Roseanne Barr's racist tweet fallout has been baffling: Even Trump and Fox News didn't come to her defense

Slate

Conservative outlets like Breitbart and Fox News used the "R-word" -- as in racist -- in describing Roseanne Barr's Valerie Jarrett tweet, as Lili Loofbourow points out. Sean Hannity blasted Barr. And President Trump -- who told supporters that Roseanne's success "was about us" when it premiered -- opted not to stick up for Barr in wake of the cancelation, with his spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying "no one is defending her comments; they are inappropriate." "It feels, to this viewer, that perhaps the last major chapter of whatever Roseanne meant to America has closed, and what’s left is the work of sorting through this clash between its star’s past progressivism and reactionary presentism," says Loofbourow. "It has been disorienting but instructive to watch the emphatic return and emphatic fall of Roseanne Barr, culture disruptor, at a time when our politics have been similarly disrupted. Barr and Trump are, after all, the yin and the yang of the story we tell about blue-collar America that’s long since stopped being true—both of them accruing capital by hearkening back to better times. Roseanne the reboot tried to do the same. Claims that the show was bravely addressing our divided political moment were ludicrously overblown. The show was funny because of how completely it side-stepped the way contemporary citizens engage with each other politically—a tendency best exemplified by its vitriolic creator, whose online conduct finally took the show down."

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