Dropped over racist tweet
Roseanne,
What the columnists said
Barr is no victim of political correctness, said Katherine Timpf in NationalReview.com. Likening an AfricanAmerican woman to an ape is undeniably racist, and Barr was making “crazy statements” long before her sitcom was revived. She called 9/11 an inside job and the Boston Marathon bombing a “false-flag” operation. Barr is indeed a “toxic and troubled” personality, said David French, also in NationalReview.com. But that doesn’t make her punishment any less arbitrary. “Fire one celebrity and you can dredge up six more who’ve posted their own deranged rants.” When you make a supporter of a bigoted president a key character in your sitcom, racism is always going to rear its head, said Roxane Gay in NYTimes.com. Trump is the “living embodiment” of Barr’s Twitter feed, and his most vocal supporters “revel in the freedom and the permission” he gives them to indulge in conspiracy theories and racism. Just before her tweeted attack on Jarrett, Barr falsely accused the Hungarian-born liberal donor George Soros of turning “in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered” during the Holocaust. That earned a retweet from Donald Trump Jr.
This is why we needed Roseanne, said Emily Jashinsky in WashingtonExaminer.com. “Roseanne Barr and Roseanne Conner are different people,” and the show’s character helped audiences understand why “decent people” gravitated toward Trump. The demographic Conner depicted is “overwhelmingly misunderstood” by Hollywood. That’s why it’s so unfortunate that Barr’s tweet confirms “the industry’s stereotypes of Trump supporters” as racist deplorables—the very stereotypes Roseanne “sought to debunk.”