friends in Italy who reached out, you have to know it’s OK. We’re still here. We’re still broadcasting,” Goldberg said in a fiery intro. “When the news broke last week about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, we took a breath to see if Jimmy was going to say anything about it first. We did the same thing with Stephen Colbert. Then our show was on tape on Friday, but we are live here today, and we’re getting into it now.”

Goldberg then went on to frame her take on the story as a matter of government interference in free speech in violation of the First Amendment. “To be clear, you cannot like a show, and it can go off the air. Someone can say something they shouldn’t and get taken off the air, but the government cannot apply pressure to force someone to be silenced.” She then introduced clips of several prominent Republicans pushing back on the FCC chair’s comments calling for Kimmel’s ouster, along with a clip of Donald Trump saying it was up to Brendan Carr, his FCC chairman.

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“It’s not up to Brendan Carr. It is not up to him. I don’t understand how you are the man in charge of the nation, and you still don’t understand how the First Amendment works,” Goldberg said sternly in response to the clip.

Elsewhere, the other cohosts also described the impropriety of the issue. Sunny Hostin, for example, quoted a Supreme Court justice to say that “we must protect the freedom to express the thought we hate.”

Then, Ana Navarro issued a note of gratitute to The View fans who were outraged by the lack of discussion of Kimmel’s suspension, saying, “I want to start by thanking our loyal viewers for demanding truth and courage from us. We deserve it. You deserve it.”

She then pointed to her own background to note that she has experienced life under a dictatorship and said that the FCC chair’s action was exactly how it began in those countries. “I lived through a right-wing dictatorship in Nicaragua…. I lived through a left-wing dictatorship in Nicaragua, under Ortega. This is what dictators and authoritarians do. It does not matter the ideology. At first, they come with the people with big platforms, at first they silence the press, but then they come for all of us, because their intent is to scare us into silence and self-censorship.”

The View, weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC