Disney’s Firing and Society’s “Cancelling” of Gina Carano

This past week, news broke that Disney had terminated their contract with Gina Carano, an actress who played a role in Disney’s latest Star Wars spin off: The Mandalorian. After the hashtag #FireGinoCarano had trended a few times, Disney finally decided it was time to cut ties with the right leaning Carano. The official statement from Disney is as follows: “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” While it is entirely within Disney’s right to fire an employee, let us take a look at what exactly Gina Carano did to “denigrate people based on their cultural and religious identities.”

We must first look back to November, shortly after Election Day, when Carano tweeted:

News outlets such as Insider and Vox write about this tweet: “Carano echoed Donald Trump’s narrative, claiming with no evidence that voter fraud has taken place in order to give Biden the win,” and “suggesting that Donald Trump was its legitimate winner,” respectively. If anything is baseless, it is not Carano’s tweet, but rather news sources (if you are willing to call Vox news) equating of this tweet to declaring Donald Trump victor. I am not a fan of generalizations and try to avoid them as much as possible, but if one is to disagree with Carano’s tweet (i.e. one would like to count illegal votes, one would leave every state to their own devices with no supervision or accountability, or one might think that voter ID is “oppressive”), then that individual is inherently undemocratic. News sources also try to make the case that Carano’s clearly satirical meme (pictured below) is a criticism of masks and makes fun of mask wearers. While I would argue that this is simply poking fun at the concept that many people will do anything as long as the government says so, it is certainly within the rights of an American citizen to criticize or put current science under a spotlight, especially when principles accepted as true are so widely contested (note page three “Reported use of cloth face covering or mask 14 days before illness onset”). 

However, the straw that broke the camel’s back in this case was Carano posting an image relating to the Holocaust. It is below:

Many newspapers have called this image anti-semitic, racist, and insensitive. It is often argued that Carano is comparing the struggle of the modern-day conservative to that of a Jew during the Holocaust. I will be the first to tell you that very few things can compare to the horrors of the Holocaust, and to even attempt to compare modern day struggles in America to those of victims of the Holocaust is wrong. However, I believe that this graphic does not make that comparison. This post makes an important point that, if not understood correctly, can come off as irrational and certainly insensitive. This post does not equate a conservative living in America to a Jew being hunted by the Nazi Regime. Rather, it is pointing out that the strategies of the early Nazis to direct hatred upon a certain group of people is not very different than the strategies of certain media outlets (and government officials) to direct hatred and even violence upon certain political groups in America. For instance, take Maxine Waters’ order to let anyone from the Trump administration know that they are not welcome anywhere: “if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere” (from cnn.com). Many of the large media corporations have an extremely strong disdain for anyone associated with Trump, especially those in office. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion of creating political enemy lists comes to mind when thinking about this, a concept that Joseph Stalin was particularly fond of. The Nazi’s fondness of lists is also important to keep in mind.

I am not arguing that America has become Nazi Germany, or that the modern American conservative experiences anything relatively close to that which those in the Holocaust did, and I do not think this post does so either. However, I think it is uncanny how extreme the thrust for hatred against Trump supporters is, as many politicians and media outlets attempt to demonize nearly 75 million Americans and lead neighbors, friends, and even loved ones disassociate with them based on political view. (Note: It is also important to note that often times Nazis conflated Jewishness with a political ideology — communism or membership to the Bolshevik party — largely due to the Jewishness of communist leaders such as Leon Trotsky. Therefore the association of Jewishness with “despicable” political views became a talking point for Nazis to advance their agenda of hatred upon the Jewish population.)

All in all, I will restate my opinion noted at the beginning of the post, that it is well within Disney’s right to fire an employee. However, I have a problem when Disney fires one employee for doing something, and turns a blind eye when another does a similar thing. Back in 2018, fellow Mandalorian actor Pedro Pascal tweeted an image that made a fairly direct comparison between Holocaust prisoners and “immigrant children” supposedly detained in America.

While this comparison is obviously wrong  on a moral level, it is also incorrect on a factual level. Snopes found that the image on the bottom of the graphic was in fact not taken in the United States, or even recently. Snopes puts it bluntly:

“Whatever life may be like for children detained in U.S. immigration facilities, it does not involve — as internment at Auschwitz did — those youngsters’ being starved, put to forced labor, subjected to criminal medical experimentation, or being gassed to death. Moreover, the bottom image in this meme is not from 2018, has nothing to do with the United States, and does not involve migrant children being held in detention. As documented in numerous news accounts and reports, it’s a photograph dating from 2010, and it and similar pictures capture Palestinian children and adults waiting to receive food at a soup kitchen in the West Bank city of Hebron during the holy month of Ramadan.”

However, as if the stars aligned, on the same day that Carano was fired from Disney, Pedro Pascal was rewarded by HBO for a morally and factually wrong post by landing a key role in a new series. As Pascal said himself, #ThisIsAmerica.