Joe Hildebrand: Whoopi Goldberg debacle proves ‘wokeness is finally eating itself’

The fearsome backlash to Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust blunder shows a long-awaited moment has finally arrived.

It’s been a long and humourless wait but the great moment has finally come: wokeness is eating itself.

Granted, few people predicted it would be digested by Whoopi Goldberg, but let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Goldberg managed to get herself cancelled last week for saying, amid various inane and incomprehensible motherhood statements, that the Holocaust was not about race.

According to Whoopi it was just a bunch of white guys killing another bunch of white guys.

Notwithstanding that the Nazis attempted to literally exterminate Jews from the planet because they believed themselves to be members of an Aryan master race and Jews to be racially inferior — and that this is arguably the most well known historical fact of the 20th century — Goldberg’s confusion is perhaps understandable.

Whoopi Goldberg is facing backlash for her comments. Picture: Valerie Macon/AFP

After all we live in an age in which the prism of identity politics dictates that one can only be oppressed based on a preordained list of racial, sexual or various characteristics — almost all of them physical, oddly enough.

But unfortunately for Holocaust victims and survivors, being Jewish is not on the list.

In fact, Jews are now the oppressors in this new paradigm — as the organisers of the Sydney Festival found out last month.

And so Goldberg’s fundamental mistake was to somehow absorb this bloodlessly dogmatic language of perpetual oppression and then blurt it out in a mindless word salad that almost poetically demonstrated the idiocy at the heart of critical race theory.

If anything, the world owes her thanks.

Whoopi’s whoopsie followed the case of Muslim AFLW player Haneen Zreika who refused to take part in the Pride round, thus leaving wokesters excruciatingly torn as to which marginalised community they should flock to Twitter in support of.

As it turned out, the silence was deafening on both counts.

Haneen Zreika sat out of the AFLW’s Pride Round. Picture: Kelly Defina/Getty Images

The fearless Dave Chappelle summed up this phenomenon perfectly with his masterful routine on the Jussie Smollett fake-gay-race-hate scandal, in which he described the black community’s response as “oddly quiet”.

While hip Hollywood types upsized their outrage on every available medium, most African-Americans knew this was something they shouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

The lack of outrage about young Ms Zreika suggests certain woke types have also learned a lesson about when to shut up.

May we hope they learn it often.

An even more bizarre sign was presented by none other than Neil Young, who threatened to pull all his music from Spotify if the streaming service didn’t cancel Joe Rogan for airing a few bats**t crazy views on vaccination.

Spotify declined and Young followed through with his threat.

Neil Young wiped his music from Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast. Picture: Alice Chiche and Carmen Mandato/AFP

Joni Mitchell also publicly threatened the same thing, thus shocking thousands of music fans who hadn’t realised she was still alive.

And so it appears that woke boomers have joined forces with woke millennials in oppressing poor, long-suffering Gen Xers, who have had to carry the can and foot the bill for both whiny generations.

Thank God we all got quietly rich.

And just to add to the toasty self-immolation, it has now emerged that the chief executive of CNN has had to resign after having a relationship with a colleague that he failed to declare.

Of course it is absurd that anyone should lose their job because of who they are sleeping with but of course CNN has made itself America’s moral policeman — sorry, officer — and all students of wokeness know that it is impossible for anyone to have a relationship with anyone on a different paygrade without there being a toxic power imbalance.

Thus CEO Jeff Zucker had no choice but to get himself cancelled, just like Whoopi Goldberg, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Haneen Zreika. What a time to be alive!

Jeff Zucker stepped down over his relationship. Picture: Robert Marquardt/Getty Images

Of course there is a school of thought that perhaps we should all just calm down and accept that other people have different views and values to our own and that that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Some might even say it’s the foundational ingredient of freedom of thought, freedom of expression and liberal democracy itself.

But that would hardly be in keeping with the tolerant and progressive society we are told we must be forced to accept.

And so even as we might gleefully cheer on the woke consuming themselves, we should also never forget that they are consuming us too.

Joe Hildebrand is host of The Blame Game, 8.30pm Fridays on Sky News Australia.