Your bag is empty.
A lot of eyebrows raised (mine are permanently raised at this point) yesterday when Donald Trump Jr. tweeted in response to Netflix’s determination to create a third season of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, when he’s “ready.” Trump Jr. declared Netflix’s choice as “yet another example of the rules only applying one way,” referencing ABC’s decision to cancel Roseanne after the titular character, Roseanne Barr, likened former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett (a black woman) to an ape on Twitter in May.
First, Donald Trump Jr. appears to believe conservatives aren’t allowed second chances and I’d personally beg to disagree: For years (it already feels like Trump has been president for, like, a decade now), I’ve seen anyone challenging the Trump administration—who voluntarily signed up to work alongside Trump—equated to revolutionaries. This is, after all, how we got the old Twitter joke of welcoming just about anyone “to the resistance,” conservative or otherwise.
I’ve seen Steve Bannon, James Comey, and others lauded for severing ties with Donald Trump, as if being conservative and having horrible views doesn’t matter as long as you’re no longer compliant to work for the Big Evil Orange Man in the White House. You can’t tell me Tomi Lahren or Candace Owen wouldn’t be doted on if they announced they’d been brainwashed the entire time they backed the Commander in Chief. Kanye West does ths all the time. This takes us back to the old proverb, “Melania, leave him, girl!” If Melania escaped, we’d welcome her into the resistance with open arms and, as long as she agreed to talk, we’d blame Trump, and what we consider abuse, battery, and/or Stockholm Syndrome.
Second, Roseanne Barr’s circumstance in no way parallels Aziz’s take-down story on Babe, which was highly critiqued as an irresponsible reporting job and downright dangerous. While Barr has made her blinkered worldview public through Twitter almost daily, Ansari found himself in a heaping helping of dumpster fire during the height—and the fury—of the #MeToo movement. The #MeToo movement encompassed ongoing workplace harassment and along the way morphed into real encounters of harassment at the hands of powerful men, but Ansari’s Babe piece detailed a date-gone-wrong—an anonymous account akin to last December’s viral short story “Cat Person,” about the sex women have with men purely to avoid hurting his feelings.
In a sense, I can sympathize with Babe—the weeks following my own involvement in an exposé of Vice in which I was made (against my knowledge of what would become of it) an integral part of the #MeToo movement and of outing men for “wrongdoings.” I’ve worked in several newsrooms. I get the pressure to push stories out, even when they make no sense. And when you aren’t known for hard-hitting journalism—as Babe is in no way a site that ensures breaking news or thoughtful, researched journalism—the pressure of a “big break” lingers over staff.
Growth and full accountability, as well as a willingness to accept consequences for your actions, are the only real ways you can redeem yourself after a monumental fuck up.
However, it is poor and shoddy journalism to detail, without proper sources, a bad date in which a 23-year-old photographer wasn’t forced, but instead felt pressured and obligated to perform sexual acts on a seemingly arrogant Ansari. And the situation the anonymous woman, who went by “Grace,” endured was grievously commonplace, and happens all the time in what I call “obligatory sex.” Of the decades-worth of men I’ve slept with, in most situations, I felt obligated and feigned enjoyment. This sucks for everyone involved, but—while there should be more discussions about the fear women face when it comes to rejecting men, and the anger men endure following the rejection—it doesn’t make it rape, or sexual assault. And the Babe piece was a wet-dream for critics of the #MeToo movement, causing the media to sit back and reevaluate definitions related to the cause.
Barr, on the other hand, has been a wicked witch of the Republican Party since announcing her support for Donald Trump’s candidacy, despite admitting he “says a lot of crazy shit” during a press tour in 2018. While she deleted the majority of her Twitter history in December 2017, Vox reported in a detailed timeline that Barr has—for years—been a vocal promoter of Alex Jones-style right-wing conspiracy theories. She stirred the pot with Pizzagate, doesn’t believe in vaccines, has insisted 9/11 was an inside job, and, after indicating Israel was a Nazi state in 2009, became a champion of Israel over Palestine in later years. All over Twitter, and in her own words. She then allegedly came clean about her belief in “Jewish mind control” in 2013 (despite being Jewish herself) and openly advocated for and defended a Holocaust-denying musician in 2013. She’s also been radically Islamaphobic, in 2013 tweeting about “ISLAMIC RAPE PEDO CULTURE,” literally in all caps.
Despite Barr’s spewing of utter nonsense, which, conservative or not, is illogical, unstable rambling at best, Barr was, in fact, given a “second chance.” In March of 2018, her hit show was rebooted for a 10th season after a 20-plus year hiatus. The show even, in a bizarre twist against Roseanne’s original character’s progressivism, allowed the real Barr to portray her character as an enthusiastic Trump supporter. By Barr’s assertion, wearing a “Make America Great” hat is true to character because the TV matriarch stood up for “working class” ideals. Barr even went as far as expressing interest in personally holding a screening of the show for Trump.
And then came the dreaded day in May when Barr, who claimed Ambien was the culprit (though Ambien shot back, stating racism is not, in fact, a side effect of the drug) in a Twinkie-defense moment, as well as having not known Valerie Jarrett was black, got both canceled in real life and on the tube. Roseanne was immediately shut down by ABC, who, following the debacle have considered yet another reboot (titled The Conners) without Barr. So, Donald Trump Jr., Barr had a second chance, and she flat out fucking blew it. It’s no one’s fault but her own.
Barr clearly doesn’t understand this as she now likens the progressive world’s unwillingness to give her what would now be a third chance by bringing James Gunn’s recent controversy and firing into it, tweeting “I’m disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn’s pedophile jokes— as the same people supported blacklisting me for a joke they didn’t even understand.” The difference here is immense, too, as Gunn’s jokes, while vulgar, weren’t made with malicious intent. Gunn’s call for reinstatement to direct Guardians of the Galaxy is because, with Barr’s consistent instability in her convictions—and, honestly, pieces like the Babe story on Aziz—people are beginning to realize that blindly “canceling” anything without the full scope of research is smutty journalism, too. It also means we’re just falling prey to strategic and effort-driven attacks by prominent far-right figures like Pizzagate founder Mike Cernovich, who’s responsible for the firing of several people who made problematic jokes online once.
Intention matters. Gunn’s tweets were stupid and repulsive, but that’s it. They were purely dumb “jokes,” crafted during a time when every white male was watching South Park and Family Guy, and weren’t just celebrated but encouraged to make gross, controversial jokes. Gunn’s worst action was not deleting his jokes, as he’d grown as a person. If people want to act like they’ve never fucked up, or have never made a totally distasteful joke, that’s on them, because we all have. The point is to always acknowledge your wrongdoings and grow upward and not… far, far down like Barr.
Gunn issued an apology stating that who he was when he made those jokes isn’t who is now, and in rereading his old blog he no longer finds the humor funny, but in very poor taste. And that should be the norm with anyone, particularly following the 2016 election. Gunn apologized despite knowing his chances of being reinstated after Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn called his old tweets “indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values.” But Gunn apologized nevertheless, genuinely, despite the consequences (of which he was willing to weather) with no notion he could ever be redeemed, likely believing the possibility was moot, though the cast has very recently called for his reinstatement.
Ansari has purposefully stayed out of the public eye for seven months now, albeit briefly returning to do a comedy set. The comedian owned up to his misdeeds, and he never said he didn’t do anything wrong or made a woeful comparison to how other men have been treated post #MeToo, he apologized in private to the subject of the Babe article, to the public, and made it clear his intentions weren’t bad. Ansari is literally just a dumbass dude. We’ve observed his standup, we watched him play a character who is essentially 100% himself on Parks and Recreation, we yawned through the second season of Master of None where he manic-pixie-dream-girls an effortlessly cool, Italian beauty instead of introducing a woman of color to the show. His intentions, however, aren’t at the plight of women as a whole—as far as we know, he fucked up once, nominally—or toward people of color, or other minorities, and he hasn’t taken to Twitter to bash women or promote falsehoods. He owned up to his misguided #MeToo moment and suffered the consequences by disappearing for nearly a year now.
Barr has always been upfront with her intentions to support a POTUS who hates women, mocks disabled people, is disgusted by minorities and believes removing immigrants—regardless of if they’ll ever be reunited with their children again—is what is making America great again. She tweeted not just something racist, but imbued with hate when she described Jarrett as combination of the “muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” And then she issued what we call a non-apology on The Sean Hannity Show in late July. Her first fuck up? Comparing her skin to Jarrett’s, claiming “her skin tone is like mine, and I’m brown.” Barr is not brown. “I didn’t know she was African-American. I assumed because she was from Iran and she lived in Iran for such a long time,” she said. This tells me nothing but that Barr’s intention was racism toward… a different ethnicity? Actually my own, so that’s cool.
Barr continued to tell Sean Hannity “I’m so sorry you thought I was racist and you thought my tweet was racist because it wasn’t.” Any apology that begins with the word “you” is false, and directs blame onto the victim—Jarrett—for “thinking” Barr was racist. It’s a gross version of gaslighting which insists Jarrett is actually in the wrong for believing Barr had been racist. She stated it was all a big misunderstanding. Barr never said, “I’m sorry I harmed and hurt you,” she literally said, “I’m sorry that you feel harmed and hurt,” again implying the blame is on Jarrett for her wacky thoughts on Barr’s bogus, racist “Ambien-induced” Twitter rant. She went on to insult Jarrett’s—who again, is a black woman—hair, telling Hannity that Jarrett “needs to get a new haircut.”
This is why Barr can stay canceled. Everyone fucks up. Everyone has said something homophobic, racist and wildly stupid and offensive, at some point in their life. Most do this in childhood. Growth and full accountability, as well as a willingness to accept consequences for your actions, are the only real ways you can redeem yourself after a monumental fuck up. All people can do is apologize and take steps to advance themselves change their beliefs and the way they respond to criticism.
We also need to take into consideration that while Trump Jr. believes “liberals” are given the benefit of the doubt over conservatives, cancel-culture has seen that neither Gunn nor Ansari have actually witnessed these so-called second chances thus far, with Ansari not responding to Netflix’s call for more Master of None (he actually paused on continuing Master of None on his own long before getting #MeToo’d, telling GQ a year ago today that his “life has not progressed enough” to write a third season) and reports that Walt Disney Studios has no plans to rehire the outcast Gunn.
So, Donald Trump Jr., that’s why we aren’t giving Barr what would now, really, be a third chance. Get it?