Ken Jennings defends the Twitter villain, “Bean Dad,” who directs old tweets with the name “Jeopardy!” Accommodation possibilities are sinking

Danger! Provisional host and alleged heir to Alex Trebek’s Ken Jennings has not had the best week online. Just before New Year’s Eve, the champion apologized for the old, insensitive tweets, including a six-year-old post in which he wrote, “Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” And on Sunday, Jennings tried to defend her podcast host, John Roderick — Twitter’s nickname is now “Bean Dad” thanks to a strange and controversial anecdote that some have labeled child abuse, and his own bad tweets have also appeared.

Over the weekend, Roderick shared a long anecdote in which he said his nine-year-old daughter told him he was hungry, and he responded by telling her to make baked beans, to react with horror when he realized who had never taught him how to use a can opener. Instead of helping her son prepare the meal, he made her struggle with the device alone for six hours in what he called a “teaching moment,” a process she noted involved “tears” and his daughter “collapsed”[ing] in a frustrated pile “.

How The Hollywood Reporter notes, some Twitter users dubbed Calvary as “child abuse”. Roderick defended himself and wrote: “Somehow, my story about teaching my daughter how to use a can opener and overcoming her frustration came down to a twitter version where I am accused of abuse. infantile. It’s amazing. My son is all right. ” He added: “The best part about the relationship between these parental worry trolls is that they keep arguing about depriving my son of baked beans for SIX HOURS is child abuse. Six hours is the time between meals “Lunch at noon, dinner at six. They’re literally saying child abuse.”

But the controversy also led some on social media to surface other more troubling posts from Roderick: posting screenshots of this, such as THR notes, included anti-Semitic messages and defenses from using racist and homophobic insults.

Jennings, who co-hosted the podcast Nmnibus with Roderick, he initially joked about the failure of the writer-musician “Bean Dad”, piulant, “I’m very jealous and annoyed that my podcast host is a dictionary entry and I never will.”

“If that reassures someone,” he said added, “I personally know that John is (a) a loving, caring father who (b) tells stories made about his own irascibility on ten podcasts a week. This place is so silly.”

When he confronted Roderick’s “strange anti-Semitic shit,” Jennings answered“If we now look up words through old tweets, it’s pretty easy to find what he actually thinks about anti-Semitism. In our program, he’s always pro-Israel!” added that “there is no axis on which any anti-Semitic screenshot represents any real opinion that you have ever heard of him.”