“Whoopi Goldberg ‘is in deep s–t’ and should be fired, ABC insiders claim.” So reports the New York Post. No, of course, she shouldn’t be fired for claiming, on The View, that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race” but rather “about man’s inhumanity to man.” However, the claim is absurd and ignorant. And it’s well timed to coincide with the release today of historian Richard Weikart’s Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. Goldberg would do well to study the book.

As Weikart recounts, the racist vision in Darwin’s Descent of Man fed the rising tide of pseudo-scientific racism that animated the eugenics movement and Nazi ideology, and that sprang up again with contemporary white nationalism. Hitler in Mein Kampf was clear that he deplored the mistake of basing anti-Semitism on “religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.”

In justifying herself, Goldberg tried to explain to Stephen Colbert that racism is only real to her if racial identity is evident from skin color rather than requiring an inquiry as to the individual’s beliefs or background. Hitler would have begged to differ. The Nazis had little difficulty in hunting down 6 million Jews, whom they considered an alien “race,” no matter how the Jews — as in the case of Anne Frank — sought to hide.