Norm Macdonald discusses Louis CK and Roseanne Barr, manages to step on every land mine
Today in frustrating missteps that will make you wish that a famous person you like had just shut their mouth and not said anything: Norm Macdonald has offered some thoughts on Louis CK, Roseanne Barr, Chris Hardwick, and the #MeToo movement in general, and all of his takes are just real bad. This is all from an interview Macdonald gave to The Hollywood Reporter, and it even starts off on a sour note with THR reminding Macdonald that he warned people about how bad a Trump presidency would be back in 2015. The interviewer asked him if he thought Trump has been as bad as he thought he’d be, to which Macdonald responded, “Not at all.”
Macdonald explains that the Constitution is strong enough to withstand anything Trump might do, “except, you know, the Supreme Court judge nomination,” but even the “emboldening of racism”—as THR puts it—hasn’t really bothered him. Macdonald explains that he lives in L.A., so he’s usually confronted with “the lunacy of the left” and that he never accepted the idea that “everybody is racist.” He recognizes that “everyone is a fucking idiot,” but he assumes that will pass at some point, even if he doesn’t necessarily want society to swing back in a more liberal direction.
To that point, he says he’s “happy the #MeToo movement has slowed down a little bit,” because he doesn’t like the way it has progressed to automatically trusting everything that women say. He thinks that Chris Hardwick specifically got “the blunt end of the stick,” from this awful trend of trusting women, even though he seems to have suffered absolutely no repercussions from the accusations that were made against him.
Speaking of not facing repercussions, Macdonald would prefer it if that was the standard response for these sort of things, at least when they concern his friends. Macdonald has a lot of sympathy for Roseanne Barr and Louis CK, as they’re both close friends and Macdonald did some work for the Roseanne reboot, and he suggests that people like the two of them “losing everything in a day” is the real worst part of all of this. Then, in an all-time-worst take, Macdonald implies that he has a lot less sympathy for the target of Barr’s racist tweets and for the women CK exposed himself to, because “the victims didn’t have to go through that”—referring to the way CK and Barr detonated their own careers because of their misdeeds.
Evidently, Norm Macdonald thinks we’d all be better off if we went back to the days when everyone assumed women were lying about abuse or harassment and all famous people were given an infinite supply of second chances whenever they fucked up. Oh, and we should all forget about any terrible things the victims of these famous people have had to endure, because it’s just such a goddamn shame that a racist like Roseanne Barr and a creep like Louis CK can’t keep making their very important TV shows.