Gina Carano, the actress who plays Cara Dune on Disney+’s “The Mandalorian,” was fired by Lucasfilm. I saw the note yesterday, and the company’s explanation which was that Carano’s
“…social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
From this I presumed that the actress had posted something that was racist or otherwise bigoted and hateful—constitutional speech, but not a public opinion that an organization dependent on widespread public favor is obligated to tolerate from its employees. Then today, I saw what she wrote, which was,
“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?”
She did not denigrate anyone based on their cultural and religious identities. LucasFilm’s statement is a lie, and indeed is very close to defamation. Carano should sue. Meanwhile, Pedro Pascal, who plays the Mandalorian in the same series, tweeted out this idiocy in 2018:
So LucasFilm (that’s really Disney, in case you’re confused) has no policy against Holocaust comparisons no matter how misleading and irresponsible. It just has an ad hoc policy that criticism of the American Left is impermissible, while criticism using the same analogies aimed at the Trump administration was just fine. Not only is a performer required to do the work he or she has contracted with the company to do, it must not disagree with or criticize that company’s favored political views.
The actress was apparently under “double secret probation” because Disney’s woke fans were angry with her for expressing anti-mask views and mocking people who include their preferred pronouns in their social media profiles, a Level 5 virtue-signalling, pathologically woke and silly practice that deserves mockery as much as anything I can think of right now. Thus her third strike of non-conforming views was distorted by LucasFilm/Disney and used to both to smear and punish her.
Such a practice represents a serious attack on freedom of speech, association, expression and thought.
Please respond appropriately.
Ethics Alarms 
To top it all off, her analogy is 100% correct and 100% appropriate as a warning for the current era of divisiveness and intentional isolation of non-conforming political views.
And how does Disney respond? By isolating a non-conforming political view. A perfectly on time action exactly in line with what Carano was warning about.
These are terrifying days indeed.
The same party that, in collusion with nefarious business interests, nearly destroyed the nation in the 1860s, is now, in collusion with nefarious business interests, setting up a scenario to destroy the nation today.
That is absolutely correct. Her statement applies yo either political extreme. The fascists at Disney and LucasFilms are too oblivious to understand that they proved what she said to be true.
jvb
Remember, the left is bold in their pronouncements to their cult of mindless worshippers that they don’t blink at publishing stories claiming that this incident actually proves that cancel culture doesn’t exist!
“Gina Carano’s Mandalorian exit proves ‘cancel culture’ doesn’t exist – despite what her fans say”
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/gina-carano-mandalorian-disney-cancel-culture-b1800886.html
I wonder if this author was the brains behind the Senate’s prosecution case against Donald Trump?
Best part of Pedro Pascal’s ignorant analogy is that the image of “kids in cages” was taken during the Obama era as a criticism of Trump.
And the best part of that image of kids in “cages”, is apparently it is Palestinian kids in a food donation kitchen goofing off while waiting to receive a meal from donors.
Is there anything that people on the Left can be relied upon to present honestly?
I don’t think so.
They cannot be trusted. Ever.
Yup. Biden’s America believes in truth not facts.
jvb
There’s already been a furor over her ‘non-conforming’ views for months and Lucasfilm continues to double down on its woke lockstep. It’s probably harder because how dare a female in KK’s ‘the Force is female’ party line dare to have a different opinion. The snowflakes are especially bent out of shape because the actress refused to mark her pronoun preference on accounts. (I would think a common sense of not forcing fights with a lady Mando on the only successful D+ show in a struggling mammoth would make more sense) I really do not get the Woke brigade: If women are supposed to be freer to stand up to speak and be valued, why are they so fast to smackdown women, calling it internalized misogyny instead of different opinions? Your opinions only have power if they are the same as everyone else’s (And they dare to think Handmaid’s Tale is only about conservative religion but not also about conformity)
Some female Star Wars Youtubers are especially pithy, as are Youtubers who are black, Hispanic, or LGBT as they are being attacked by Lucasfilm’s people and defunded by Youtube. Free speech used to be enshrined on the Left when I was younger… They will not see that all these abuses to ‘erase’ hate speech is THE MOST hateful speech of all!
It is not about liberty or women’s rights. It is about power. Why do you think Trump is so hated? Is it really because he said and did things that were bad and caused a bunch of people to storm the Capitol? No. It’s because the power structure couldn’t control him, and by extension, his supporters. Trump supporters didn’t shut up, didn’t obey or do what they were told. Therefore, Trump has to be destroyed to send a message to the country that disobedience will not be tolerated. This actor is collateral damage.
jvb
JVB
I am of the same opinion as you. I believe the goal of the progressives to continue their war on Trump has less to do with destroying him but to destroy any possibility that another might take up the mantle of draining the swamp and giving the power back to the people.
The choice is ours if obtaining Disney products yields greater satisfaction than the costs of speech suppression by media titans buy them. If not stop financing the suppressors activities. Very simple.
Hear, hear! Simple indeed!
Perhaps this response by Disneycorp is more about them beholden to Chinese intrests who are currently involved in the processing of one to three million people through Xinjiang internment camps.
Best line, from the BabylonBee, of course: “Only when we force everyone to believe the same thing can we defeat fascism.” Pretty much sums up the state of the silly-left these days!
https://babylonbee.com/news/to-prove-cancel-culture-doesnt-exist-disney-fires-actress-who-condemned-cancel-culture
https://babylonbee.com/news/gina-carano-rehired-by-disney-after-she-identifies-as-an-abusive-male-director
The easiest way to reveal the full idiocy of comparing current events to the oppression of the Nazis is to make sure that anyone making such comparisons is socially ostracized, forced out of any employment, and publicly slandered.
Of course, people who hold outspoken progressive views need not suffer the punitive measures needed to rein in the views of politically-undesirable untermenchen.
Sigh.
We finally got Disney+ in December so we could watch “The Mandalorian” and utterly loved the show. Her character was just okay. I wouldn’t have missed her if she’d been written off the show for any other reason.
This just makes me mad.
They don’t even care about the double standard or about losing conservative business. Must be all that Chinese money coming in. I joked with our son a couple of weeks ago about whether Disney, in all its woke diversity mode, would ever do a Tibetan princess film.
Cancelled Disney + today. They won’t miss my $6.99, but enough is enough.
That’s the ultimate problem.
Disney has now backed itself into a corner (though it doesn’t care). By taking a stand, they can’t wriggle out, apologize, and hire Carano back on, because the woke mob is infinitely more virulent in it’s economic punitiveness. Disney has to accept the loss of a modicum of people who quit on the principle of defending free speech, because the loss of consumers from the virulent Left anti-free speech crowd (but I repeat myself) hurts the bottom line a lot more.
But she was denigrating someone. She was denigrating Nazis.
But that has a deeper significance. You can’t say “that doesn’t count” unless you want to have a slippery slope with some protected and some not. You should instead take it as a reductio ad absurdum to show that measures like that are unsound regardless.
Is an accurate characterization of actual conduct truly denigration?
Is truth a defence against an accusation of libel? In many jurisdictions it isn’t, particularly if it relates to a professional matter, because identifying a shonky tradesman or similar hinders or could hinder him from plying his trade – even if he pulls his socks up. (This is an area in which the law in Victoria and New South Wales do or did differ, with ramifications for Australian journalism).
So also, ascribing Nazism to Nazis could interfere with their capacity to practise Nazism. Now, you could argue that that would be a good thing, but to do so would be just precisely missing the point I made before: we cannot frame the measures so as to distinguish the categories adequately. To see this, for “Nazi” read “Trumper” throughout.
Gina Carano should sue the pants off Lucasfilm.
You all are analyzing this incorrectly.
For those of you who don’t know me, I am a liberal. However, I also happen to be the public face of a company whose majority clientele are C-suites at corporations and law firms. My sole job is to bring in business from these organizations, and my clients are overwhelmingly Republican (I only know of a handful of exceptions). I also report directly to the CEO of my company, who is a Republican.
It is my job to bring in significant revenue for my company every year. I am not permitted to offend anyone. I am required to have a very bland LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook profile. Less experienced people in my department receive training on this, at my level, I am expected to know it cold. One slip up with a single corporate client could cost my company millions in revenue and possibly my job.
No doubt Disney is losing revenue by firing this actress, but the company’s sole calculation was whether or not keeping her on was going to result in losing even more revenue. That’s it.
Also, the full story has not been reported here. The actress already had received warnings about her tweets, and she ignored that and pressed on. There was an additional tweet comparing Republicans to Jewish people in the Holocaust which I believe was the last straw. All she had to do was stay quiet — something I am required to do every day as part of my employment.
1. But SS, the LucasFilm statement was an outright falsehood. Surely you don’t advise clients to do THAT!
2. You really think the company thought the tweets of an actress would cause them to lose revenue, especially since those tweets were hardly extreme or objectively offensive.?
3. How is the analysis wrong? The company lied about what she tweeted. It defined a standard that it does not follow. It is using intimidation to suppress free speech it doesn’t like, not its market.
4. Sure, they have a right to make it impossible for conservatives to work in their industry. That doesn’t make it ethical or healthy.
The company made its decision based on how her tweets were being viewed by the majority of its consumers. It doesn’t have to be right, and Disney has no obligation to reeducate its consumers. I am a liberal working in a conservative industry. This is my choice, and I have to play by the rules.
There obviously have to be limits to what are reasonable rules. If a company required you to certify under oath your support for company-approved candidates? Agree not the belong to certain organizations or support particular publications?
“The company made its decision based on how her tweets were being viewed by the majority of its consumers”
So if the “majority of consumers”—how did they know that?—see her tweet as A when it is objectively NOT A, they are responsible in adopting that false narrative? Her tweet did not denigrate anybody or any group. Disney? LucasFilm stated that it did, in a pubic statement. How can you defend that? As counsel, how could you allow it?
Correction: the company seems to have made a decision based on how her posts were being viewed by a small handful of “activists” (are you really “active” if all you do is sit around and bitch on Twitter all day?) on social media, many of whom are probably not even subscribers to the service in question. I’ll wager that the number of people who unsubscribed from Disney+ over Carano’s tweets is in the single digits, if it’s not actually zero. Certainly nowhere near the majority of their customers were upset over this, they just chose to apply grease to the squeakiest wheels. The problem with this sort of nonsense is, that doesn’t quiet the squeaking, it only emboldens the wheels to squeak more loudly.
This would seem a lot less unfair and arbitrary if Disney had a policy like the one you describe, where employees must remain apolitical and uncontroversial on social media. They clearly do not have such a policy, or if they do, it is only enforced when the employee’s politics are perceived to be conservative. (I say “perceived to be” because I’m old enough to remember when the idea that one shouldn’t hate people who think differently than you do wasn’t solely a “conservative” viewpoint…)
That sounds right. If the Disney and LucasFilms had terminated the other guy for making the similar politically charged postings, they would have more credibility. Here, it just looks partisan.
jvb
Companies are allowed to look partisan. The rule is, “Don’t piss off the clients.” I have sat through numerous work meetings where politics were discussed. Know your audience. Always do what’s best for the company. This isn’t hard. All she had to do was shut up — and she had received previous warnings. She made a choice.
They are allowed to look partisan, they are allowed to be unfair, they are allowed to be unethical and stupid, they are allowed to be bigoted and prejudiced (against whites). They aren’t allowed to publicly announce that an employee engaged in racism or bigotry when she did not. And they shouldn’t, though they are allowed, and even encouraged, to enable widespread viewpoint discrimination in society. Obviously it’s hard, because Disney screwed it up.