ABC Knew Exactly What They Were Getting With Roseanne Barr

The 65-year-old's history of peddling conspiracy theories and sharing racist and Islamophobic views should've set off alarm bells much earlier.
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ABC’s decision to cancel its “Roseanne” reboot after a racist tweet by the show’s lead star raised one immediate question on Tuesday: Uh, what took so long?

Disney CEO Robert Iger stood behind the decision, first announced by ABC president Channing Dungey, saying, “There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.”

But if Roseanne Barr’s tweet disqualifies her from leading a major network’s primetime sitcom, then her yearslong history of outlandishly false, inflammatory claims should have barred her from getting her show back in the first place.

Here are some of the problems ABC seemingly ignored when handing the 65-year-old a series.

Barr previously called a black woman an “ape.”

Barr’s tweet that sparked outrage and her show’s cancellation referred to former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, a black woman, as “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.”

In her apology Tuesday, Barr said she “should have known better” when she made her racist tweet. And she’s right — because this was at least the second time she has called a black woman an “ape.”

In a since-deleted 2013 tweet, Barr called then-President Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice “a man with big swinging ape balls.”

Twitter

Barr loves calling people Nazis.

When Barr disagrees with someone, she has a habit of calling them Nazis. The same day as her racist remarks about Jarrett, she also tweeted that liberal billionaire George Soros was “a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered.”

Soros was 14 years old in 1945 ― younger than Anne Frank ― and was never a Nazi collaborator.

In March, Barr tweeted a photo of Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor David Hogg, accusing him of making a Nazi salute. Hogg was a survivor at Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed by a gunman.

She later walked back the statement, but the damage was done.

In 2016, she called Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin “a filthy nazi whore.”

And if you happen to disagree with her? Well, you might be a Nazi too, according to Barr.

Which is very interesting, considering ...

Barr dressed up as Adolf Hitler.

In a 2009 article for the satirical Jewish magazine Heeb, Barr donned a Swatiska and Hitler mustache for a photo shoot which showed her taking gingerbread cookie figures out of an oven. The post was titled “That Oven Feelin’,” and the photos still exist all over the internet.

“Who better a symbol of Germany than Hitler?” Barr said when she finally addressed the issue in an episode of “The Green Room with Paul Provenza.”

She later said she didn’t “give a fuck what people think” and that it “pissed me off” that people were upset by it.

Barr peddles false conspiracy theories.

From falsely claiming Hogg was giving a Nazi salute during a speech, to saying Democrats were running a child sex ring out of a neighborhood pizza shop in D.C., Barr has peddled wildly false and dangerous conspiracy theories to her ravenous followers.

Barr has retweeted posts and links backing the “untold story” hoax that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop in the nation’s capital. She more recently peddled an incorrect conspiracy that President Donald Trump had “freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over this word. Hundreds each month.”

She was apparently referring to nonsense theories posted on websites including 4Chan that suggested Trump is secretly dismantling satanic child sex rings linked to high-level Democrats.

She has also tweeted about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer fatally shot in Washington in 2016, claiming it was a political assassination. No evidence suggests that.

Apparently none of these lies set off any alarms for ABC.

Barr is terrified of Muslims.

In her tweet about Jarrett, Barr said she was a baby born of the “Muslim brotherhood.” It’s just one example in a long line of insults and casually Islamophobic remarks Barr has dropped in the past.

Though she’s deleted many of her tweets, she has constantly attacked Islam and retweeted people with the same abhorrent views. In one example, she referred to Islam and “RAPE PEDO CULTURE.”

Twitter

And in one of the last episodes of the reboot, the plot centers around Roseanne Conner suspecting that her new Muslim neighbors might be terrorists.

That dog whistle could not have been louder, and still ABC did nothing.

Barr is transphobic.

“Women do not want your penises forced in their faces or in our private bathrooms,” Barr tweeted in a 2012 tirade against a transgender woman who made headlines after using a women’s locker room.

“I’m sorry, but a dick means you’re a man to me,” she wrote. “Maybe I’m old and out of it, but I can’t go there, sorry.”

It led to her getting into a lengthy Twitter spat with other users who called her out.

“I can’t help but think that lots of these trans women sound like the worst red necked woman haters I grew up around in SLC Utah,” she tweeted at the time.

Such a victim.

Barr called for a college to be bombed.

In a 2015 response to a vote in support of divestment from businesses with ties to Israeli military actions by the University of California, Davis, student government, Barr called for sectarian violence.

“I hope all the jews leave UC Davis & it then it gets nuked!” she tweeted at the time. She followed up that tweet with “Nuke all UC David Jew-Haters.”

All of this is to say that ABC made the right call in canceling Barr’s show and sending her plummeting back into the void of obscurity. They just shouldn’t have pulled her from the void to begin with.

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