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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34577 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Worth noting:

  1. Roseanne was fired in 2018 during the 1st Trump Administration

  2. ... for tweeting about how senior senior Obama Administration (and then Foundation) official Valerie Jarrett looked like she was from Planet of the Apes

I don't think that Obama admin pressure would have been necessary for her to be fired for that in the conditions of the time. It's certainly far from impossible that Obama admin pressure may have been applied anyway. Also, interpreted very very abstractly, it is almost definitionally certain. I can't tell which of these ways she meant it in.

Roseanne clarifies -- she claims that the Obamas directly pressured the studio to fire her:

QT @BarackObama:

Remember when you and your wife called Bob Iger to have me fired?

Further, she has claimed in the past that she was tweeting about Valerie Jarrett in the context of criticising the Obama admin's Iran deal which she knew Jarrett was associated with. She now seems to be making a harder claim that the Iran deal part was significant to her firing:

QT @JackPosobiec:

Because they aren’t the same. I wasn’t fired for lying I was fired for telling the truth about the Iran deal and slandered into oblivion. This will still be worse for our side than theirs. Kimmel will get an entire PR tour to clear his name with the backing of all media.

I don't personally find that very easy to believe, though I don't discount it 100%. The 1st claim I don't know, but it is not helped by the 2nd.

(it's also possible she's just extending the chain of causation back one step to reflect her subjective experience and does not really intend to be making a claim about the motive)

Even if all of the above were true (and I don't grant that):

Yeah imagine an administration putting pressure on a television channel to fire a comedian they didn’t like.

A former President is not an administration in any meaningful way. He doesn't even have any real government influence during the Trump presidency.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that big chunks of Trump 1's administration felt more comfortable taking orders from Obama than from Trump.

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