Do we like Whoopi Goldberg?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long record of backing LGBTQ+ people, with one real stain: the Holocaust remarks that she apologised for twice.
Whoopi sits at the table on The View, where the hosts argue the day's hot topics live on air. That is a recipe for hot takes, and hers have regularly landed her in the news. Live TV means she says things without a script, and some of them she has had to take back.
The big stain is February 2022. Discussing the ban of the graphic novel Maus, she said the Holocaust “isn’t about race”, a line that drew a wave of backlash. ABC News president Kim Godwin suspended her for two weeks, and Whoopi said she should have said it was about both and apologised for the hurt caused. Then in December 2022 she revisited the point in a Sunday Times interview, and followed up with a statement saying she was “still as sorry now as I was then”.
On the harm test, we found nothing in her own words aimed at LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. The sting is the Holocaust comments, which hurt Jewish people, and the fact she brought it up again months after apologising. The record on vaccines and climate turned up thin in our searches, so we can't say much on those. It's a mark, not a pattern, which is why it's an asterisk.
The recent stuff is mostly politics on the couch. In January 2026, after a fatal shooting in Minneapolis involving an ICE agent, she suggested on air that agents were “violent criminals”, then said after the break “That is not what I’m doing”, arguing it was about accountability. In February 2026 she addressed her name appearing in the Epstein files via a 2013 email, saying she wasn't involved with him; the report doesn't say she has been accused of anything. Where you land on the ICE comments depends on whether you read them as a slip or a point about oversight.
On the good side, West Hollywood gave her the key to the city in July 2024, with the city recognising her support for the LGBTQ+ community. She has also said she has “no plans to go back to the Kennedy Center” after the Trump takeover, calling it a smack to the arts. That's a stand, whichever side of that fight you're on.
So would we support her? Yes. She has got things wrong on air, and the Holocaust episode was a proper stuff-up, but she apologised and the rest of her record leans our way. We didn't get to check every corner of her long career, so call this the picture from the last few years rather than the whole filing cabinet.