After not addressing the the suspension of their ABC colleague Jimmy Kimmel last week, the hosts of The View wasted no time getting into the subject Monday.
“Did y’all really think we weren’t gonna talk about Jimmy Kimmel? I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons?” Whoopi Goldberg said to begin Monday’s show. “No one silences us.”
She added, however, that after the news of Kimmel’s suspension broke on Sept. 17, the show “took a breath” to see if Kimmel would make a public comment (he has not yet). Goldberg noted that they did the same thing when CBS announced it was ending The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. So they didn’t talk about Kimmel’s suspension on Thursday’s live episode of The View or Friday’s pretaped installment.
“You can [dislike] a show and it can go off the air,” Goldberg continued. “Someone can say something they shouldn’t and get taken off the air. But the government cannot, cannot apply pressure to force someone to be silenced.”
The show then played clips of Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy saying FCC head Brendan Carr had overstepped in threatening to examine ABC affiliates’ licenses over remarks Kimmel made about the alleged killer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Ana Navarro added that she lived under both right-wing and left-wing dictatorships growing up in Nicaragua, and that silencing speech is part of the dictator playbook, regardless of ideology. “They want to scare us into silence and self-censorship,” she said.
Alyssa Farah Griffin — who worked in the White House during President Donald Trump’s first term — said standing up for free speech, even speech that doesn’t align with her personal beliefs, “is not just a long-standing American position, it’s a conservative position. … What made me a conservative was that as imperfect as our system is, the Constitution gets it pretty damn right. The First Amendment is first for a reason.”
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