Roseanne Barr, who described herself as ethnically Russian, Polish and Lithuanian Jewish in her autobiography (Roseanne: My Life as a Woman, New York 1989, Harper and Row), has staged a comedic comeback on the documentary channel of America’s most-viewed television personality, Tucker Carlson.
Barr said she was blackballed, or “canceled,” by Hollywood after she tweeted disparaging remarks about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett in 2018. Barr wrote of Jarrett: “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=v.” Jarrett then claimed she was a “person of color” because she had Persian ancestry, and that the “ape” reference was therefore racist. Barr countered she thought Jarrett was white, and that the charge of racism was purely political, stemming from Barr’s support for the policies of then-president Donald Trump. The American television network ABC promptly canceled Barr’s revamped “Roseanne” series and removed all references to it from their website.
Barr is no stranger to controversy. She parodied the American national anthem at a nationally-televised baseball game in 1990, which then-president George H. W. Bush called “disgraceful.” Her first series “Roseanne” ran from 1988 to 1997, outliving the bush presidency, and was updated by ABC in 2018 with most of the same members of the cast, albeit 20 years older.
She gave an interview to Tucker Carlson’s documentary enterprise Tucker Carlson Today which aired last week. Tucker Carlson Tonight is the most-watched news program in the United States and he presented a long excerpt from that interview on his evening show last week, in which Roseanne vowed to be even more offensive now than in the past. She characterized the prevailing leftist political ideology in the United States as pure fascism and said it was impossible to compromise with that ideology in order to get by. Fox Nation, the premium service of the Fox news and entertainment network, is scheduled to air her new comedy special “Cancel This” in early 2023.
She spoke extensively about her faith in God and her Judaic religious beliefs in the interview.
Full interview available here.