Whoopi Goldberg was once Caryn Johnson. Her parents apparently didn’t know how to spell Karen or they foresaw how the name would be used today. Now, a “Karen” is defined as a middle-aged white woman who thinks everyone around her is an inconvenience (I think).

I tried to convince Dawn to use her last name instead of Groszkruger, as in Mr. and Mrs. Thomas instead of Groszkruger, because I was tired of spelling out Groszkruger. Most people probably know how to spell Thomas. Karen would be easy as well. But then, I had to go back and take the “e” off of the ends of all my Whoopis.

Whoopi has now been swept up in the free speech tsunami. She had the nerve to say that The Holocaust was not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man. ABC executives have suspended her from a TV show called The View. A view is okay as long as it’s their view.

I agree with their right to control their show. The First Amendment applies to the federal government, not private citizens. The only way to apply it here is if we traced ABC’s finances back to some federal subsidy we don’t presently know about.

Canceling opinion has become the new way to argue. This is the saddest thing of our time. In the Joe Rogan, Spotify / Neil Young, Joni Mitchell controversy, we have words such as “unproven, unsubstantiated, and misinformation” tossed around instead of a civil but elaborate discussion of facts.

No one can deny that many things exposed on Joe Rogan’s podcast have been proven correct over time, such as the effectiveness of masks, social distancing, and vaccines. If the old hippies actually knew they were right, they would let the public decide with all the information available. Crosby, Stills, and Nash have joined Young in the crusade for ignorance. It’s ironic because at their founding they were anti-establishment. Now they are the establishment.

To simply shut the conversation down should remind us of The Holocaust. (Stay with me. I’m not comparing the pandemic response to The Holocaust, like RFK Jr. did.)

The lead up to The Holocaust was not simply Aryans born to hate Jews. First, the victors of World War I made it impossible for Germany to recover from the war by banning exports resulting in no income from outside the country. Then the poverty because of that brought about the need for a scapegoat. Many Jews had developed a culture of business acumen making them comparably wealthy. Class warfare as promoted by Karl Marx fit perfectly with destitute German workers being portrayed as being exploited by greedy Jewish businessmen.

The Nazis, in their quest for a socialist utopia, naturally latched on to hatred of Jews as a way to gain the power they needed to attain that goal. Envy is a powerful motivator. What Whoopi did wrong was remove the racism label so people would think about it. The word “racism” has become a stop sign for critical thought and conversation.

The discussion on The View where Whoopi triggered the simple-minded jerks was

about censorship. It was about banning the book “Maus” because of a few swear words and a naked lady.

As usual, the market knows best. Sales of “Maus” have soared after the ban in Tennessee. Spotify’s ad revenue and paying subscribers have surged as well. Censorship is the tool of those who know they are wrong.