The nation has watched Roseanne Barr’s bizarre meltdown. It started with an overtly racist tweet that shook a major television network to its core.
Barr at first tried to handle it like many mentally ill people might. Pull yourself together and apologize. She did that, even promising to quit twitter. It didn’t work. Within hours of the racist tweet ABC cancelled her show.
With that the crazy was back on. Barr did not leave Twitter, not even a little. Instead she went on a tweeting rampage befitting . . . a certain President. She blamed her cast for throwing her under the bus, she blamed ABC, she blamed Ambien. She repeated long debunked conspiracy claims that George Soros was a Nazi “who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth.” This was after she accused Chelsea Clinton of being related to Soros, calling her “Chelsea Soros Clinton.” Barr even tried to claim she didn’t know Valerie Jarrett is black.
Barr has long advocated reality defying conspiracy theories. From 9/11 Truther claiming Bush did it, to the Boston Marathon bombing being a false flag attack, to government mind control experiments, which in at least one tweet she attributes to Jews. Seriously, how did her career survive this tweet?
Barr got some attention in late March with a bizarre tweet rooted in the pedophilia obsessed QAnon conspiracy theory, that I think just might be the most whackadoodle out there. The QAnon theory is really just an evolution of the discredited “Pizzagate” nonsense that led an Alex Jones inspired lunatic to take a rifle into the falsely accused pizza joint and fire it. At the heart of both QAnon and Pizzagate is the “Deep State Conspiracy Theory,” more on that later.
Even Barr’s racist “Planet of the Apes” attack on Valerie Jarrett was in reply to a conspiracy theory about Jarrett and Obama.
It was actually Jimmy Kimmel, of all people, who prompted me to pause in my own hostile reaction to Barr’s racist tweet, and her bizarre conspiracy filled nonsense before and after it. Kimmel reminded us that all this batfecalmaterial crazy stuff is crazy, and by that we mean mentally ill.
Kimmel is right. Barr deserves some compassion because anyone watching this meltdown can see that she is not living in reality, is clearly mentally ill, and needs help. Even her firing was reduced to a paranoid conspiracy as she retweeted that “they brought the show back so they could inevitably cancel the show when she said something they didn’t like.”
That paranoid spin is just pathological. “Roseanne” was ABC’s #1 show. It was the linchpin and focus of their advertising for the Fall season. ABC did not do this because they wanted or plotted to, they had to. I mean, follow the money. Kimmel is well founded in suggesting we deal with this reality defying conspiracy theorist as we would others who are mentally ill.
Roseanne’s more recent tweets have focus on the “whataboutism” approach of our President. Trump’s reaction to all this was to not condemn, or even address, Barr’s racism but rather to whine that ABC should apologize for doing far worse to poor little Trump.
As we discuss Barr’s mental illness resulting in a disconnection from reality, we should do the same with President Trump. That disconnection from reality is manifested even in the tweet above. Trump is complaining about a mistake Ross made last December that Trump included in his Fake News Awards. The thing is, Trump’s assertion above that ABC did not apologize does not comport with reality. ABC most definitely did and ABC punished Ross to the tune of four weeks pay. Read reality for yourself.
Trump has a long history of whackadoodle conspiracy theories that defy objective reality, many shared by Roseanne Barr. From Birtherism, Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the JFK assassination, to his claim he personally saw thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in NYC, to Justice Scalia being murdered, his bigger inauguration crowd size, to 3 million illegally cast votes, to Obama wiretapped Trump tower, the list goes on and on. Barr’s basic belief that the “Deep State” is out to get us us reflected in paranoid, they are out to get me, Trump tweets that even use the term “Deep State.”
Some of Trump’s whackadoodle conspiracy theories could have deadly impacts if applied as public policy. He claims the medical community is lying to us about vaccines.
Trump also claims the medical community is lying to us about the risks of Ebola, a belief that had he been President could have been a death sentence for at least two Americans.
The false, deep state oriented, conspiracy theories continue even into this week. Trump continues to claim the FBI placed “spies” in his campaign even as his staunchest allies repudiate this. He just denied, and described as lies from the “Corrupt Mainstream Media,” that he fired Comey because of the Russian investigation. Yet on May 11, 2017 he stated on national television that he did exactly that.
Roseanne Barr is disconnected from reality. She is prone to wild and demonstrably untrue conspiracy theories. She is mentally ill and should be treated as such.
Donald Trump is disconnected from reality. He is prone to wild and demonstrably untrue conspiracy theories. He is mentally ill and he should be treated as such.
