Comedian-turned-MAGA conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr was reminded of the circumstances behind her now-infamous firing from the reboot of her classic sitcom Roseanne after she compared her exit to ABC’s suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after President Donald Trump saw an opening to get him off the air following comments Kimmel made about the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
Yesterday, ABC said it was suspending Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” after conservatives charged the longtime host with misrepresenting the politics of the man accused of killing Kirk.
The move came just hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), criticized Kimmel and hinted his agency could take action against ABC over comments the host made during Monday’s broadcast.
Kimmel said, among other things, that “the MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
In response to a post from Atlantic writer David Frum, who said he was “trying to imagine the reaction if the Biden administration had demanded that Fox fire Greg Gutfeld because he wasn’t sufficiently sad about the assault on Paul Pelosi,” Barr wrote:
“Yeah imagine an administration putting pressure on a television channel to fire a comedian they didn’t like.”
You can see her post below.
But that’s not at all what happened.
Barr has largely failed to revive her career after she was booted from the Roseanne reboot for racist remarks about Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Barr blamed her viral tweet, in which she referred to Jarrett, who is Black, as “Planet of the Apes,” on her Ambien prescription. She was subsequently fired from Roseanne (which was canceled and eventually came back as The Conners) as a result of the scandal, and an unrepentant Barr, no stranger to courting controversy, fell deeper into the far-right.
Since then, Barr has periodically made headlines for promoting baseless lies and conspiracy theories disseminated by QAnon, whose believers allege Democrats are part of a Satan-worshipping, baby-eating, global pedophile ring that conspired against Trump during his time in office.
Barr was also fired in 2018 during the first Trump administration—not under former President Joe Biden, who took office in 2021, three years later.
She was swiftly called out by people who stressed that no, her firing could not be compared to Kimmel’s situation, which amounts to government censorship.
Carr’s push to pull Kimmel from the air marked the latest in a series of attacks on the media by the president and his administration.
Trump previously sued ABC, which later paid $16 million to settle the case. On Monday, he filed a defamation suit against The New York Times and four of its reporters.
Earlier this summer, the FCC signed off on a major merger involving Paramount, the parent company of CBS, just days after CBS agreed to a separate $16 million settlement with the president.
