Roseanne Barr and the New, Dumb Conspiracy Theory We Have to Hear About Now
ABC debuted a reboot of the 90s sitcom Roseanne this week, and its ratings outperformed every other premiere so far this season. In fact, it was such a success that Donald Trump—whose top priorities are TV ratings, good news about himself, and celebrity fans—called Roseanne Barr to congratulate her. And make no mistake, Barr is a Trump fan: both she and her sitcom counterpart are Trump supporters and defend him by claiming that he won the the election thanks to poor voters looking for help, which is, objectively speaking, wrong.
But Barr also has a reputation for boosting far-right conspiracy theories. On Twitter she's posted that modern Palestinians own black slaves, retweeted claims that Parkland student activist David Hogg is a Nazi, and said in interviews that government-backed chemtrails are a form of mind control. So it didn't take long after her show's return for her to get back on that horse.
Trump has famously accomplished little outside of attacking public lands and rolling back protections for anyone who isn't a white billionaire, so at a glance it might not be clear what Barr is talking about. But it makes sense if you hang out in some of the seedier, more credulous corners of the Internet, where a conspiracy theory called "The Storm" has gained traction and shamed PizzaGate in both scope and ridiculousness. Select All dug into this in December of last year, explaining that the whole thing originates on 4chan with a user named Q, who managed to convince other users that he was a high-level government official tasked with leaking information to Trump's supporters online. As Paris Martineau wrote there:
According to Q, Trump was never really involved with Russia, and isn’t actually under investigation by Mueller & Co. On the contrary, Q insists that it’s actually Clinton and Obama who were corrupted by Putin (and are now actually under investigation by Mueller) because they’re obviously just evil, money-hungry globalists who’ll do anything for the highest bidder. (Oh, yeah, and they’re also apparently into raping and killing children, though the crowd is split over whether this is because they’re satanists or just part of some weird blackmail scheme involving the CIA.) Q also claims that Trump, the genius that he is, figured all of this out way back when he was just a measly presidential candidate, and has been pretending to love Putin and/or be involved with Russia ever since as a way to force a third party to investigate these horrors — without drawing the attention of those evil Dems-who-must-not-be-named, of course — because he’s just that selfless of a leader.
This whole debacle only makes sense with several tremendous leaps in logic, the least of which involves assuming Donald Trump is a masterful tactician who's not literally distracted by every big truck he sees.
ABC has to be delighted by these developments and has already announced that they've renewed the Roseanne reboot for a second season.
