“I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter,” Roseanne Barr tweeted early Tuesday morning. That was before ABC canceled the hit reboot of her sitcom after she tweeted that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was a cross between the “muslim brotherhood” and “planet of the apes.”
As of Tuesday night, Barr was back on Twitter, retweeting a barrage of supportive messages from her conservative fans, several of which contained more racist imagery of Jarrett and outright lies and conspiracy theories about her background.
One tweet that popped up in Barr’s feed was one from fake Georgia congressman Steven Smith, who tweeted, “Valerie Jarrett is LIGHTER than #Roseanne! How would she have ANY IDEA Iranian-born Muslim Valerie Jarrett is black?”
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Among the many problems with that statement: Jarrett is not a Muslim and was born to American parents in Tehran.
Another meme shared by Barr was a hoax photograph allegedly from Jarrett’s Stanford University yearbook in which she supposedly wrote, “I seek to help change America to be a more Islamic country.” As several of the comedian’s followers pointed out, Jarrett’s last name was still Bowman when she graduated college—she did not marry William Jarrett until 1983, five years after graduating from Stanford—not to mention the fact that the meme features a recent photo of her.
And then there was the meme that sought to justify Barr’s analogy between Jarrett and a character from Planet of the Apes. The argument seemed to go, if it is acceptable to compare President Trump to an orangutan—as Bill Maher famously did, and was subsequently sued for $5 million over the joke by Trump—then why shouldn’t Barr be allowed to compare this African-American woman to an ape? (Editor’s Note: This is incredibly stupid. It is racist to compare black people to apes, and not racist to compare white people to apes. This shouldn’t be difficult to understand.)
Yet after all of this, Roseanne attempted to find absolution with another series of apologies to Jarrett and the hundreds of people who lost their jobs when her show was canceled. “I am sorry for making a thoughtless joke that does not reflect my values,” she wrote.
Barr then tweeted, “guys I did something unforgiveable so do not defend me. It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended-it was egregious Indefensible. I made a mistake I wish I hadn't but...don't defend it please. Ty.”
