Wednesday night on CNN, Van Jones had The View’s Whoopi Goldberg on his special townhall style series The Messy Truth as his guest. The show, which admirably attempts to get people from both sides of the political aisle talking to eachother, unfortunately only made the truth messier with Whoopi, who made a number of dubious and patently false claims.
The show started off with Whoopi talking with a pro-life woman in the audience about last weekend’s women’s march. The audience member said it was unfortunate that what was supposed to be a positive, inclusive movement ended up excluding pro-life women like her. Whoopi calls that “a mistake” but then goes on to defend the march’s organizers as not purposefully excluding pro-life women:
VAN JONES: Was that a mistake Whoopi?
WHOOPI: It was absolutely a mistake
JONES: Because it was like a litmus test for the kind of woman that could come.
WHOOPI: Well, no, I think in part, part of the problem and I only found this out yesterday because Cristela was on our show. And we asked her about this because she's very close with the people who organized. They never -- the people who organized this never specifically said this is just -- this is for you. This is for you. That, you know, once you get too many people involved, everybody says well you can't come and you can't come. From what I understand, and it wasn't the case in New York, because everybody marched in New York. But what I -- what I was told by her is that that was not true of the organizers, and yes it was a mistake. Because this was about women marching.
Whoopi tries to explain away pro-life groups from being excluded as an unintentional “mistake” but that flies in the face of facts, at least for the women’s march on Washington. The organizers there even released a statement clarifying that pro-life groups were not welcome. The snub was purposeful.
Later in the program, Whoopi made a false statement, out-of-the-blue about Mitch McConnell that she has repeated at least four or five times this year alone on The View and ABC News fact checkers have yet to call her out on it. While talking about Obama, Whoopi suddenly brings up a very old statement from McConnell:
WHOOPI: And also, you know, Obama -- let's talk a little bit about Obama.
JONES: Yes.
WHOOPI: Okay. So here the guy gets in. Okay, he gets in. Day two, the man -- what's his name --
JONES: McConnell.
WHOOPI: Mitch McConnell said we're not going to help him--we’re not doing anything. Nothing.
JONES: Nothing.
Whoopi is referring to McConnell saying that he wanted to make President Obama a “one-term President,” a statement he made two years into Obama’s term. So not only is Whoopi grossly distorting what McConnell actually said, but she continues to claim it was immediately after Obama entered the White House, a patently false claim.
While ABC News has yet to call out Whoopi on this fake statement, Politifact recently rated a lie she told on the View, (that we blogged about here at Newsbusters,) as “pants on fire” false. Maybe this one with McConnell will earn her another entry in Politifact if she continues to repeat it.
Towards the end of the show, Whoopi also claimed that the 2008 election of Obama with black voters was not about skin color, even though 96% of blacks voted for him:
VAN JONES: You know, one of the things that I was curious about. It was a woman's March, it was a big women's March, how do we deal with the fact that 42% of the women who voted though voted for Donald Trump and 53% of the white women who voted, voted for Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. What -- what kind of a woman's movement is it when you have those kind of numbers.
WHOOPI: Well, I don't think women were voting for women. They were voting for candidates. And that should be clear to people. You know, people always -- what people said, oh, you're black, you voted for Barack Obama. Don't make that assumption. These women voted their beliefs. And if Hillary had shared those beliefs, maybe they would have voted for Hillary. So I think you have to, you know, first you have to start up here with the bar.
