Roseanne Barr's "sarcasm and satire" about the Holocaust obscures the actual conspiracy she's pushing

Breaking: Roseanne Barr has said something controversial. The comic has basically done nothing but that in the last decade or so, but out of context, this quote comes across as particularly egregious. “Nobody died in the Holocaust, either. That’s the truth,” she said. “It should happen. Six million Jews should die right now, ’cause they cause all the problems in the world, but it never happened.”

On its face, this is an utterly repulsive thing to say, but comedian and podcaster Theo Von—to whom this remark was made—came to her defense. Barr was “obviously using sarcasm and satire,” he wrote on Twitter, sharing video of an extended version of the quote from his podcast. “She is a mensch and one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”

The clip is truthfully hard to parse, but it does appear that Barr (who is Jewish) was being sarcastic in her comment about the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the statement was made in service of a conspiratorial point. Championing that age-old wisdom that comedians are the last warriors on the front lines for free speech, Barr jokes that there’s a government “mandate” on the truth enforced “on YouTube” and other social platforms. There are guidelines, she says, so that people are only able to speak the truth, “And the truth is that Biden got 81 million votes by winning 36 counties,” as well as the bit about the Holocaust. So if we accept that Barr is being ironic about both statements in the same way, the underlying message of her joke is that 1) President Joe Biden didn’t win the election fairly and the Holocaust did happen, and 2) the government is preventing people from speaking these “truths” online.

TL;DR: Barr is promoting a conspiracy theory here, just not necessarily the one that’s making headlines. This is nothing new for the once-beloved Roseanne creator, who has repeatedly pushed QAnon talking points. Elsewhere in Von’s podcast, Barr opines that quarantine was “the best thing that ever happened to this country” because it helped people “break out of mind control.” “It woke people up as to what mattered, and then they got on the Internet and started looking for answers, and that’s why they call it ‘The Great Awakening,’” She explains, citing a popular QAnon belief. “Or I say, that’s what Q was for quarantine.”

So while Barr may indeed employ “sarcasm and satire” to make her points, those points are unequivocally rooted in dangerous conspiratorial thinking. One needs only peruse Barr’s own YouTube to see that she’s peddling far-right talking points and QAnon ideas that have no basis in reality. More context definitely does not help her case this time around.