Laura Ingraham and guests Alveda King and Howard Kurtz turned Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about a black woman into a story about the oppression of white people, specifically Christian conservatives and Donald Trump.
Host Laura Ingraham spent no time considering how Barr’s racist tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett is part of a rise in ethnic hate in this country. Instead, Ingraham used the moment to foment even more divisiveness on behalf of white people and Hatemonger-in-Chief Trump.
Ingraham seemed grudging in her acknowledgment that Barr deserved to have her show canceled. Ingraham called it “a breakneck speed cancellation of the most popular network television show of the season.” She described Barr’s comments as “in the eyes of a lot of people were pretty inexcusable, to say the least.”
But after two minutes of establishing anti-racism bona fides, with King saying that ABC responded “appropriately” and agreeing with Jarrett’s response that this was a “teachable moment,” the conservative messaging was teed up.
Ingraham suggested that liberals such as Joy Behar, who publicly mocked Mike Pence’s Christianity, had been able to apologize and move on as if nothing had happened.
Ingraham continued, “Alveda, you see the double standard, however. Christians are mocked and ridiculed. Entire classes of people ridiculed. Yet, someone issues an apology, maybe makes a phone call – and career preserved.” Predictably, nobody mentioned Kathy Griffin.
According to CNN, the decision to cancel Barr’s show was not based only on this incident. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that though this episode was by far the worst, it “was the third or fourth time when Barr's tweets had presented a problem for ABC.” In other words, there was no reason to believe this last was a one off.
King used the moment to once again paint fetuses as civil rights victims.
“It’s just an absolute terrible thing to take a racial slur and kind of throw it out there like that and I understand that,” King began. “However, I believe that we all, as human beings, red-blooded, human beings, our skin color really doesn’t define us, it’s our character that does. We’re not color-blind. We can see ethnicity and we should because if we ignore or say we can’t see skin color then we can’t see the oppression and the wrongdoing that happens even down to the little babies in the womb all the way to old people.”
Kurtz took a jab at ABC. The network “knew exactly what it was getting with Roseanne,” he said. “It was a gamble here that maybe she would zip her lip and she did create a funny show, a pro-Trump show that touched a lot of people in the country but ABC cannot claim to be blindsided.”
Then Kurtz veered off into lecturing African Americans Don Lemon and Jarrett for thinking that with Birther-in-Chief, housing-discriminator Trump in the White House and still spewing antagonism against African Americans, Trump-promoting Barr might have felt emboldened to liken a top Obama adviser to an ape.
KURTZ: And then there’s one more point here and that is, I was just waiting, I was counting down - CNN’s Don Lemon. OK, Roseanne and President Trump are trafficking in racism. … MSNBC bringing it in. Even Valerie Jarrett was taking the high road and she was sort of blindsided here but she took a swipe at the president. Although he liked Roseanne and he called Roseanne after the success of the debut, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump! The mainstream media have turned every negative controversy into a Trump story.
King responded by reiterating that this is a “teachable moment.” But that wasn’t good enough for Ingraham. She interrupted to all but demand that King exonerate Trump.
INGRAHAM: But did Donald Trump create the atmosphere, Alveda? That’s what the left is saying.
KING: No, no, no. No, he did not. i voted for Donald Trump. i’m not a racist.
INGRAHAM (laughing): I think that’s obvious.
KING: We are not racist. To tie this one particular act from one particular person and say that it's Donald Trump - President Donald Trump's fault, that's just not true. I think we should not do that.
By the way, I don’t remember any of these people complaining when Fox pundits blamed President Obama and his sympathy for Black Lives Matter for deaths of police officers.
Watch Fox turn white racism into white-racism victimhood above, from the May 29, 2018 The Ingraham Angle.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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