“Name anyone who’s been assassinated in this country. We continue to fight on, and that’s what America offers,” Goldberg said on “The View.”

Days after controversial commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a college campus discussion about gun violence in America, The View cohost Whoopi Goldberg has offered a powerful bit of advice for would-be assassins who might target public figures.

The 69-year-old EGOT-winning Ghost and Sister Act actress said Monday morning on the talk show that, although “we’ve seen it before” in terms of politically motivated assassinations, violence is never the answer.

“It’s awful when it’s a Kennedy or a Lincoln or a Garfield. It doesn’t matter. What assassins should always remember is, just because you take somebody out, doesn’t mean the message is going to stop,” Goldberg said, looking into the show’s camera. “It’s important to keep that in mind.”

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‘The View’ cohosts discuss Charlie Kirk’s assassination

She continued, “When you look at our loss of Martin Luther King, name anyone who’s been assassinated in this country. We continue to fight on, and that’s what America offers.”

Goldberg, whose views are largely left-leaning and vastly different from Kirk’s, said that “you have the right to say and feel whatever you want” in America, which she said is “your birthright” as a citizen.

“Taking somebody out is not the way to do it. You want to fight about something? Go to the ballot box, elect different people,” she stressed. “Killing people doesn’t do anything except make it a horrible world for their children.”

Earlier during the Hot Topics discussion, Republican panelists Ana Navarro and former Donald Trump White House staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin also pushed back against the idea of fostering a culture of political violence in the United States.

“To me, it doesn’t matter what their political persuasion was. A lot of people are out there trying to portray Charlie Kirk as if he was spreading pixie dust around the country. A lot of people, to use the word of [Utah’s] Gov. Cox, found what he said inflammatory or worse. But that’s not the point,” Navarro told The View crowd. “The point is, we are in America, he has the right to say it. I have the right to disagree and find it abhorrent, but our weapon in this country is debate, our weapon is freedom of speech, our weapon is organizing, our weapon is our vote. Our weapon should never, ever be a gun.”

Griffin pointed out that tech companies often play a role, she felt, in radicalizing Americans against one another through the use of an “algorithm that’s meant to make us hate our neighbor,” while she urged viewers to “reject it, touch grass,” and “talk to your neighbor” to get to a point of understanding.

“Talk to humans. We have to be the change we want to see,” she finished.

On Thursday, the morning after Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, Goldberg called his death “beyond devastating,” and said she hoped the impact of Kirk’s legacy meant that “young Republicans never forget that they have voice.”

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Charlie Kirk

Kirk’s controversial rhetoric on political and social issues led to polarized reactions in the public sphere. After his death, users online pointed out the irony that, when he was shot, Kirk was discussing with an audience member the issue of gun violence in the country. Many also pointed to a 2023 interview in which Kirk spoke about the Second Amendment.

It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” Kirk said on stage in 2023.