In the original Star Wars movie, Darth Vader destroys the planet Alderaan to send a message to the Rebel Alliance: this is what happens to those who oppose The Empire. It is an act of pure evil, so it’s ironic that Disney (owner of Lucasfilm) now seems to be sending a similar message to young actors everywhere: express contrary opinions and we will destroy your career.
“The Mandalorian” actress fired
If you don’t watch the “The Mandalorian” then you probably don’t know the name Gina Carano. The former MMA fighter hasn’t had many acting roles prior to playing Rebel Alliance soldier Cara Dune on the Disney+ Star Wars series. But her performance was well received, and the character was so popular that there were reportedly plans to create a spin-off series starring Carano as Dune.
But then some people started complaining about her social media posts, such as a recent one in which she compared being a Republican in America today to the hostile environment faced by Jewish people in Nazi Germany. In a since-deleted Instagram post, she wrote:
“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.”
Following Carano’s post, Gizmodo reported that a Lucasfilm representative said in a statement that, “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’s analogy was a poor comparison, as are almost all comparisons to the Holocaust. But it’s hard to believe that was the real reason for her firing, because fellow “The Mandalorian” actor Pedro Pascal has made his own awful Holocaust comparison, without facing the same consequences. In 2018, he tweeted the hashtag #ThisisAmerica along with a meme showing two pictures: one of children in a German concentration camp during WWII, and another that claimed to show migrant children locked in cages in America in 2018.
As if the poor comparison wasn’t bad enough (given that the Nazis murdered millions), what he shared wasn’t even true: the image Pascal shared that was purportedly from America in 2018 was actually an image published by the L.A. Times in 2010 with a caption “Palestinian children wait to receive donated food at a soup kitchen.” The original image is available on the Internet Archive.
In another social media post, Pascal (who gained fame as Oberyn Martell on “Game of Thrones,”) also compared Trump supporters to confederates and Nazis.
So if two actors from the same show working for the same company both made similarly poor comparisons between American politics today and Nazi Germany, why was only one of them fired? Could it be because one of them is liberal and the other is conservative?
More importantly: Disney, which now owns Lucasfilms, literally thanked the Chinese government agency that is running concentration camps where Uighurs are reportedly being used for slave labor and subjected to human rights abuses including forced sterilization, organ harvesting and government-sanctioned rape. So the idea that it fired Carano because of her “abhorrent” post defies credibility.
Want to fight back against Cancel Culture, which seeks to silence those who oppose the Woke Left? Cancel your Disney+. Want to show corporations that you will not tolerate them doing business with a country that is running literal concentration camps? Cancel your Disney+.
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