Gina Carano’s Firing Is the Product of Yet More Calvinball

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, February 11, 2021

 

Gina Carano, the actress who plays Cara Dune on Disney +’s The Mandalorian, has been fired by Lucasfilm for her social media posts. As has become typical, the justification for the firing is not only slippery as hell, it is reflective of a glaring double-standard that its architects are not even attempting to hide:

 

Here’s what Carano wrote:

 

Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different than hating someone for their political views?

 

This is fairly stupid, as are most things said on the Internet. But, stupid or not, it has no obvious connection to the explanation that Lucasfilm gave, which was that Carano’s

 

social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.

 

But “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities” is simply not what Carano did. Instead, she said that the Holocaust happened because the government made people hate their neighbors for their religion and identity, and suggested that political hatreds could end up the same way. I don’t agree with Carano on that, and I don’t like Holocaust comparisons anyhow. But her argument here is not “denigrating” anyone, so much as it is asking for an extension of tolerance into the political, as well as the religious, realm.

 

Perhaps Lucasfilm has a hard policy against its employees casually drawing comparisons with the Holocaust?

 

Oh:

This tweet — published by Pedro Pascal, who plays the Mandalorian — is also stupid. More important, though: it is an example of precisely the same thing as Carano’s. Pascal is not “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities,” either. Instead, he is extrapolating a politicized “this is how this starts” theory out so far until it hits the Holocaust. Why is one acceptable and the other not? Because those doing the firing agree with Pascal’s underlying message, but disagree with Carano’s. That’s why.

 

Well, and because they’ve been trying to fire Carano for ages. Per the Hollywood Reporter:

 

“They have been looking for a reason to fire her for two months, and today was the final straw,” a source with knowledge of Lucasfilm’s thinking tells THR.

 

And why?

 

Disney+ fans previously called for Carano to be fired following her anti-mask tweets last November. She also previously “made light of people including their preferred pronouns on social media by adding ‘beep/bop/boop’ to her Twitter bio,” a move that some viewed as transphobic.

 

“Anti-mask tweets” and a “beep/bop/boop” bio that “some viewed as transphobic”? What a bunch of babies we’ve become.

 

This is not the way.