Blacklists Are Not the Problem

By Kyle Smith

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

 

Blacklists are fine. Does anyone seriously dispute this?

 

That the Walt Disney Co. fired The Mandalorian star Gina Carano for her political views would not be regrettable if those views were genuinely extreme and abhorrent. If it turned out that Carano was a current member of the American Nazi Party, and Disney had just found out about this, it would have been fine to fire her. There might be some companies out there that have no concerns whatsoever about the political views of their employees. But the employees of media and entertainment companies are, to a certain extent, the public faces of those companies. Neither Disney nor Warner Bros. nor the Washington Post nor NBC nor any other such company would want to be associated with vile political views.

 

So no, it doesn’t bother me that the major Hollywood studios decided, in the 1950s, to blacklist ten Communists, because Communism is about as vile as political views get. The congressional investigations into Communism in Hollywood were detestable in their combination of hysteria and grandstanding. Joe McCarthy and his henchmen, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., were not attacking a real problem so much as they were seeking political advantage by targeting an unpopular group. But no one should shed a tear because a few fiercely committed apostles for an evil, anti-American cause were denied chances to work (to say nothing of the fact that the most talented among them remained employed anonymously under a wink-and-nudge system anyway).

 

In short, blacklists themselves aren’t the problem. The problem is that in Hollywood, straying one inch right of the center gets you labeled extreme and canceled, while if your progressive dues are paid up, you can say whatever you want without consequence. Anti-Semitism, for instance, is associated with both extremes of the political spectrum, but it’s only held against Hollywood conservatives. Two years ago, known Democrat John Cusack shared a sickening anti-Semitic image, lied about it, and remained employed (on an Amazon Prime TV series called Utopia that failed when it debuted last fall). He’ll be back.

 

Carano, on the other hand, was fired for making an overwrought metaphorical comparison between her ideological opponents and Nazis, which is a rhetorical move so common on the left that you’d be hard-pressed to find an outspoken progressive or mainstream media outlet that hasn’t employed it. (Her own co-star, Pedro Pascal, for instance, used a Nazi analogy to criticize the Trump administration’s child-separation policy.) She also made a very mild joke about pronouns (“beep/bop/boop)” that only a rage-aholic activist could possibly be offended by, expressed the same annoyance lots of Americans feel about mask mandates, and indicated she was worried about election fraud, which Democrats up to and including Hillary Clinton routinely do whenever they lose elections. All of this was deliberately exaggerated by progressives to paint a picture of Carano as an anti-Semitic transphobe who claimed the election was stolen. After she was fired, someone noticed that she’d also shared a cartoon image depicting a cabal of greedy bankers controlling the world, but this is fairly routine populist stuff. Carano said she didn’t know about a previous version of the image (in which the bankers had huge noses) and there was nothing in the picture she shared to indicate Jewishness. (More on that here.)

 

Outspoken left-wing actors — Alec Baldwin, Mark Ruffalo, Jim Carrey, Martin Sheen, etc. — have no problem getting work even if they pile up a record of being repeatedly arrested in street scuffles, sharing grotesque images that suggest the murder of public officials, falling for nutty conspiracy theories, or urging members of the Electoral College to nullify the result of a lawful presidential election. I wouldn’t support blacklisting any of them, because I think the American public can handle knowing that some celebrities they love are horrible people who hold crackpot ideas.

 

But again, the problem is not blacklisting per se. The problem is that in Hollywood, it is now obviously hazardous to your career to be conservative. An industry that prides itself on tolerance, openness, and pluralism should create some space for allowing its employees to agree to disagree.