In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, "The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg said that she believes she's only been "canceled once" in her career, after making a "joke" at a 2004 fundraiser for John Kerry, who was running for president at the time.
During the interview, Goldberg told author Jazmine Hughes, that she believes "she has really been canceled only once." Hughes wrote that Goldberg as well as many other celebrities, spoke at an event for then-Senator Kerry, who was running against former president George W. Bush in 2004. She said everyone was taking "potshots" at Bush, and added that Goldberg told a joke as well.
The New York Post published a piece the following day, Hughes wrote, headlined "Dirty Trick: Lewd Whoopi bashed Bush."
"As other outlets picked up the story, more performers were also called out, but the focus and furor were trained squarely on Goldberg, then a darling of the Democratic Party and a close friend of the Clintons,’" the New York Times Magazine piece said.
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Hughes wrote that Goldberg's career went "dark" and that friends starting ignoring her in public. She said Goldberg was uninvited to the Democratic National Convention and the "worst part" was that no one ever printed Goldberg's joke.
"You know why they couldn’t print what I said?" Goldberg asked Hughes during the interview. "Because I didn’t say anything that was bad."
Goldberg criticized cancel culture while referencing the Bush joke backlash, in August 2021 at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
"I would describe that situation as a lot of people covering their backsides, because the joke was never about him," Goldberg said at the time. "But no one ever stood up and said, ‘Hey, here’s what actually happened.’ And they put it in the newspaper. And you notice, they’d never seen what I exactly said, or what I said at all. But all somebody has to do is say you said it."
She also said that she felt like the truth doesn't really matter.
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The Times Magazine dug up Goldberg's remarks at the Kerry fundraiser. Goldberg encouraged people to vote for Kerry and said "someone's tarnished the name of Bush."
"Someone has waged war, someone has deliberately misled the country," Goldberg said, according to the New York Times Magazine. "The bush I know and cherish would never do such things. My bush is smarter than that. And if my bush is smarter than that, you can understand just how dumb I think that other bush is."
"Vote your heart and mind, and keep bush where it belongs," she said, while pointing to her crotch, Hughes wrote. Goldberg told Hughes that hearing her "joke" read back to her gave her "proof."
"Her remarks weren’t obscene — at least, no more than anyone else’s. She wasn’t crazy in her self-defense and insistence that she hadn’t done anything wrong. The only thing she was guilty of was being funny, and then unfairly maligned," the piece said.
Goldberg told Hughes she didn't say anything she was accused of saying.
"But I didn’t do what they said I did. And I will take anything that you’re mad at that I actually did. But you cannot accuse me of shit I didn’t do," she said in the interview.
Goldberg claimed in January that the Holocaust was "not about race" during an episode of "The View."
She was suspended from the show for two weeks and upon her return to the program said it was an "honor" to sit at "The View" table.
