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Cancel culture came for one of the Left’s luminaries when she made a massive mistake about the Holocaust, blinkered by the ideology of critical race theory, where white people cannot possibly be oppressed on account of their race. Still, is this the way to respond to errors? What happened to civil discourse?

Whoopi Goldberg broke the internet last month by making painfully ignorant claims on The View about the Holocaust — and then being handed a two-week suspension for her troubles.

“Let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race. No. It’s not about race,” she opined to her co-hosts. “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” she added. “These are two white groups of people.”

Whoopi later apologised for setting up the false dichotomy. “On today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both,” she tweeted.

Debates raged over whether her two-week suspension by employer ABC was justified. Some conservatives were predictably gleeful that cancel culture had come back to bite a lefty. Apparently missing the irony, prominent wokesters queued up to moan that cancel culture is getting out of hand.

Many stood on firmer principles, arguing that neither Whoopi, Joe Rogan nor anyone deserves to be cancelled — and that cultural disagreements are best settled by communication, not censorship.

One of these was the former star of The Mandalorian, Gina Carano. Carano was dropped by Disney after tweeting a meme last year that referenced the treatment of the Jews in 1930s Germany.

Double Standard

While Carano’s post certainly wandered into Godwin’s law territory, it didn’t deny the suffering of the Jews. Rather, she clumsily suggested that the sort of political hatred manifesting in the 2020s could take us there again. “Don’t let the government pit you against each other or history tells us that could go wrong,” is how she tried to clarify the meme as criticisms against her piled up.

Nevertheless, Lucasfilm — owned by Disney — cut ties with Carano, dropping her from The Mandalorian and all future projects. “Her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable,” the company postured in a still puzzling statement.

Given that ABC is also owned by Disney, the hypocrisy is glaring. “Two weeks to slow the double standards,” Gina Carano tweeted in the first of a series of posts about the scandal. She later wrote:

Critical Race Kablooey

The deeper plot behind Whoopi’s whoopsie is the role that critical race theory (CRT) played in her erroneous thinking. CRT has explicitly shifted the goalposts of public discourse, so that racism is no longer the oppression of people based on their ethnicity but the oppression of minorities (principally “black people”) based on their ethnicity.

Whoopi’s embrace of CRT is why she declared with such misplaced confidence that the Holocaust couldn’t possibly have been about race — since the Germans and the Jews were “two white groups of people”.

Never mind that Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that “the sacred mission of the German people… [is] to assemble and preserve the most valuable racial elements… and raise them to the dominant position.” Never mind that he later declared, “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.”

By reducing racism to only “white-on-black” oppression, critical race theory does indeed rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Whoopi was only articulating this logic. And she taught us all a lesson: CRT makes you stupid, so avoid it like the plague.

Amending Definitions

It seems the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) learnt the same lesson. The ADL is an international Jewish NGO based in the United States. Its focus has been to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate, but more recently the ADL has drunk the woke Kool-Aid too.

To become CRT-compliant, the ADL changed its definition of racism in mid-2020 to “the marginalisation and/or oppression of people of colour based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”. Immediately following the Whoopi affair, they corrected course. As of Thursday, racism can once again be wielded in any direction, according to the ADL:

Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favourable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.

Whoopi doesn’t deserve to be cancelled. But two weeks of downtime will have given her plenty of opportunity to reconsider the dangerous stupidity of CRT.

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Originally published at MercatorNet.