Whoopi Goldberg Has Had It
'The View' moderator openly not giving a f*ck is canon to the show. But has her IDGAF attitude turned to apathy for the job?
On October 2nd, I saw a headline, the first five words of which piqued my interest: “Whoopi Goldberg has tense clash….” I was immediately activated. I’d barely clicked into the article when the disappointment set in; this “tense clash” paled in comparison to a bygone era of The View in which “tense” once meant walking off the set mid-interview and “clash” used to be Whoopi telling Meghan McCain, "Girl, please stop talking. Please stop talking right now!” before McCain vowed to not speak for the rest of the show. Clearly, things have changed since I got off the merry-go-round.
I became a devout View-er beginning in 2005. I watched Rosie O’Donnell v. Elisabeth Hasselbeck happen live, LL Cool J bicep curling Elisabeth, Sherri Shepherd and Joy Behar, Whoopi’s first fart, Whoopi defending Mel Gibson, Kelly Osbourne/Rosie Perez “Oh, that’s — no…” and “In the sense that...” and of course “I am John McCain's Daughter!”/“I am Gino Occhiuto's daughter!” I’ve read Barbara Walters’s Audition cover to cover twice, can name every co-host in chronological order and have even been to Sunny Hostin’s Purchase, New York home.
But when Meghan McCain left the show in 2021 (one of the only co-hosts to elect to leave rather than be fired), I began to drift. Still, I feel an obligation to touch down once in a while and get a lay of the land and pay necessary respect to the house that built me. So on Monday, effectively teased by the “tense clash,” I decided to watch tip to toe. What I discovered was actually far more interesting than the aforementioned “tense clash” in which Whoopi went after a Republican congresswoman about her anti-abortion stance.