Wow! Remember when Disney was the all-American company? Now it is the archetypal anti-American company. When Disney and Lucasfilm tried to destroy the career of “Mandalorian” actress Gina Carano because she is a conservative, they were going after not just one person but after the idea of free thought, the right of dissent and the American way. Here’s my column from Real Clear Politics today.
The Mob Came for Gina Carano With Hashtags & Hate
By Frank Miele
Perhaps you’ve been distracted by yet another partisan impeachment of Donald Trump, but if so I wanted to bring your attention to the latest evidence that the Democrats are not really after Trump; they are after each and every conservative in the country.
You may not know who Gina Carano is. I didn’t know until recently, but she is an actress who plays the highly popular character Cara Dune on Disney’s “Star Wars” spin-off “The Mandalorian.” Carano first rose to fame as a mixed martial arts fighter, and has given women a role model for strength and musculature. In a galaxy far, far away, she kicks ass with grace and humor. In other words, she has broken boundaries and is a living advertisement for diversity.
But it turned out that one aspect of her diversity was too much for Hollywood to handle. She is a conservative. That’s her crime. The mob came for her not with torches and pitchforks, but with hashtags and hate.
This is really a scary story because it shows just how insane the left has become. Carano was fired from “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts offended some fake liberals who could not stand the idea of a woman who could think for herself. Lucasfilm, the Disney subsidiary that produces “The Mandalorian,” called Carano’s posts “abhorrent and unacceptable.” When the mob demanded #FireGinaCarano, Disney heard and responded. Her future as a role model for smart, sassy, strong women has been canceled.
So just what horrible thing did she say? Did she use racial slurs? Or threaten violence against an identity group? Did she post child pornography or support genocide?
Hell, no! Just the opposite!
What Lucasfilm and Disney found so “abhorrent” was an Instagram post opposing violence and rejecting stereotypes that reduce people to scapegoats who are seen as legitimate targets of hate. Here is the offending post:
“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?”
It’s unclear if Carano wrote the post herself, or shared someone else’s ideas since it was framed by quotation marks. In either case, there is nothing abhorrent in that remark unless rational thought has become abhorrent.
Oh, wait, that is the problem. Because we now live within the arbitrary constraints of political correctness, facts no longer matter. It would be an easy task to prove that Hitler and the Nazi party spent the better part of two decades indoctrinating the German public to hate their Jewish neighbors. It is also an easy matter to demonstrate through a variety of historical precedents that genocidal hatred is not limited to the Nazi hatred of Jews. Yet Carano is criticized for warning that what happened in Germany could happen again, not necessarily in the same way but with the same devastating human consequences.
Carano did not equate the Holocaust with contemporary efforts to paint conservatives as dangerous, but that is what the “cancel culture” mob is claiming. They insinuate, oddly, that Carano’s citation of anti-Semitism is itself somehow anti-Semitic.
This post on Twitter was typical: “Gina Carano needs to be held accountable. The oppression my people have faced because of our religion and ethnicity is NOT the same as political disagreements.”
No, it is not the same, but it is instructive. Religion and politics are both systems of belief, and if you are hunted down and persecuted, possibly killed, because of your beliefs, then you are a victim of a crime against humanity. Again, Carano’s clearly drawn point was that targeting any group as an object of socially approved hate has proven to result in oppression and even violence.
Carano knows what she is talking about. As a conservative celebrity, she has been a lightning rod for progressive hatred herself. It’s likely that Disney has been waiting for an excuse to dump her ever since she tweeted her apparent support for Donald Trump after the Nov. 3 presidential election:
“We need to clean up the election process so we are not left feeling the way we do today. Put laws in place that protect us against voter fraud. Investigate every state. Film the counting. Flush out the fake votes. Require ID. Make Voter Fraud end in 2020. Fix the system.”
Is it possible that the House impeachment managers will come after Gina Carano next? Just kidding, but Democrats have Twitter and Facebook to do their dirty work. Plus corporate America. They’ve gone after so many other conservatives already that it’s starting to look like a cheap remake of the 1950s Hollywood blacklist. Mike Lindell, Gateway Pundit, Lou Dobbs, Wayne Allyn Root, Project Veritas, Sen. Josh Hawley, plus thousands of ordinary Americans have all been targeted.
It brings to mind the famous poem of Martin Niemöller, the Lutheran pastor who opposed Hitler and saw the dangers of totalitarianism up close:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
That’s the point Gina Carano was making. As for Niemöller, he spent from 1938 to 1945 in Nazi concentration camps. He readily admitted afterwards that before his own arrest, he had turned a blind eye to the oppression of others because he thought he was safe.
Likewise, many Americans today are not just unconcerned about “cancel culture,” but celebrating it. For now, they enjoy watching their political enemies silenced, but how long will it be before they themselves are the victims of the same monolithic groupthink?
To paraphrase Niemöller, “First they came for Donald Trump, then they came for Gina Carano, then they came for free speech itself.” And when they came for you, there was no one left to tweet about it.
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And I pray more Americans will stand up and speak out.
Niemöller’s words cannot be repeated often enough. THEY are all from the same pit and must be continuously exposed and confronted without letup or caving from their intimidation. Gina Carano’s crusading word’s re: election fraud are correct. Going forward, her call for election reform needs to be at the tip of the rhetorical spear.
Thank you for this post. It should be read by everybody but it won’t be. Niemoller’s words are so important in todays world.