Roseanne Barr Has Been a Dangerous Conspiracy Theorist All Along

It began, as so many scandals do today, with a tweet. On Tuesday morning, actress Roseanne Barr cracked a racist “joke” at the expense of Valerie Jarrett, comparing the former Obama adviser to an ape. Within hours, Barr had issued a public apology and vowed to “leave Twitter.” Before noon in Los Angeles, she was unemployed, with ABC canceling the second season (eleventh overall) of her eponymous sitcom “Roseanne.” “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” President of ABC Entertainment Channing Dungey said in a statement.

Dungey, who is the network’s first black president, has earned plaudits for her decisive action. Still, in an age when the president of the United States regularly obscures the truth while degrading entire races and populations, the question remains: Why did ABC feel compelled to revive Barr’s television career in the first place?

Tuesday’s tweetstorm is hardly the comedienne’s first brush with ignominy. Less than a decade ago, Barr, who grew up in a working-class Jewish household in Salt Lake City, posed for a “Germany” issue of the now-defunct magazine Heeb with a swastika armband and Hitler mustache. The photo shoot included pics of her displaying a batch of burnt gingerbread men that accompanied an article titled “That Oven Feelin’.”

“There’s another, deeper layer to it,” Barr explained to “The Aristocrats” producer Paul Provenza at the time. “You know just the every day. Moving off this Holocaust. There’s been about fifty of them since then. That’s what I’m kind of trying to say. Jesus Christ it’s so every day now, holocausts, it’s like baking cookies…You know what I mean, I don’t know. I’m just really old. When you’re post-menopausal, you’re just really crazy.”

If the incident can be dismissed as an attempt at edgy humor for a Jewish satirical magazine gone awry, her more recent behavior cannot. An avid Trump supporter, Barr has emerged in recent years as one of the right’s more delirious conspiracy theorists. On several occasions, she has suggested, baselessly, that former DNC staffer Seth Rich was assassinated, and that the Clinton campaign operated a child sex ring out of the Washington, D.C., pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. Prior to her departure from Twitter on Tuesday, she retweeted an account offering information about Reddit invention QAnon, a shadowy Trump official whose dispatches detail the president’s plan to combat the deep state and (what else) a cabal of liberal pedophiles—or so his followers have convinced themselves.

Tuesday’s episode wasn’t even the first time Barr has engaged in overt bigotry on social media. In a tweet from 2013 that has since been deleted, the actress called then-ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice “a man with big swinging ape balls.” (A separate attack this morning saw her accuse billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator, an anti-Semitic smear popular among white nationalists). As of this writing, she has just shy of 700,000 followers on Twitter.

ABC executives have known who Barr was all along, and they greenlighted new seasons of “Roseanne” anyway. Whereas the original sitcom offered a nuanced portrait of a working-class American family, the reboot has served, at least in part, to sanitize the voice of certain Trump voters. Roseanne Barr reveals what one actually sounds like.