Roseanne Barr Is Our Duke Of The Week

TPM Illustration. Photo by Getty Images/ Vera Anderson
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

For those masochists among us who have followed Roseanne Barr’s Twitter timeline over the past seven years, it’d be less-than- jolting to learn the comedian and recently revived sitcom actress tweeted something racist this week.

Since she joined Twitter in 2011, Barr’s timeline has served as a watering hole for conspiracy theorists and racist trolls alike, providing ammo for fringe groups’ arsenals, regardless of political ideology.

A brief overview: Barr has been an enthusiastic propagator of Pizzagate, vehemently asserts that 9-11 was an inside job, has occasionally climbed aboard the vaccine-truther train, regularly promotes anti-Jewish and Holocaust denying tweets, while simultaneously labeling Israel a “Nazi state” and retweeting arguments about Palestinian violence.

Despite this record of unhinged rhetoric, Barr managed to shock the masses (and her ABC bosses) with a clearly racist tweet this week, buried in a thread of conspiratorial comments about members of former President Barack Obama’s administration, who, according to Barr, deployed FBI agents to spy on the former French president.

“muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” she wrote at 2:45 a.m. Tuesday.

The tweet, clearly referencing former Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, was deleted posthaste. But the sitcom star was not fast enough: As is inevitable when celebrities let loose in the Twitterverse, someone had taken a screenshot. The distinctly racist comment about Jarrett, who is African American, went viral by sunrise.

The backlash prompted Barr to tweet an apology (also now deleted) for “making a bad joke about her politics and her looks” and vowing to leave Twitter for good. (She didn’t.)

Within hours of releasing her apparently disingenuous apology, ABC announced it had canceled her self-titled reboot, “Roseanne,” a sitcom about a working-class family in Illinois that originated in the 1980s and was rebooted this year with a new plot involving political themes. (Barr’s character was a Trump supporter, as Barr is in real life, and her sister Jackie voted for Hillary Clinton.)

After the show was cancelled, Barr continued to post defensive tweets and retweets justifying her behavior. She shared a post that suggested she thought Jarrett was white. In a since-deleted tweet she claimed she was “Ambien tweeting” at the time she made the “joke.” (“Racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication,” the manufacturer behind the sleep aid tweeted.) Barr later told followers that their encouragement had inspired her to “do something” to assert her freedom of speech. She ended the day Thursday begging for more followers and requesting “prayers for healing of our divided nation.”

The President, predictably, couldn’t resist the urge to dive in to the political mud slinging. Instead of criticizing ABC for cancelling Barr’s show — of which he was, apparently, a big fan — he used the melee as an excuse to re-up his attacks on the media, posting a less-than-subtle tweet questioning why he hadn’t received an apology from the CEO of Disney for the “HORRIBLE” things said about him on ABC News.

Despite her tumultuous week on Twitter, Roseanne is back at it: Her latest Twitter crusade amplifies anti-Muslim troll Amy Mek’s claims that journalist Luke O’Brien of The Huffington Post was “endangering” her family by writing about them.

For posting a tweet so racist that even Trump couldn’t be bothered to use his 280-character megaphone to defend it outright, Barr is our Duke of the Week.

Latest News

Notable Replies

  1. Like Trump, absolutely nothing surprising in Barr’s behavior. ABC knew what they were getting with the reboot.

  2. I’m just glad Roseanne got so much exposure that almost everyone knows what a racist, bigoted nutbar she really is.

  3. It’s hard to believe ABC didn’t know about:

    Perhaps ABC, rather than Roseanne, deserves that Duke award.

  4. Avatar for gr gr says:

    Going way back in her career – alleging her parents molesting her as a diapered infant – I knew she was 3 tacos short of a picnic. Oh yes, it was a “recovered memory”.
    BTW: I thought the Duke was for government corruption behavior.
    Roseanne Barrs are a dime a dozen. She just happens to be a comedienne who played a red neck blue collar wife in a TV show for people like her.

  5. “When the going gets tough, the tough blame Ambien!”

    “If you can’t stand the heat, Tweet a picture of yourself in the kitchen baking some ‘Jew Cookies’ and point the finger at Holocaust-survivor George Soros.”

    “Due unto others as 4Chan would do unto that Kenyan Muslim Socialist Usurper Barack Obama.”

    “When life gives you lemons, squeeze out some inexcusably racist remarks about a person whose political beliefs you disagree with.”

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

13 more replies

Participants

Avatar for system1 Avatar for adabsurdum Avatar for dave48 Avatar for danny Avatar for gr Avatar for sanni Avatar for tao Avatar for kitty Avatar for thunderclapnewman Avatar for tena Avatar for dommyluc Avatar for michaelryerson

Continue Discussion
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Deputy Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: