The Four Color Media Monitor

The Hollywood Reporter says Hartley Sawyer, the actor playing Elongated Man on the Flash TV series (which Geoff Johns has credits for developing, if it matters), has been fired after it turned out he posted repulsive tweets on his Twitter account:

Actor Hartley Sawyer has been fired from The Flash after a host of his tweets containing misogynist and racist references were surfaced in the past week.

The tweets, all from before he joined The CW series, make references to sexual assault and contain racist and homophobic language. Sawyer's Twitter account has been deleted, but screenshots of the old posts have circulated online in the past two weeks. His firing also comes amid nationwide protests against systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd's May 25 death in Minneapolis. [...]

Sawyer joined The Flash in 2017 as Ralph Dibny, aka Elongated Man. He recurred on the show initially and was upped to series regular in 2018.

Historically, the slapstick adventure character he played up till now on this TV series has surely been one of the most badly abused in almost 30 years, along with his wife Sue Dibny (Identity Crisis and Gerard Jones's writings), and these discoveries add only more insults to injuries. One can only wonder what Sawyer thinks of the 2004 miniseries written by Brad Meltzer. Sawyer sure knew how to provide ammunition for SJWs at a terrible time. Here's what Entertainment Weekly's reported he said:

The tweets in question were published before Sawyer joined The Flash in 2017 and are dated from 2012-2014. At the time of publishing, his Twitter account has been deleted; however, there are still screenshots of the tweets floating around the internet. Among them were references to sexual assault ("As a lad, one of my favorite activities was kidnapping homeless women and cutting off their breasts"), racist comments ("The only thing stopping me from doing mildly racist things is the knowledge that Al Sharpton would never stop complaining about me"), and sexist remarks ("Things only women should be in: twilight screenings, gynecologists offices, and Porsches).

Sawyer claimed he was joking, but his comments about kidnappings are particularly repulsive. Graphic gore isn't something you joke about, nor is kidnapping in a country where thousands of women and children are kidnapped and raped every year. If you know where to look, you'll notice some of the live action DC adaptations have scandals and embarrassments abound, like an actress on the Smallville series arrested for collaboration with a sex abuse cult and jailed, an abusive producer on the Supergirl TV show, and Aquaman movie co-star Amber Heard's scandal. So this makes yet another one that's bound to put a whole cloud over another production. USA Today notes:

"The Flash" showrunner Eric Wallace wrote in a statement shared late Monday by star Grant Gustin that Sawyer's tweets "broke my heart and made me mad as hell," noting "they're indicative of the larger problem in our country."

Wallace vowed to "continue to find Black and Brown writers, directors, actors and producers of all genders to help tell FLASH stories. Their stories are part of the American narrative, too, and must be heard."

I think what's really angering about this is that, while I'd rather not provide an audience to a series that's already got its own problems with liberal influence (though Supergirl's probably suffering worse), this scandal has them tripping over themselves to appease more social justice advocates, like LGBT ideology. Something else atrocious about Sawyer's comments is that they provide ammunition for bad reps like Sharpton, who encouraged anti-semitism in the past, supported the fake sexual assault story concocted by Tawana Brawley, and never did any favors for any community. What are the chances Sawyer will turn to aiding Sharpton personally soon?

The day prior, Sawyer had shared a message on Instagram voicing his support for the Black Lives Matter movement. "I am white. I have privilege. For too long, I have not used my platform to advocate for POC. I apologize to all my brothers and sisters."

He also included a quote attributed to former Ohio state senator Nina Turner: "The burden cannot just be on the backs of black people to deal with it."

Of course, you couldn't possibly expect a likely Democrat to admit the left has ever had a problem with racism, or that Joe Biden did a terrible disfavor in modern times. For now, what's clear is that he's tarring the white community entire, obscuring the hard work Abe Lincoln did to abolish slavery, all in an attempt to apologize to crowds who're unlikely to forgive him. Sawyer's career is surely finished, and considering the harm people like him do to society overall, he's bound to deserve it. First, he makes repulsive remarks. The next, he's groveling before a movement that's built on bad ideologies.

And since we're still on the subject, let's see what Forbes is saying, and the writer appears to have slipped in something inappropriate about one actor whose record is far from as bad as the others who brought scandals about:

We see actors leave CW series all the time when their arcs are finished, and occasionally, it’s not on the best of terms. But I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite this severe before.

[...] I really don’t want to even repost them here, but you can read some of the worst offenders in this reddit thread. While yes, many of these are 8-9 years old, at the time Hartley still would have been in his mid ‘20s, not some 13 year-old trying to be edgy, which is what these sound like. The tweets have since been deleted but they have already all been screenshot for posterity.

[...] I would not expect Sawyer to be given a second chance and return to The Flash. While Ralph had become a central part of the cast, he’s not quite “essential” and it should be easy enough to write him off when the show returns.

I will say the CW Arrowverse shows are starting to feel a little…unsteady. Legends of Tomorrow lost three cast members this season, two of which did not seem to want to go willingly (Brandon Routh and Courtney Ford), Supergirl wrote off Dean Cain as Kara’s father due to his bad politics, The Flash is now dealing with this Sawyer mess and the show that started it all, Arrow, is now over. Oh, and the lead of Batwoman quit and needs to be recast and rewritten entirely. It just all seems a bit…shaky.

Now the columnist has a point that the Arrowverse isn't very steady, and hasn't ever really been. But he lost me when he asserted the mid-90s Superman's politics are "bad", without specifying. Cain, from what I know, is right-leaning, supports Israel, and he's even co-produced documentaries about the Armenian Holocaust of WW1 committed by Turkey's Islamic Ottoman empire in its last years. And the Forbes writer has the gall to say Cain's politics are bad? Or worse, the Supergirl TV producers had the gall to get rid of him as a cast member for that? Sick.

As noted before, what Sawyer did only heaps more denigration upon John Broome and Carmine Infantino's Silver Age creation for slapstick adventures. But if the live action DC adaptations suffer due to these scandalous affairs, I honestly can't bring myself to care. The staffers working on them are such liberal hypocrites, they're probably getting what they deserve.

Labels: Aquaman, dc comics, Flash, misogyny and racism, politics, Supergirl, Superman, violence