In the 12 hours since the news of her suspension broke, I haven’t seen a single person on social media, left or right, condone the decision. “Who is so frail over at ABC?” asked Joe Scarborough this morning. “Who was so frail out there that they can’t understand when somebody makes a mistake, apologizes for the mistake, and takes all the corrective actions that can be taken for that mistake, and they’re still suspended for two weeks?” That’s overwhelmingly the consensus view.

And even if ABC execs were sincerely offended, there’s no way to make sense of why some comments made on “The View” deserve punishment while many others are shrugged off. Dan McLaughlin put it well: “Getting suspended from The View for being ignorant & offensive is like when the drummer from Guns n Roses got sacked from the band for too many drugs.”

The bottom line is that virtually no one believes the suspension was warranted, especially after two separate apologies by Goldberg. Although one notable commentator did post this hours before ABC made its decision:

I hate commenting on my old employer because I have moved in every way a person can move on.

That being said I am an activist against antisemitism and it is a big part of my life.

The growing threat is real and virulent and everywhere. I am heartbroken about what was said.

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) February 1, 2022

Hmmmm! McCain elaborated in a column at the Daily Mail, emphasizing that she wasn’t calling for Goldberg to be fired but complaining that liberals on “The View” enjoy a benefit of the doubt about their good intentions that conservatives wouldn’t get:

I also think ABC and The View at large need to take a hard look at why some hosts — and let me be completely candid here – why some liberal hosts are held to an entirely different standard than anyone else.

Whoopi has said a slew of insanely-controversial and hurtful things over the course of her tenure at The View.

Some of the more notorious ones include defending Roman Polanski for raping a 13-year-old (calling it ‘not rape, rape’) and defending Bill Cosby after over 50 accusers had come out publicly with their stories.

With age and status comes protection at The View.

This goes for the other liberal hosts as well.

Others have also noticed how ABC let Whoopi off with a wrist slap after sending conservative Gina Carano packing from “The Mandalorian” for something insensitive she posted about the Holocaust. Partly that’s because Goldberg is much more important to the success of “The View” than Carano was to the success of her own show. But only a fool would fail to grasp McCain’s point that the media is more comfortable defending draconian penalties against the right than the left.

Even so, Whoopi is reportedly furious at the suspension:

Goldberg, 66, feels “humiliated” at being disciplined by ABC execs after she followed their advice to apologize for the ill-conceived comments, a well-placed insider told The Post.

“She feels ABC executives mishandled this. She followed their playbook. She went on ‘The Late Show With Steven Colbert’ and then apologized again on ‘The View’ the next day,” a source said…

“Her ego has been hurt and she’s telling people she’s going to quit,” the source said. “Suspension from ‘The View’ is like getting suspended from Bravo. The bar is very low.”

According to the Daily Beast, her co-hosts are also outraged at the suspension. Is that a matter of standing up for a buddy or are the liberal ladies of “The View” mortified by the sudden prospect of accountability for the dumber things they say? Either way, Ana Navarro told the Beast, “I love Whoopi Goldberg. I love The View. This was an incredibly unfortunate incident. Whoopi is a lifelong ally to the Jewish community. She is not an antisemite. Period. I am sad. And I have nothing else to say.”

“She is not an anti-semite.” That’s one reason why so many believe ABC went too far in suspending her, that her comments about the Holocaust seem motivated not by malice but by ignorance. She’s not the first person to have trouble discerning whether Jews are members of a religion or a separate race, notes Yair Rosenberg. “Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in,” he wrote yesterday. “This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in!”

When someone speaks from ignorance rather than malevolence and apologizes (repeatedly) upon being corrected, the response should be forgiveness. Joe Rogan deserves the same after vowing to do better when addressing subjects like COVID and vaccines. So why is Whoopi being punished anyway? Is it really the case that ABC executives are “frail,” as Scarborough said?

Nah. I think this is the proverbial “chilling effect” of cancel culture in action. It’s probably true that no one was going to lead a boycott of “The View” or of ABC if Goldberg went unpunished, especially after the head of the ADL appeared on the show and said last night that he accepts her apology. But one never can tell. There’s a stochastic element to cancellation in which some efforts to punish a heretic gain grassroots traction and become a financial and PR problem for a company whereas others never quite get going. ABC looked at the Whoopi controversy, I suspect, and decided to offer a half-measure to placate critics before a few days of bad press had a chance to metastasize into something more challenging. Solution: Don’t fire her but do suspend her for two weeks and hope that’s enough to get people off their back.

Which is exactly how the cancelers out there want corporations to react. The goal of cancel culture isn’t to systematically boycott every celebrity who crosses a particular political line. The goal is to get corporations to act preemptively by punishing the unorthodox in hopes of heading off any cancellation efforts that might be brewing. Co-opt corporate America into becoming enforcers of your politics and you can prevent problematic opinions from being platformed in the first place. That’s a much more robust approach to ensuring orthodoxy than having to protest an endless stream of unorthodox statements that make it to air.

Here’s a smart take from British TV on the problem with what Goldberg said.

Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended by The View following her controversial comments about the Holocaust when she said 'it was not about race'@Baddiel tells @susannareid100 and @adilray that Goldberg's comments reveal 'a lot about the confusions people have around anti-semitism' pic.twitter.com/63VR5SV9BD

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) February 2, 2022