Former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling was among the first to state his support for Roseanne Barr before her racist tweet got her sitcom canceled on Tuesday morning.
Bolling was an omnipresent Fox News persona for years up until last year. In August of 2017, he was exposed after harassing female employees and colleagues in person and through lewd texts and photos. After a brief legal battle, Bolling departed from Fox News “amicably,” according to the Huffington Post.
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Bolling remains an outspoken conservative political commentator to this day. He often defends the president in times of extreme criticism. On Tuesday, he did the same for Barr when she tweeted a racist conspiracy theory. Barr posted an apology a few hours later, but Bolling told her there was no need.
“No apology necessary at [Roseane],” Bolling wrote in the now deleted tweet. “And please don’t leave. Unless it’s just for a few minutes!!”
Bollings fear came to pass a few hours later, as ABC President Channing Dungey announced that the Roseanne reboot was cancelled.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” Dungey wrote.
Bolling has yet to address the controversy again on Twitter, though it dominated the news cycle for most of the day. He was one of the few public figures to try and defend Barr, even in conservative circles.
However, Donald Trump Jr. did tip his hat to Barr by retweeting another conspiracy theory she had tweeted earlier in the night. The 65-year-old had suggested that Chelsea Clinton was secretly married to a nephew of George Soros, rehashing the long-debunked theory that Soros had worked with the Nazis during World War II. Trump Jr. Retweeted these ideas, and left them up on his profile throughout the day.
Others found it hard to defend Barr after the tweet that got her show cancelled. In it, she responded to a conspiracy theory that Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett had broken the law to cover up crimes for the former president.
“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” Barr wrote, using Jarrett’s initials. Some scrambled for a way to defend the post.
“According to the movie, ‘Planet of the Apes,’ the apes were actually superior to and enslaved the humans,” wrote conservative talk show host Bill Mitchell. “They were not, ‘dumb animals’ but the dominant species. Still trying to figure out how this is racist unless calling someone superior is racist.
Mitchell was dragged for this tweet and later deleted it, however he went on to discuss the Roseanne cancellation at length with other posts that were deemed offensive.
