Kathy Griffin branded Roseanne Barr’s recent appearance on InfoWars “sad,” after the comedian was shown sharing a host of conspiracy theories during her wide-ranging interview with Alex Jones.
Barr, 70, sat down for an interview with right-wing conspiracy theorist Jones for a taped conversation that went live in early March. During the interview, she spoke about everything from Nazism and Israel to vaccines and Harry Potter.
The actress and comedian recently reemerged under the spotlight to promote her stand-up special Roseanne Barr: Cancel This! She asserted that she was essentially banished from Hollywood in May 2018, after she tweeted that the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby,” referring to Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, who is Black.
Kathy Griffin is pictured above at “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on November 29, 2021, in Los Angeles, California. Inset: Roseanne Barr is pictured on February 14, 2023, in New York City.
Barr said at the time that she wouldn’t have tweeted the joke had she known Jarrett was Black, and that she would have apologized on air, but ABC decided to fire her from the hit show, Roseanne before she could do so. The network brought the show back as The Connors, with the comedian’s lead character having been killed off.
A clip of Barr’s InfoWars interview was shared on Twitter with the caption: “Alex Jones and Roseanne meltdown.” Barr was served Jameson whisky in the video before saying: “I wrote this book called Roseannearchy and of course nobody [bought] it, even though I went on Oprah and sucked [Oprah Winfrey’s] a**.”
She said that she “wrote that book to help deprogram kids from the Harry Potter bulls***,” before sharing that the 2011 book ended with a “chapter called ‘Wherein I Kill Satan,’ and I tell you how to do it.”
She continued: “But people with these German hats since telling us to take these shots and they’re using the Jewish people, basically over there in Israel as lab rats to do it on. And they’re lining up to do it. All they can do it just blow up stuff and cause earthquakes with their earthquake and heart attack machines. They’re just trying to kill everybody.”
She also suggested that 2005’s Hurricane Katrina “was the first time I think they [were] just trying it out, you know…Destroying a city and then going in after…”
Later in the video, Barr spoke about a pyramid that “money people” and “people who own the world” constructed, saying that “they brought the Nazis over. They took over our government.”
Reacting to the clip on her locked Twitter account, comedian Griffin, 62, said that she once looked up to Barr after the star helped boost her early career.
“This just makes me sad,” Griffin wrote. “Roseanne used to be such a role model. She gave Jennifer Coolidge* & I a break when she cast us in a summer replacement show she produced and starred in called Saturday Night Special. I did not know she was this deep in to this stuff.”
“What a shame,” one of Griffin’s followers responded. “I don’t understand what people are getting from these behaviors. She’s already famous. Wealthy. She has resources the rest of us only dream about.”
“She’s a true believer,” Griffin wrote back.
Barr had been a staunch progressive earlier in her career, once protesting at an Occupy Wall Street rally and running for president for both the Green Party and Peace and Freedom party. Switching sides in 2016, she became a devoted supporter of former President Donald Trump, of whom Griffin has been highly critical.
Griffin faced backlash after posing with the severed head of a Trump effigy in 2017. While she initially asked for forgiveness, Griffin later retracted her apology. She said that her decision to pose with the head damaged her career.
In 2018, after Barr’s controversial remarks ended in her being fired from her Roseanne reboot, Griffin called the comedian a “Nazi sympathizer.” She also suggested that Barr pursue a job on Infowars.
Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment while promoting her Laugh Your Head Off comedy tour, Griffin said: “All the agents skipped me. I can barely get one agent on the phone that I have left. No publicist will touch me; I’m so toxic.
“But Roseanne, who’s a Nazi sympathizer, she gets an ABC high-budget show?…Roseanne is the real deal. She’s a true believer. She’s a Nazi. She has Nazi sympathies. She has Nazi leanings, and even after her first Twitter apology, before she got fired, she tweeted David Hogg, one of the Parkland survivors, is a Nazi. And then deleted it.
“She’s a lost cause,” Griffin said. “Meaning, maybe she’ll get a job on InfoWars with Alex Jones and, if she wants to, perpetuate her theories that Hillary Clinton had a child sex ring in the bottom of a pizza parlor. Because that’s what she thinks. That’s very different than [the classic sitcom] All in the Family, the idea that the Roseanne show was showing the ‘real America.’ No, you are showcasing one nutjob.”
“I’m glad that [Barr] showed her true colors,” she added, “because I think it’s so essential for people to understand the delineation between an actress who’s playing a role that’s a very softened version of the Nazi sympathizer she has become. And I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true.”
