Hey, ABC: Roseanne Never Should’ve Returned in the First Place
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You’ve probably heard the news by now: ABC has cancelled the Roseanne reboot after Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Normally it’d be surprising to see a company cancel the third highest-rated show on network TV. This is Roseanne Barr we’re talking about, though. Her Twitter feed has long been a home of fact-free, far right conspiracy theories ripped straight from Infowars and talk radio. It’s the kind of stuff you’d expect to read on Breitbart instead of having pumped onto your phone straight from the star of the biggest sitcom on network TV. ABC and its parent company Disney made the right move canceling her show now, but it only brings back an unanswered question many have been asking since the reboot was first announced: why give the Roseanne Barr of 2018 any platform at all?
ABC was intentionally trying to court the kind of voters who propelled Donald Trump to the White House in 2016: disaffected working class whites who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton. Let’s set aside the open racism that defined the Trump campaign and focus on the portion of Trump voters who were driven by actual economic concerns and not by right wing grievance politics. The Roseanne of the ‘90s might have spoken for those voters—it was a show about pro-union working class whites struggling with a changing economy, after all—but the Roseanne Barr of the 2010s was clearly a terrible spokesperson for anything other than fringe crackpots.
Here are the facts: Barr has been writing and sharing unhinged, hateful comments on Twitter since well before ABC brought Roseanne back. She deleted many of her most inflammatory tweets long ago, but you can easily find articles written about them at the time, like this Jerusalem Post article from 2016 that quotes Barr as calling Clinton aide Huma Abedin “a filthy nazi whore” and stating that Clinton “is surrounded by jew haters who make fun of the holocaust and jewish suffering.” This Daily Beast article details how she shared conspiracy theories blaming the left for the death of Seth Rich. She was openly transphobic and Islamophobic on Twitter years ago, has consistently liked and retweeted various conspiracy mongers and alt-right activists, and ABC still willingly went into business with her. She tweeted repeatedly about “pizzagate” and “pedogate,” accusing Democrats and the Clinton campaign of running a child sex ring. Just last night, when she wasn’t making racist comments about Jarrett, Barr was using right wing conspiracy theories to attack Chelsea Clinton and George Soros. And don’t forget that photo shoot for Heeb magazine, where Barr dressed like a Hitler baking human-shaped cookies in an oven.