The Mandalorian star and former MMA fighter Gina Carano was axed from Lucasfilm on Wednesday over what the company called ‘abhorrent and unacceptable’ social media posts. The final straw, according to various reports, was a post making comparisons between current political divisiveness and the Holocaust.
Carano used a meme (a ready-made combination of text and imagery) to point out that the Nazis paved the way for systematic round-ups of German Jews by normalizing
‘The government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?’ Carano asked.
You know we’re in trouble when a cage fighter calls for civility.
Comparisons to the Holocaust are almost always ill-advised and hyperbolic, but Carano’s point stands. It’s a recurring historical fact that mass violence and even genocide start with hating your neighbor: stating how dehumanization is always the prelude to persecution is hardly ‘abhorrent’. It’s also a fact that, as Edmund Burke said, the ‘triumph of evil’ requires ‘good men to do nothing’.
But debates about whether or not Carano’s post crossed a line are missing the forest for the trees — because that’s not why she was fired. If Lucasfilm really had a problem with comparing today’s political climate with Nazi Germany, they would have canned The Mandalorian‘s other lead star, Pedro Pascal. In a 2018 tweet, Pascal posted a meme with side-by-side photos of Jewish people locked in a concentration camp and what were alleged to be migrant children being held in detention centers at the southern border. This is nonsensical for numerous reasons, the most obvious being that the US government is not massacring migrant children. Ironically, the photo Pascal shared did not show children in US detention centers, but of Palestinian children waiting to be fed at a soup kitchen from 2010. The IHRC’s definition of anti-Semitism, accepted by the State Department, includes gratuitous comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel.
Pascal’s post was fine and Carano’s was not because Pascal was criticizing the ‘right’ people. He passed Hollywood’s political litmus test by attacking the Trump administration, lecturing Carano about how not putting her pronouns in her Twitter bio was transphobic, and publicly supporting his brother when he came out as transgender. He even passed the liberal litmus test when it emerged that those were Palestinian children in that photo. Carano, meanwhile, has run afoul of the woke mob too many times before by questioning insane COVID masking and lockdown policies, speaking out against political censorship and, you know, just generally not being a flaming leftist.
Carano’s firing is a tribal culling of anyone who steps out of line from the entertainment industry’s progressive orthodoxy. Lucasfilm merely used her post about the Holocaust as a justification for something they’ve been wanting to do for a long time. All Carano did wrong was dare to exist in a space that has no tolerance for ideological independence.
