Sorry, comedy fans, but just burning your New Balances isn’t enough to distance yourself from the white supremacist (or, as Jimmy Fallon would probably put it, “totally wild”) elements that buzz around the Trump campaign like flies on a Porta-Potty. You’ll also have to stop watching Seinfeld.
Earlier this year, back when he was simply Trump’s third campaign manager and not an alarming household name, we wrote a Newswire explaining that Steve Bannon is a partial owner of Seinfeld syndication rights. That means that every time you tune in to reminisce about the Clinton administration through the medium of Elaine’s terrible dancing, you’re throwing a few pennies to the man responsible for headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Ugly And Crazy” and “Data: Young Muslims In The West Are A Ticking Time Bomb, Increasingly Sympathizing With Radicals, Terror.”
That’s still true today, and now Rob Reiner has given a new interview to The Daily Beast in which he recalls how Bannon came to acquire said rights via his company, Castle Rock Entertainment. Apparently, Bannon was part of a consulting team hired by Castle Rock minority stakeholder Westinghouse Electric to facilitate Castle Rock’s sale to media giant Turner, and believed so strongly in the potential of the not-yet-hit sitcom that he was willing to accept, as Reiner puts it, “a small piece of Seinfeld that he’s had forever” as his payment.
“When I first heard about it, it made me sick. It makes me sick. Because I had no idea. I didn’t know who he was, or that he was representing Westinghouse. So there you have it,” Reiner says. At press time, as far as The A.V. Club knows, Home Improvement is still a safe choice for cuckservatives and feminazis alike.