Consider their silence broken.
On Monday morning, The View aired a new episode and finally addressed the controversy behind ABC yanking Jimmy Kimmel off the air last week.
The panelists had previously been criticized for not speaking out on such a salient topic, with many observers wondering if they had been ordered to stay quiet by their corporate bosses.
To open the program, host Whoopi Goldberg said she and the others on stage “took a breath to see if Jimmy [Kimmel] was going to say anything about it” first, adding:
“I mean, look, did y’all really think we were not gonna talk about Jimmy Kimmel? I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons? You know, no one silences us.”
Referencing CBS recently deciding to cancel Stephen Colbert, Goldberg continued:
“We did the same thing with Stephen Colbert. Then, our show was on tape on Friday. But we are live here today. And we’re getting into it now.”
And then they got into it.
“You can not like a show and it can go off the air” and “someone can say something they shouldn’t and get taken off the air,” but “the government can not apply pressure to force someone to be silenced,” Goldberg explained as her stance.
Goldberg added of President Donald Trump:
“I don’t understand how you are the man in charge of the nation and you still don’t understand how the First Amendment works.”
Are we sure he doesn’t understand? Or is it more that he simply does not care?
From there, Ana Navarro expressed her viewpoint.
“For me, I want to start by thanking our loyal viewers for demanding truth and courage from us. You deserve it and we will give it to you,” she said.
“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 — who stood for debate, who stood for freedom of speech, is being used to silence people and cancel people.
“I don’t understand how in this country, where the First Amendment made to the constitution was to guarantee freedom of the press and freedom of speech, the government itself is using its weight and power to bully and scare people into silence.”
Charlie Kirk’s memorial service was held over the weekend, several days after the conservative commentator was shot dead while making a speech on a college campus in Utah.
Farah Griffin, meanwhile, encouraged viewers to “think about the precedent it sets down the road.”
Two days before ABC’s September 17 decision, Kimmel said during his monologue that 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. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
He also offered his condolences to Kirk’s family prior to the episode.
And he didn’t say a negative thing at all about Kirk himself.
At the end of the September 22 episode of The View, Goldberg wished the audience a happy Rosh Hashanah and offered this message:
“Don’t give up, we are all in this together and we’re doing it, and we will see you tomorrow, because we will.”