The hosts of “The View” broke their silence on Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension on Monday morning, scoffing at the idea that anyone thought they’d remain silent.
“Now look. Did y’all really think we weren’t going to talk about Jimmy Kimmel?” moderator Whoopi Goldberg asked as soon as she sat down. “I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons? So you know no one silences us.”
In the immediate days following Kimmel’s suspension, the hosts stayed silent on the show, prompting many to think they were instructed to stay silent by ABC, as the network owns both “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The View.” But according to Whoopi, they were just taking “a breath to see if Jimmy was going to say anything about it first.”
“To be clear, you can not like a show and it can go off the air. Someone can say something they shouldn’t, and get taken off the air. But the government cannot apply pressure to force someone to be silenced,” she continued.
Kimmel was pulled from air for his comments following Kirk’s killing, in which he said “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Following his comments, FCC chair Brendan Carr publicly called for stations to stop broadcasting Kimmel.
“I want to start by thanking our loyal viewers for demanding truth and courage from us,” host Ana Navarro said. “You deserve it, and we’ll give it to you.”
“The part that I don’t understand that is so ironic to me is how the horrible, senseless, assassination of Charlie Kirk, a man I disagreed with but who stood for debate, who stood for freedom of speech, is being used to silence people and cancel people,” she continued.
Before his death, Kirk asserted that hate speech wasn’t real as he posted vitriol about marginalized groups himself. In a 2024 social media post, he wrote that “hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”
“This is what dictators and authoritarians do,” Navarro said. “It does not matter the ideology. At first, they come for the people with big platforms. At first, they silence the press. But then they come for all of us. Because their intent is to scare us into silence and self-censorship.”
Meanwhile, host Alyssa Farah-Griffin echoed sentiments expressed by Jake Tapper, warning conservatives celebrating Kimmel’s cancellation that, eventually, there will be a Democratic president again, and they won’t want to be subjected to their own precedent.
Recently, Whoopi Goldberg called out Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying she “is blurring the lines when it comes to what constitutes hate speech” after threatening to “target” anyone celebrating the assassination of Kirk.
“I always thought that this administration campaigned on ending the weaponization of free speech,” Whoopi said at the time.
“I know there’s a lot of stuff people say that I don’t like,” she continued. “I don’t like it, but as an American, I have the right to say I don’t like it, and they have the right to say it. I will fight for their right to say stuff I don’t like, because I will say stuff they don’t like, and I don’t want them up my behind about it either. So I don’t understand.”
“The View” airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
