By Rod DREHER
In Woke World, you can be cancelled not for what you said, but for what left-wing people think you said. It happened to Don McNeil, and now it has happened to Mandalorian actress Gina Carano. Excerpt:
In the wake of Gina Carano’s controversial social media posts, Lucasfilm has released a statement Wednesday night, with a spokesperson saying “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.”
Carano played bounty hunter Cara Dune on the first two seasons Lucasfilm and Disney+’s The Mandalorian, and it looked like we’d be seeing more of her. It appears not.
The actress shared a TikTok post comparing the current divided political climate in the U.S. to Nazi Germany.
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. 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 from hating someone for their political views,” she wrote.
Her point was that Nazism didn’t come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a long campaign of demonizing Jews, one that pre-dated the Nazis. I first became aware of this at an exhibit on display at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, back in the year 2000. The exhibit showed how the German media began, in the early 20th century, to portray the German people as a body threatened by parasites. This coincided with the rise of eugenic thought in German (and, note well, American) medical and scientific circles. The Nazis built on what the German public had already been taught to believe. Gina Carano is absolutely correct to say that the Holocaust was prepared by a long campaign of demonization. Though I agree that it’s a shaky analogy — hating people for their race or religion is different from hating them for their ideas — her point is basically sound.
And for that, her career is over. Nobody in Hollywood will hire her now.
Contrast that to Krystina Arielle, a black woman recently hired as host of a Star Wars show, who has a history of aggressive racialist social media posting. For example:
And:
You know what? I find that kind of racist trash talk objectionable, but for the most part, I really don’t care what kind of obnoxious opinions a celebrity holds. We have to try to be tolerant, even of stupid people.
When Arielle was criticized for her neoracism, Star Wars stood by her:
At Lucasfilm and Disney, there is a double standard for white actors and black actors.
Pointing this out doesn’t do any good. If they were liberals, they would see the double standard, and change their ways. But they’re not liberals. They are bigots for the Left.
What can we do? I see that there are a number of conservatives on social media announcing that they are cancelling Disney Plus in solidarity with Gina Carano. What else?
Ben Shapiro has a good broadcast today about the Carano mess. He points out that millions of people — even some liberals — are afraid of cancel culture coming for them. People can relate to what happened to Carano. Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, says he doesn’t generally like Holocaust comparisons, and says that Carano’s was “overwrought,” but in no way a fireable offense. Watch:
Guess what Shapiro found on the Twitter feed of Pedro Pascal, a woke co-star of Carano’s? This, from 2018:
So: it is fine for a woke Star Wars star to cite the Holocaust if he’s using the comparison to criticize Trump, but it is a fireable offense for a non-woke Star Wars star to cite the Holocaust if she’s doing so to criticize political demonization from the Left.
In his show, Ben Shapiro rightly says that there is a powerful troika of Media-Democratic Party-Corporations that define and institutionalize woke doctrines. This is the Empire. Time for a Rebel Alliance to fight them. Trump is obviously not the Luke Skywalker we need. But we need a Luke Skywalker.
