After Ratings Surge, Roseanne Praises Trump’s War Against Human Trafficking
With 18 million looking on, Barr gives important praise where it’s due.
BY ZACH HALLER | APRIL 3, 2018
Read on Medium: https://medium.com/@zachhaller/after-ratings-surge-roseanne-praises-trumps-war-against-human-trafficking-317e1b9ad169
Tuesday, March 27, Roseanne Barr’s namesake sitcom returned to ABC after more than twenty years off the air following its initial run. Barr’s blowout revival saw 18.3 million viewers, doubling its competitors in young-adult ratings with its hourlong premiere, and ratings are still climbing. ABC responded immediately by ordering another season, approving what will be an 11th season for the classic working-class sitcom starring Barr herself, which originally ran on ABC for nine seasons from 1988 to 1997.
The blockbuster premiere earned Barr a congratulatory call from President Trump, and a glowing review from Liel Leibovitz in a must-read analysis, Why Trump Should Be Thanking Roseanne Bigly. Leibovitz hit the nail on the head in recognizing the nature of the cultural milestone Barr’s revival achieved, including a pointed critique of how the 2016 election corrupted the American entertainment industry, emphasized below:
It’s hardly a secret that Hollywood was shocked and disgusted by the election of Donald Trump. I felt very much the same way myself. But watch virtually anything on TV and in the multiplex these days, and you realize that the election spurred Hollywood’s power brokers into making a very risky bet, producing content almost exclusively for people who thought and felt and believed the same exact things as them. It’s always been a liberal-leaning industry, but you needed to glimpse only a few minutes of this year’s Academy Awards to understand that ideological purity was now paramount to artistic merit.
Here, Leibowitz points out the truth the establishment would prefer you forget: Hollywood itself was one of the numerous institutional elements that privately coordinated before the election to favor Hillary Clinton for President regardless of how Americans would vote, and in spite of their broad distrust for her.
Having long enabled Clinton, her husband, and their network of ne’er-do-wells, Hollywood and legacy media were heavily invested in ensuring her election. Entertainment industry moguls and producers overtly adopted Clinton and the Democrats’ infamous dual-purpose 2015 media directive to both muddy the waters around Clinton’s ongoing scandals, and elevate Donald Trump as a “Pied Piper” in support of the Clinton-Obama agenda going into 2016.
In broad daylight, the state brazenly wielded both entertainment and news media as part of its broader effort to elect Clinton, as seen in the overwhelming prevalence of anti-Trump bias across virtually all programming from major American media since before the election. As the anti-establishment wave carried Trump, a political outsider, into office, the Clinton-Obama regime consolidated corrupt elements within America’s party establishments — including Hollywood and legacy media — against him.
America’s entertainment industry wanted Clinton elected, and certainly feared a Trump administration that would put Hollywood’s bad actors at risk after having long been ignored — if not enabled — by authorities under Obama. So, Hollywood and legacy media did their part, incorporating the Democrats’ anti-Trump messaging through programming and celebrities in unison with the politicized forces within the U.S. government, big tech, and big media working to sabotage Trump and elect Clinton at all costs.
Virtually every pillar of the American power establishment was out to stop Trump in 2016, and Trump had a middle finger for each one of them.
Barr remains one of the scarce voices of reason in the entertainment industry since 2016. Of her many gifts is her ability to traverse difficult topics and wax on hard truths with a common decency and willingness to listen that is virtually impossible to come by in Hollywood since the election. Barr’s expression of views supportive of Trump constitute the exact dialogue the Clinton-Obama regime seeks to suppress in its fascist use of news and entertainment media to censor and suppress their political opposition.
In a great deal, the Pied Piper strategy serves specifically to stifle dissent in this way. Barr, like many of her fellow Americans, respects diverse opinions; since the media has homogenized its content against Trump for several years now, the divergent opinions presented on her show are precisely what legacy American media — and democracy — desperately lacks.
This of course, is no accident: the U.S. government has long used its media proxies to shape public opinion and imbue group-think that is uncritical of the state. Ominously, the conglomerated media took this unsettling trend to unprecedented lengths as directed by Clinton, Obama, and their shadowy Deep State regime in advance of the 2016 election.
In effect, the Pied Piper memo serves Clinton and her associates as an enhanced “Code of Silence”, using news and entertainment media to shield the guilty parties corrupting American media and government more than their existing networks already do. Prior to the election, and behind closed doors, the media began their still-ongoing effort to “muddy the waters” to protect Clinton from scrutiny of her extensive unethical and criminal misconduct as she campaigned for President.
For the right, this strategy handed billions of free airtime to Trump, most of which was negatively biased; for the left, it resulted in a “Bernie Blackout” that would mitigate Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ ill-fated primary bid while silencing progressives duped by the Democrats’ staged primary.
With Trump Derangement Syndrome dominating the airwaves and a compromised media obscuring Sanders, demand grew for unbiased content that challenged the narratives sold by Clinton’s state-aligned media partners.
This context helps explain Barr’s success, who openly supports Trump off and now on screen; by 2018, her massive ratings are in part representative of the collective sigh of relief resonating from the way Barr’s earnest dialogue restored a long-gone sense of normalcy to TV.
With all eyes on her since the blowout premier, Barr posted a series of tweets citing Trump’s efforts to combat human trafficking as a basis of her support for the President. Barr’s initial tweets on the subject have since been deleted, but appear below for posterity:
President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over this world. Hundreds each month. He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere. notice that. I disagree on some things, but give him benefit of doubt-4 now. — Roseanne Barr (
) March 31, 2018
I have worked with victims of trafficking for decades & supported the fight against it. Sorry to have mentioned it here. It’s not the place. — Roseanne Barr (
Despite deleting the tweets above, Barr left posted a handful of others drawing attention to the massive increase of human trafficking arrests that have occurred under the new administration, and in light of Trump’s executive actions in support of this mission.
Like clockwork, Barr’s tweets were quickly spun by the Democratic Party’s dutiful media administrators, with Twitter taking to its Moments feature to water down Barr’s posts as “confusing”, and Newsweek rushing to issue the predictable partisan spin, referring to her tweets as part of a “right-wing Trump conspiracy theory”.
Of course, there is nothing confusing nor partisan about taking a moral stand against human trafficking.
Barr’s courage to speak out deserves praise, as do the consequential efforts to combat trafficking that have been taken by Trump’s administration. Only the grossly amoral would dismiss efforts to protect our children; the media’s interest to downplay Barr’s solidarity for victims of abuse and politicize her advocacy as right-wing is an ominous sign they, once again, may be covering for guilty parties on the left.
Grievously, America’s media is both grossly amoral, and terribly politicized. High-profile criminals like the Clintons rely on co-conspirators in news media to cover-up their crimes, and in entertainment media to shape culture in a way that downplays the severity of them. Here, muddying the waters around the ethics of sexual harassment and assault deliberately enables abusers; using cultural icons and popular characters to dull American’s sensitivities and control public opinion serves ultimately to weaken the veracity of legitimate calls for accountability from law enforcement.
The efforts American media goes to in protecting rapists and child abusers demonstrates most clearly its abject moral bankruptcy.
This is, of course, the same media protected the Clintons as they provided assistance to a convicted child trafficker arrested at the Haitian border attempting to smuggle 33 kids out of Haiti without documentation, and that would sooner give wall-to-wall coverage to a Stormy Daniels non-scandal than address the decades of media silence on Bill Clinton’s victimization and rape of Juanita Brodderick.
As seen in Trump’s recent orders and the massive arrests of human rights abusers since he took office, the days of Presidents soft on human trafficking are gone; Barr is right and respectable to note this on her platform. Following eight years of white collar impunity under Obama, Trump’s efforts to police Clinton and Obama’s criminality have already changed America in that its corrupt elites across all industries are now no longer too big to jail.
Unfortunately for Clinton, the walls are closing in quickly. The week of the Roseanne revival also saw home raids and arrests of Clinton-linked cult leaders guilty of horrific acts of violence against women and human trafficking. As Trump and Congress determine how criminal Clinton’s takeover of the DNC was, the Inspector General’s report on government agency abuses is due at any moment and set to blow the lid off Clinton-Obama corruption, including the manipulation of media and other nefarious actions taken by the co-conspirators lingering in America’s shadow government.
The brutal realities of the scourge of human trafficking in America and around the world are undoubtedly painful, but cannot and should not be ignored; without fearless advocacy for the victims and constant interrogation to ensure law enforcement is principled and swift, things will only get worse. Whether Americans view Trump favorably or not, it cannot be denied that here, he is following through on his promise to protect America’s children in good faith. On the other hand, legacy media continues to be seen blurring ethical lines in scandal after scandal as they fight to stymie fallout occurring across the power establishments, more often indulging superpredators like Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Dan Schneider where they should be condemning them.
The overlapping interests of Washington and Hollywood are damning here.
Following decades of impunity afforded to rapists and child abusers in high places, it is by now common knowledge that both the Democrats and Hollywood are sooner to promote sexual predators than to punish them.
Hand in hand with legacy media, Hollywood continues to follow the media’s Pied Piper strategy, downplaying the severity of Clinton’s crimes, including covering for Clinton’s odious history of protecting abusers, and obscuring what role she may play in the sordid affairs of her confidant and former campaign manager John Podesta.
Trump and Barr’s efforts to take action and raise awareness of the global human trafficking epidemic should be acknowledged and praised. Particularly given the Pentagon’s efforts to glamorize American imperialism and fetishize war through Hollywood, dissenting opinions must be loud and clear, literally for goodness’s sake. With corrupt forces and politicians doing all they can to censor dissent, Americans of all party affiliations must be bold and relentless in guarding the right to speak freely enshrined in the First Amendment. The public cannot rest assured without knowing human trafficking is being policed as the crime that it is; there should be no hesitation to call for accountability, particularly when children are in danger.
Both in her show and her activism, Barr understands that diversity of opinion is part of the cultural diversity that makes America unique and, at its best, unparalleled; respecting the spectrum of opinion eases the pressure of difficult conversation, and abets productive discourse. That Barr brought attention to human trafficking and rights abuses in the wake of the success of her show’s revival gives Americans all the more reason to respect and admire her, and recognize her well-deserved place as the cultural icon and national treasure that she is.
Fortunately, in Barr’s world, and broader America, Americans don’t need Hollywood or Washington to tell them how to think or who to vote for. As the legacy mainstream media continues to collapse under the weight of its shame and scandals, Americans of all stripes should rally around Barr and other entertainment industry leaders not intimidated by an amoral media, or afraid to speak up and out for what’s right.
The future of our children depends on it.
Zach Haller (@ShirtlessPundit) is a writer, artist, and activist based in Seattle, Washington. Support Zach’s work with a donation on Paypal or Patreon.
Note: The author writes in an independent capacity unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except his own personal views.