Of course Meghan McCain went on a self-righteous tirade about Whoopi Goldberg

Meghan Mccain has taken to the Daily Mail in an oped to discuss Whoopi Goldberg’s recent comments about the Holocaust on The View. She wants you to know though that she really, really didn’t want to have to say anything, but just couldn’t help but feel a moral obligation to offer her shiny pair of pennies. She also stresses how happy and fulfilled she has become in the six months since leaving The View so unceremoniously and mysteriously.

Her piece reads as being informed by bitterness for how her time on The View played out, but also like an opportunity to neg a beloved former co-host whose comments that the Holocaust “isn’t about race” led to a two-week suspension rather than a firing. The mild penalty, she says, proves an inherent bias in media against conservatives.

It feels contradictory — especially from someone who once tweeted “I have a responsibility to speak for the 50% that feels media doesn’t represent them,” while also at the same time being a self-proclaimed “ABC political analyst.” It’s not that the media has a bias against conservatives; it is that conservative media and liberal media handle things so differently. Places like OAN, Fox News, and her husband’s The Federalist routinely allow their pundits, guests, and writers to say all kinds of absurdist, inflammatory, and factually incorrect things without issue. And that is the standard that conservatives want from liberal media, but don’t get; that gets turned into accusations of bias, when they’re really just playing in the wrong sandbox to begin with.

McCain extensively paints herself as an advocate against antisemitism to give herself authority to condemn Goldberg’s comments. And while antisemitism is an insidious force that we should denounce and stop, her singular focus on it feels manipulative. She cherry-picks statistics that while being genuinely horrifying, she also refuses to contextualize. The rise in antisemitism she’s denoting is congruent with a rise in all minority-targeted and race-based bigotry and hate crimes, largely stoked by the Trump administration and its rhetoric. McCain paints the story as if antisemitism happens in a vacuum far away from the broad spectrum of hate groups that identify as conservatives like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. She alleges, “...actual bigotry toward the Jewish people is not just tolerated but defended in ways I find abhorrent. For many years, this has been an underlying aspect of leftist politics, particularly of the campus variety.” This comes from a woman who suggested that the January 6th insurrection could be correlated to Black Lives Matter protests, and who's been accused of cultural appropriation.

McCain has famously refused to let up on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar after Omar made problematic comments about lobbying that were read as antisemitic — which Omar adamantly apologized for. Accusing liberals of antisemitism seems to be McCain’s favorite weapon, and unfortunately, Whoopi’s ill-advised and poorly thought-out comments led her right into McCain’s favorite trap. McCain also seems both in favor of misconstruing pro-Palestinian remarks as anti-Jewish remarks, and also blind to her own camp’s antisemitic remarks — having once turned a conversation on The View about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s likening mask mandates to the Holocaust into yet another rant about Omar. But like Omar, Whoopi has apologized — and did so not only on two different television shows and Twitter the same day as her comments, she also took the time to educate herself by speaking with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on the show the next day. And still, she is enduring a two-week suspension to have time to reflect. I’d argue those are real consequences not motivated by bias.

But McCain conversely says, “I was lectured to thousands of times on The View, there is a belief that 'cancel culture' is really 'accountability culture' among the woke left. Which seems to be a belief that's quickly forgotten whenever it's Whoopi who has to be held to account.” It feels like she is insisting that she received unfair treatment by comparison, and while yes, she was often rebuked by her co-hosts with differing opinions, she left the show with two years on her contract and with the producers trying to convince her to say.

Meghan McCain is a product of her upbringing, which just so happens to be of the blue blood conservative variety. It comes with a special flavor of smug righteousness that belies a disdain of criticism against the conservative ethos. There’s nothing a representative of conservative values seems to love more than when someone on the left messes up. It turns into a “liberals, they’re just like us!” very quickly without much thought to the long list of people on the right who have espoused similar or worse ideas, and rarely with an apology. While McCain was occasionally critical of Trump while he was president, she doesn’t seem to want to reckon with the real hate that he spurred, and instead find any liberal to potentially point fingers at. And while advocating against anti-semitism is noble, for Mccain it reads more like a shield and sword, one she will happily wield against her former co-host.