Her working with someone so blatantly racist and vile as Ben Shapiro proves she hasn’t been misunderstood or taken out of context or something like that. In fact, she’s obviously much worse than we even knew. I think her bad posts were actually probably her filtering herself somewhat.
The right-wing victim complex is a seriously real thing. My Trumper father is constantly complaining about the huge disadvantages and struggles white male Christians have in this country. He feels they are the most discriminated against group. I mean, he literally thinks being successful in America is much harder is you’re white than if you’re black, harder for a man than a woman, and that Christians are literally persecuted (unlike Muslims and atheists).
Also, I saw a good meme about being “cancelled for conservative beliefs” the other day, I wish I saved it. I’ll share the gist of it though:
Person A: I ‘m being cancelled for my conservative beliefs!
Person B: Oh, you’re being cancelled for believing in lower taxes?
A: No, not for those beliefs.
B: Oh, you mean you got cancelled for believing in governmental deregulation?
A: No, not for those beliefs either.
B: Oh, so you got cancelled for believing in state’s rights?
He hardly disproves the existence of cancel culture with that "perfect" Q&A. Don't you find it coincidental that the only people paying the price for their political or religious beliefs are those who go against the woke consensus? (spoiler alert: I know you do because I read your piece on the cancelling of Troy Leavitt.)
“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.”
“The Palestinian Arab population is rotten to the core.”
“The Palestinian Arabs have demonstrated their preference for suicide bombing over working toilets.”
“Palestinian Arabs must be fought on their own terms: as a people dedicated to an evil cause.”
In reference to Obama being elected:
“Yet, all we hear now is that America is deeply racist and that Black people are still systemically discriminated against and that Black people are still victims in America society. So, it turns out it didn’t mean anything.”
In reference to Black people being excited about Black Panther:
“'Blade' was not enough"
“We've heard it's deeply important to millions of black Americans, who, after all, were not liberated from slavery 200 years ago, and liberated by the civil rights movement with federal legislation, and have not been gradually restored to what always should have been full civil rights in the United States.”
"None of that has mattered up until they made a Marvel movie about a superhero, who is black, in a country filled with black people."
"We’re above 800 million Muslims radicalized, more than half the Muslims on Earth That’s not a minority. That’s now a majority."
Preface: I haven't even watched Mandalorian yet, so I don't mind arriving late. I didn't find out about the Carano incident until today and besides, it feels like a rerun of an old show. These things happen all the time - some celeb says some exaggeration on social media, people start asking whatever company to cut ties, then company cuts ties, nobody lives happily ever after, etc. Most of the time the celeb is of the right variant in politics - because the right is kind of awkward and unpopular (at least in pop culture, but pop culture may have a different right-left distribution than the full population). It's a very familiar formula and it's all just so tiresome.
Instead of just discussing the event itself we should probably also ask what we can learn from this.
First, I want to point out that just because Carano did indeed post some dumb things online, it doesn't mean that her firing wasn't politically motivated. If Disney would just outright fire people for supporting Trump or for having conservative views on, say, abortion, then it would truly be a PR nightmare for them. However, if Disney secretly wants to get rid of her because they are angry about her views on Trump, then it's a stroke of luck that Twitter finds her dumb posts and starts a controversy about them. Now Disney can play the victim and make it seem like they 'reluctantly' let her go amid the controversy. I am not claiming that this indeed is what happened, but it is one possibility among several and it's important to keep multiple possibilities in mind until all the facts are in.
Also, Carano herself may seem like she is doubling down or like she is pretty happy about the situation, but how do we know that this is actually the case? The opposite case would be that she is pretending to be okay for either professional reasons or perhaps for some personal sense of pride. The situation with all the political chaos and the pandemic has surely made everyone a bit more on edge than usual, and I also believe that people like her must have many different stress factors that I couldn't even begin to imagine.
I don't personally know any people who have been cancelled (or had an attempt made at them) but from a few less well-known cases there have been rumors that the cancellation actually severely impacted the victim's mental health although nobody could have known based on public behavior. I think this is a reasonable possibility and I want to stress that all may not be as it seems. Stress could also be used to potentially explain Carano's weirdness on social media.
That brings me to another topic: conservatives seem to constantly be freaking out nowadays, what's up with that? Is that also stress? I'm going to make an attempt to argue something in that direction (but not without reservations).
One way to formulate this question more precisely would be to ask whether this "persecution complex" is caused by some psychological traits related to American conservatism, or if the cultural environment actually is biased against them? You could also try the "why not both?" approach.
Well, to start with the more negative aspect, paranoia seems to be a recurring thing in American politics. In the 60s, Hofstadter wrote a famous essay ("The Paranoid Style in American Politics") about this and I've seen interest re-emerge in his essay now during the Trump presidency. Somewhat similarly, in the 60s conservative Republican Barry Goldwater used a remarkably aggressive and accusatory rhetoric during his campaign. His campaign was in opposition to the '64 Civil Rights act, which he argued was a plot by the federal government to increase its own influence. Hofstadter certainly had an anti-Goldwater agenda in writing his essay, but it was also about using American political history as a proposed explanation for why Goldwater's angry rhetoric was successful among the rural conservatives of the time. (By the way Erik, I'm not sure and this may be common knowledge, but Goldwater was from Arizona)
The point where I start getting stumped is where I try to understand why American politics, of all countries, contains such paranoia. Maybe Hofstadter (and others) just overstated it, but after the last 4 or so years it's difficult to think so. If I would seriously try to write something about this maybe I would start by something about evolution, how it's important for a species to be a bit more than cautious about predators, and speculate that ancient evolved instincts today leads to a paranoid temperament in some cases, and schizophrenia in the most extreme cases. In that case the paranoid style in America would just be a consequence of random chance - a bunch of paranoid early settlers made the foundation of the paranoid style we know today.
But this is rambling and I need to try to state my point quickly before I drink too much whiskey. So, with Hofstadter and recent events, you would think this paranoid mentality is a part of many conservative's psychology (you might call this a 'persecution complex' if you were so inclined). Some of political history (partially) justifies that. Then, what's the state of the evidence for the opposite: that conservatives are actually being treated unfairly? Well, for this I would probably start somewhere with the university environment - some basic facts are that academia used to be much more diverse in terms of politics - you would have liberals and conservatives in roughly equal numbers working together quite happily. Today there is instead something like a 15:1 liberal to conservative ratio, and it's higher in some subjects. A lot of studies about this gets given time on Heterodox Academy - an organization seeking fairer treatment of conservatives in academia. Their website has a lot of stuff: https://heterodoxacademy.org/
It would take a long time to read so I'll summarize a few key ideas: they argue that increasing liberal dominance in academia actually leads to lower quality of research because people of similar ideas are less likely to criticize ideas they hold dear for political reasons; another issue is that if only liberals work on a political psychology study then they would be more likely to misrepresent non-liberals by mistake. As for why so few conservatives work in academia, the authors argue that it's a mix of choosing to leave due to overwhelmingly liberal faculty and also due to political discrimination. It was actually a long time since I read the paper so I hope I'm not misrepresenting the research here, but you can check it yourself and also read newer Heterodox Academy content.
Okay, but even if there is some discrimination in academia, that doesn't mean much in itself. I wanted to talk about the media, but looking for information is taking a longer time than expected. It's difficult to determine objectively whether conservatives are being treated fairly by the media without relying just on anecdotes. In recent history, 2008, almost 90% of media personnel donated money to the Obama campaign, if I'm reading this story right: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-democrats-got-88-percent-of-2008-contributions-by-tv-network-execs-writers-reporters-updated
This is suggestive of a similar liberal dominance as in academia, but it's important to note that it's not really evidence of unfair treatment. There have, ever since the 60s, been American conservative "media watchdogs" that tried arguing that the dominant media has too much liberal bias, but on the other hand this may just be because conservatives are unreasonably paranoid! The fact that these "watchdogs" in recent years have started looking way more conspiratorial and weird does not support the case. What a dilemma.
If I allow myself to do some sloppier arguments I would easily be able to argue that conservatives are in deep shit. Opposition of gay marriage since the 90s has turned into an embarrassment for them, as public opinion suddenly in the last 10 years or so turned very quickly in favor of it. I think the poor outcomes of the Iraq War of 2003 are about 95% blamed specifically on the Republican Party, despite Democratic hawks also supporting and working together with the Republicans on this. I can't think of any similar 'embarrassments' for the Democrats, and I haven't even begun talking about Donald Trump. In the popular mind, I think conservative Republicans are going to be The Official Bad Guy for a long time after this. From e.g. Carano's POV, this must be a very unpleasant situation to be in. You do not simply change your politics; a conviction is a conviction.
If I had to make a WW2 meme about American conservatives, I don't think I would compare them to German Jews in the 30s. I think it would be more appropriate to compare them to generic Germans in the 20s. The aftermath of WWI leading to an official joint condemnation of the German PEOPLE as being "solely responsible" for the horrors of WWI, was such a national embarrassment and source of shame, that I doubt people today can imagine it. To top it off, Germany was the most harshly punished nation and when economic crisis hit the French army just straight up invaded and occupied industrial areas, to force them to keep manufacturing and keep the war reparations flowing. This sets into context the eventual rise of Hitler - a man who instead told the people to be proud of being Germans and that they were being treated unfairly by the opposing powers, and to shift the blame for WWI on someone else (including, infamously to blame the Jewish minority for the fact that Germany lost...).
So what, you may think, WW2 must have been caused by a lot of different things. Why focus on this humiliation of the German people? If they didn't want to be seen as war-like, then why did they start WW2? Obviously it's impossible to prove but the possibility is terrifying - that ordinary men and women subject to enough humiliation and loss of dignity would turn to a dictator that advocates eternal war and destruction. It's worth noting that the British delegation to the Versailles negotiations in 1919 tried to stop the other major powers from punishing Germany too harshly - because they anticipated that if you crush your enemies too harshly, they will come looking for revenge later on. By the way, there is such a thing as the 'clean wehrmacht myth'. A lot of people believe that the German army wasn't politicized (i.e. nazified) that much in the 30s, just that they were honorable soldiers fighting for their country. This idea was manufactured mostly by the US Army post-WW2, for the explicit purpose of 'softening the blow' and allowing the German people to live with some dignity and hopefully avoiding a WW3. It's the truth.
So, this finally brings me to the largest and most important point here: Please don't humiliate American conservatives too much - they need to be able to live with some dignity or they are going to be weak towards guys like Trump, who rile them up with words and deeds of anger.
Ah, it's fine. You don't have a deadline or anything, you can even take a week or so off and really think things through after everything has - hopefully - calmed down. I'm sorry about blasting your substack with such a wall of text. If you consider it rude, for any reason, I swear I won't do it again. Also, don't feel obliged to reply to me if you don't want to.
I also (after a re-read) think my comments were a bit flawed and with one big omission: I didn't talk at all about the responsibility of conservatives to 'meet in the middle' for a (hypothetical) reconciliation.
Well, her net worth is reportedly around $8MM. If she manages her money, she doesn't have to work again. So, I guess she can afford to make statements that will prevent from working in Hollywood again
It's funny how cancel culture is only deemed "accountability" when a conservative voice is in the crosshairs. Gina was making an analogy, that bad shit starts with neighbors. Flat footed? Perhaps. Worse than other social media faux pas made by the woke crowd? Absolutely not.
Now I'll be exercising my cancel muscle by unsubscribing to this Substack. I just don't need to read any more apologies for left wing behaviors that demonize those with whom they disagree.
I don't think that's true at all. Disney dumped James Gunn and only rehired him after a great deal of pushback. And if someone on the left says something shitty, I hope just as much that they take responsibility for their words. True, people on the right are probably more likely to get in trouble over this stuff currently, but it's not black and white, either.
Her working with someone so blatantly racist and vile as Ben Shapiro proves she hasn’t been misunderstood or taken out of context or something like that. In fact, she’s obviously much worse than we even knew. I think her bad posts were actually probably her filtering herself somewhat.
The right-wing victim complex is a seriously real thing. My Trumper father is constantly complaining about the huge disadvantages and struggles white male Christians have in this country. He feels they are the most discriminated against group. I mean, he literally thinks being successful in America is much harder is you’re white than if you’re black, harder for a man than a woman, and that Christians are literally persecuted (unlike Muslims and atheists).
Also, I saw a good meme about being “cancelled for conservative beliefs” the other day, I wish I saved it. I’ll share the gist of it though:
Person A: I ‘m being cancelled for my conservative beliefs!
Person B: Oh, you’re being cancelled for believing in lower taxes?
A: No, not for those beliefs.
B: Oh, you mean you got cancelled for believing in governmental deregulation?
A: No, not for those beliefs either.
B: Oh, so you got cancelled for believing in state’s rights?
A: No.
B: What beliefs are you being cancelled for?
A: Ummm.... uhhhh.... you know.... Ummm...
So well said, dude. The Q&A at the end is perfect.
He hardly disproves the existence of cancel culture with that "perfect" Q&A. Don't you find it coincidental that the only people paying the price for their political or religious beliefs are those who go against the woke consensus? (spoiler alert: I know you do because I read your piece on the cancelling of Troy Leavitt.)
Can you provide examples of Ben Shapiro saying or writing anything racist?
Sure, that’s quite easy.
“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.”
“The Palestinian Arab population is rotten to the core.”
“The Palestinian Arabs have demonstrated their preference for suicide bombing over working toilets.”
“Palestinian Arabs must be fought on their own terms: as a people dedicated to an evil cause.”
In reference to Obama being elected:
“Yet, all we hear now is that America is deeply racist and that Black people are still systemically discriminated against and that Black people are still victims in America society. So, it turns out it didn’t mean anything.”
In reference to Black people being excited about Black Panther:
“'Blade' was not enough"
“We've heard it's deeply important to millions of black Americans, who, after all, were not liberated from slavery 200 years ago, and liberated by the civil rights movement with federal legislation, and have not been gradually restored to what always should have been full civil rights in the United States.”
"None of that has mattered up until they made a Marvel movie about a superhero, who is black, in a country filled with black people."
"We’re above 800 million Muslims radicalized, more than half the Muslims on Earth That’s not a minority. That’s now a majority."
Preface: I haven't even watched Mandalorian yet, so I don't mind arriving late. I didn't find out about the Carano incident until today and besides, it feels like a rerun of an old show. These things happen all the time - some celeb says some exaggeration on social media, people start asking whatever company to cut ties, then company cuts ties, nobody lives happily ever after, etc. Most of the time the celeb is of the right variant in politics - because the right is kind of awkward and unpopular (at least in pop culture, but pop culture may have a different right-left distribution than the full population). It's a very familiar formula and it's all just so tiresome.
Instead of just discussing the event itself we should probably also ask what we can learn from this.
First, I want to point out that just because Carano did indeed post some dumb things online, it doesn't mean that her firing wasn't politically motivated. If Disney would just outright fire people for supporting Trump or for having conservative views on, say, abortion, then it would truly be a PR nightmare for them. However, if Disney secretly wants to get rid of her because they are angry about her views on Trump, then it's a stroke of luck that Twitter finds her dumb posts and starts a controversy about them. Now Disney can play the victim and make it seem like they 'reluctantly' let her go amid the controversy. I am not claiming that this indeed is what happened, but it is one possibility among several and it's important to keep multiple possibilities in mind until all the facts are in.
Also, Carano herself may seem like she is doubling down or like she is pretty happy about the situation, but how do we know that this is actually the case? The opposite case would be that she is pretending to be okay for either professional reasons or perhaps for some personal sense of pride. The situation with all the political chaos and the pandemic has surely made everyone a bit more on edge than usual, and I also believe that people like her must have many different stress factors that I couldn't even begin to imagine.
I don't personally know any people who have been cancelled (or had an attempt made at them) but from a few less well-known cases there have been rumors that the cancellation actually severely impacted the victim's mental health although nobody could have known based on public behavior. I think this is a reasonable possibility and I want to stress that all may not be as it seems. Stress could also be used to potentially explain Carano's weirdness on social media.
That brings me to another topic: conservatives seem to constantly be freaking out nowadays, what's up with that? Is that also stress? I'm going to make an attempt to argue something in that direction (but not without reservations).
One way to formulate this question more precisely would be to ask whether this "persecution complex" is caused by some psychological traits related to American conservatism, or if the cultural environment actually is biased against them? You could also try the "why not both?" approach.
Well, to start with the more negative aspect, paranoia seems to be a recurring thing in American politics. In the 60s, Hofstadter wrote a famous essay ("The Paranoid Style in American Politics") about this and I've seen interest re-emerge in his essay now during the Trump presidency. Somewhat similarly, in the 60s conservative Republican Barry Goldwater used a remarkably aggressive and accusatory rhetoric during his campaign. His campaign was in opposition to the '64 Civil Rights act, which he argued was a plot by the federal government to increase its own influence. Hofstadter certainly had an anti-Goldwater agenda in writing his essay, but it was also about using American political history as a proposed explanation for why Goldwater's angry rhetoric was successful among the rural conservatives of the time. (By the way Erik, I'm not sure and this may be common knowledge, but Goldwater was from Arizona)
The point where I start getting stumped is where I try to understand why American politics, of all countries, contains such paranoia. Maybe Hofstadter (and others) just overstated it, but after the last 4 or so years it's difficult to think so. If I would seriously try to write something about this maybe I would start by something about evolution, how it's important for a species to be a bit more than cautious about predators, and speculate that ancient evolved instincts today leads to a paranoid temperament in some cases, and schizophrenia in the most extreme cases. In that case the paranoid style in America would just be a consequence of random chance - a bunch of paranoid early settlers made the foundation of the paranoid style we know today.
But this is rambling and I need to try to state my point quickly before I drink too much whiskey. So, with Hofstadter and recent events, you would think this paranoid mentality is a part of many conservative's psychology (you might call this a 'persecution complex' if you were so inclined). Some of political history (partially) justifies that. Then, what's the state of the evidence for the opposite: that conservatives are actually being treated unfairly? Well, for this I would probably start somewhere with the university environment - some basic facts are that academia used to be much more diverse in terms of politics - you would have liberals and conservatives in roughly equal numbers working together quite happily. Today there is instead something like a 15:1 liberal to conservative ratio, and it's higher in some subjects. A lot of studies about this gets given time on Heterodox Academy - an organization seeking fairer treatment of conservatives in academia. Their website has a lot of stuff: https://heterodoxacademy.org/
They have sometimes helped with research about the impact of liberal dominance in academia: one comprehensive paper about the particular field of psychology can be found here: https://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf
It would take a long time to read so I'll summarize a few key ideas: they argue that increasing liberal dominance in academia actually leads to lower quality of research because people of similar ideas are less likely to criticize ideas they hold dear for political reasons; another issue is that if only liberals work on a political psychology study then they would be more likely to misrepresent non-liberals by mistake. As for why so few conservatives work in academia, the authors argue that it's a mix of choosing to leave due to overwhelmingly liberal faculty and also due to political discrimination. It was actually a long time since I read the paper so I hope I'm not misrepresenting the research here, but you can check it yourself and also read newer Heterodox Academy content.
Okay, but even if there is some discrimination in academia, that doesn't mean much in itself. I wanted to talk about the media, but looking for information is taking a longer time than expected. It's difficult to determine objectively whether conservatives are being treated fairly by the media without relying just on anecdotes. In recent history, 2008, almost 90% of media personnel donated money to the Obama campaign, if I'm reading this story right: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-democrats-got-88-percent-of-2008-contributions-by-tv-network-execs-writers-reporters-updated
This is suggestive of a similar liberal dominance as in academia, but it's important to note that it's not really evidence of unfair treatment. There have, ever since the 60s, been American conservative "media watchdogs" that tried arguing that the dominant media has too much liberal bias, but on the other hand this may just be because conservatives are unreasonably paranoid! The fact that these "watchdogs" in recent years have started looking way more conspiratorial and weird does not support the case. What a dilemma.
If I allow myself to do some sloppier arguments I would easily be able to argue that conservatives are in deep shit. Opposition of gay marriage since the 90s has turned into an embarrassment for them, as public opinion suddenly in the last 10 years or so turned very quickly in favor of it. I think the poor outcomes of the Iraq War of 2003 are about 95% blamed specifically on the Republican Party, despite Democratic hawks also supporting and working together with the Republicans on this. I can't think of any similar 'embarrassments' for the Democrats, and I haven't even begun talking about Donald Trump. In the popular mind, I think conservative Republicans are going to be The Official Bad Guy for a long time after this. From e.g. Carano's POV, this must be a very unpleasant situation to be in. You do not simply change your politics; a conviction is a conviction.
If I had to make a WW2 meme about American conservatives, I don't think I would compare them to German Jews in the 30s. I think it would be more appropriate to compare them to generic Germans in the 20s. The aftermath of WWI leading to an official joint condemnation of the German PEOPLE as being "solely responsible" for the horrors of WWI, was such a national embarrassment and source of shame, that I doubt people today can imagine it. To top it off, Germany was the most harshly punished nation and when economic crisis hit the French army just straight up invaded and occupied industrial areas, to force them to keep manufacturing and keep the war reparations flowing. This sets into context the eventual rise of Hitler - a man who instead told the people to be proud of being Germans and that they were being treated unfairly by the opposing powers, and to shift the blame for WWI on someone else (including, infamously to blame the Jewish minority for the fact that Germany lost...).
So what, you may think, WW2 must have been caused by a lot of different things. Why focus on this humiliation of the German people? If they didn't want to be seen as war-like, then why did they start WW2? Obviously it's impossible to prove but the possibility is terrifying - that ordinary men and women subject to enough humiliation and loss of dignity would turn to a dictator that advocates eternal war and destruction. It's worth noting that the British delegation to the Versailles negotiations in 1919 tried to stop the other major powers from punishing Germany too harshly - because they anticipated that if you crush your enemies too harshly, they will come looking for revenge later on. By the way, there is such a thing as the 'clean wehrmacht myth'. A lot of people believe that the German army wasn't politicized (i.e. nazified) that much in the 30s, just that they were honorable soldiers fighting for their country. This idea was manufactured mostly by the US Army post-WW2, for the explicit purpose of 'softening the blow' and allowing the German people to live with some dignity and hopefully avoiding a WW3. It's the truth.
So, this finally brings me to the largest and most important point here: Please don't humiliate American conservatives too much - they need to be able to live with some dignity or they are going to be weak towards guys like Trump, who rile them up with words and deeds of anger.
That's enough alcohol for me
I'll reply when I've sobered up....
Ah, it's fine. You don't have a deadline or anything, you can even take a week or so off and really think things through after everything has - hopefully - calmed down. I'm sorry about blasting your substack with such a wall of text. If you consider it rude, for any reason, I swear I won't do it again. Also, don't feel obliged to reply to me if you don't want to.
I also (after a re-read) think my comments were a bit flawed and with one big omission: I didn't talk at all about the responsibility of conservatives to 'meet in the middle' for a (hypothetical) reconciliation.
Well, her net worth is reportedly around $8MM. If she manages her money, she doesn't have to work again. So, I guess she can afford to make statements that will prevent from working in Hollywood again
It's funny how cancel culture is only deemed "accountability" when a conservative voice is in the crosshairs. Gina was making an analogy, that bad shit starts with neighbors. Flat footed? Perhaps. Worse than other social media faux pas made by the woke crowd? Absolutely not.
Now I'll be exercising my cancel muscle by unsubscribing to this Substack. I just don't need to read any more apologies for left wing behaviors that demonize those with whom they disagree.
I don't think that's true at all. Disney dumped James Gunn and only rehired him after a great deal of pushback. And if someone on the left says something shitty, I hope just as much that they take responsibility for their words. True, people on the right are probably more likely to get in trouble over this stuff currently, but it's not black and white, either.