On a recent episode of This Past Weekend with Theo Von, the popular comedian sat down with fellow comic Roseanne Barr, whose comeback show was canceled in 2018 in the wake of her sending racist tweets. Now, Barr has made another alarming comment, telling him that “nobody died in the Holocaust,” before adding, “It should happen. Six million Jews should die right now ’cause they cause all the problems in the world.”
It’s unclear whether she actually believes the Holocaust didn’t take place, or whether she was making an abhorrent comment about what you are and aren’t allowed to say online.
Barr had previously attributed her cancellation over her racist tweet, which read, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj [Valerie Jarrett],” to “intellectual witch-burning, and arrogance and ignorance. All of the press of the United States and the world, how they interpreted my tweet without any knowledge of the fact that I was sending it to a journalist in Iran about what was happening to the people in Iran. We’re under such terrible censorship. It’s just terrible and frightening.”
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In May, she also blasted former Roseanne co-star Sara Gilbert for talking extensively about her cancellation over racist tweets. “It wasn’t enough that [Gilbert] stabbed me in the back and did what she did to me there, but then she would go on her talk show every day and talk about how shocked she was at my racism on top of it,” Barr told Megyn Kelly. “It was [Gilbert’s] tweet that canceled the show.”
Barr, who is Jewish, brought up the Holocaust in the context of a conversation with Von about not being able to speculate that the last presidential election had been rigged without being de-platformed from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
“You can’t say that like, you know, the election,” Barr told Von, “was rigged or not rigged,” Von finished. “Right,” Barr responded. “That’s all a lie. The election was not rigged. Thirty six counties can give you 81 million votes. That’s a fact.”
“That's the truth,” Barr said, as Von laughed. “And don’t you dare say anything against it. You’ll be off YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other ones because we have, you know, there’s such a thing as the truth and facts and we have to stick to it.”
“And that is the truth,” Barr continued, “and nobody died in the Holocaust either.”
Von didn’t push back against Barr’s statement in the clip, and instead pivots right into asking her, “You’re part Jewish, right? And a lot of Hollywood is Jewish, yeah? They started Hollywood.”
“Just like rap, Black people started rap,” Barr responded. “So I went to go over there and tried to get in rap and go, ‘All these Black people, you know, go on Saturday Night Live like Dave Chappelle. I’m just saying a lot of Black people are in control of rap. Hello?’ Well, you went there. You tried to get in show business. Of course it’s Jewish. But you know, and people should be glad that it’s Jewish too, because if Jews were not controlling Hollywood, all you’d have was fucking fishing shows.”
Von, meanwhile, appeared to be attempting some damage control when he tweeted on Tuesday, “This Roseanne Barr clip was sarcasm folks. A clip taken out of a long sarcastic rant she had during our chat. Can we not recognize sarcasm anymore?”
In response to Barr’s comments, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted, “Sarcasm or not, Roseanne Barr’s comments about Jews and the Holocaust are reprehensible and irresponsible. This isn’t funny. And shame on Theo Von for letting it go unchallenged and instead diving into conspiracy theories about Jews and Hollywood.”
