#FireGinaCarano, Crush Your Enemies, Drive Them Before You

Is this the way?

“The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking around.”

~ Lewis Caroll, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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Gina Carano, the actor who plays ex-Rebel shock-trooper Cara Dune, came under fire on Twitter this week after posting some stupid nonsense on Instagram.

The Twitter mob descended, called for her head, and Disney delivered it on a silver platter. In fact, I started writing this post while the hashtag #FireGinaCarano was trending and by the time I was finished with it Disney had pulled the plug. I had to rewrite the entire thing!

Cara Dune will no longer be a part of Star Wars television. The mob called for blood and blood was spilled. The troublemaker was shown the door and the Twitter outrage mob was vindicated. Nothing is more satisfying than calling for someone’s head and watching it roll.

"Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future," said Lucasfilm in a statement. "Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable."

So let’s talk about what Gina got wrong, what Disney got wrong, and why Twitter justice is anything but.

The #FireGinaCarano hashtag started trending after The Mandalorian actor posted this to her Instagram:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children,” she wrote. The post she shared reads: “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.”

[Edit: I fixed this quotation as I had lumped Carano’s bit with the original post. My mistake!]

No You’re Hitler!

So, this is a tricky one. First off, ‘Nazi soldiers’ is probably the wrong term for the actual thugs who went out and beat up Jews in Nazi Germany. “Nazi soldiers” is actually a weird way to frame soldiers in the Third Reich. Many of the soldiers and officers in the German army weren’t Nazis at all. Hitler’s militias—the Braunhemden or Brownshirts as they were referred to at the time—were responsible for beating up Jews, communists, Roma and so forth, during Hitler’s rise to power.

After that, it came down to the SS and the Gestapo. By and large, the soldiers were off doing other stuff like invading Poland and France. Nazi thugs and police, on the other hand, did a whole lot of awful things. And yes, there were Nazis in the army and Nazi soldiers at the death camps and so on and so forth. But to suggest that Nazi soldiers didn’t beat up Jews is preposterous.

Also, the idea that “because history was edited” people don’t know about the Nazi party drumming up hate among the populace is sheer nonsense. History is history. It’s only edited because different historians research and write about different pieces of it in different ways. There’s not some vast conspiracy to cover up random historical facts (though I suppose there are efforts to paint over anything we now find distasteful). There is no shortage of history out there to read about the ways violence against Jewish people has been incited over the centuries. Whoever came up with this meme didn’t find the secret historical data that was “edited” out of the books. What a silly notion.

Aside from this, the post does make one good point. It’s true that Hitler and the Nazis drummed up hatred against Jews and communists and “the other” in order to turn the German populace against those groups and incite violence. This was nothing new, of course. All across Europe for hundreds of years Jews faced violent mobs. Pogroms were horrifically routine in Russia and across Europe. Hitler’s atrocities were unique more in scale than in kind. We should be worried about dangerous populists doing the same thing now.

Of course, the real issue with all of this is that Carano falls into the whole “let’s compare ourselves to the Jews and their plight” trap, essentially whining that conservatives are being treated like Nazi Germany treated the Jews. Clearly this is a bad take.

A pretty basic rule of Being Smart Online is just never compare yourselves to the Jews and the Holocaust. Don’t do it.

I do agree that we should try not to demonize our political opponents and that doing so has potentially disastrous consequences, but there are better ways to say that. But it’s not like Republicans and conservatives haven’t done their fair share of demonizing the “other” as well. In a new poll from CBS News, a majority of Republicans view Democrats not as political opponents, but as enemies.

A majority of Democrats view Republicans as political opponents, though quite a few also think of them as enemies. This is not a healthy state of affairs for our Republic. We debate with our political opponents; enemies we crush, drive them before us, hear the lamentations of the women.

It’s not hard to imagine a future where similarly awful things to what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 40s could happen here. But it’s laughable to suggest that white Americans or Republicans face anything even remotely like the plight of the Jews in the Third Reich.

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You Can’t Fire Me, I Quit!

When I first penned this post I wondered aloud whether it was justified to call for Carano to be fired. Now that she’s been dumped by Disney the question shifts a little. For one thing, we have to consider not merely the Twitter mob, but also the multi-billion dollar business that is Disney.

Disney has every right to cut ties with any actor or director or producer or supplier that the company wants to cut ties with for whatever reason. Disney cutting ties with Carano is reasonable enough, regardless of what we might think about the Twitter outrage warriors who brought this to Disney’s attention in the first place.

At a certain point, Disney has to consider its brand and whether or not somebody is negatively impacting said brand and in this case, given Carano’s history of bad takes on social media, Disney reached a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s back moment. This wasn’t Carano’s first social media flub. She’s a grown woman and made her own choices. She should know what happens when you play with fire. Disney’s decision to no longer work with her might have been provoked by the #FireGinaCarano hashtag, but ultimately it was a business decision and one you can hardly blame Disney for making.

The Twitter mob is another matter.

The Twitter activists who got the #FireGinaCarano called her anti-Semitic. I find that pretty outlandish. It may be stupid to compare yourself to the Jewish peoples’ suffering under the Nazis but it doesn’t mean you hate Jewish people. That doesn’t even make sense.

Disney’s own statement claims that “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable."

But at least this particular post doesn’t seem to denigrate anyone based on their cultural or religious identity. It’s a bad take but it’s hardly “abhorrent.”

I probably disagree with Carano on a lot of things. I’m not sure. I haven’t spent a lot of time digging into her belief system, though it’s clear she’s a conservative.

But does my disagreement with Carano mean that she should be fired? Maybe not just me, but if I whip up enough people to get a hashtag trending, then does it mean she should be fired? Can we start finding everyone we disagree with on Twitter and get as many of them fired, canceled or shut out of polite society as possible? Surely, this will make the world a better place.

Fear. That’s what we need to spread. We need the people who we disagree with to be afraid of us. It might not change their minds or lead to anything productive, but that’s beside the point. Crush your enemies.

I wonder if this is really the world we hope to create. I thought we wanted a more tolerant world, where nobody had to live in fear.

A similar thing happened to James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, when conservative activists dug up some old, bad tweets of his and Disney fired (and then re-hired) him. This cuts both ways.

Gunn made some terrible, unfunny, offensive jokes back when he was trying to be edgy. I don’t think the James Gunn of the present should be fired because of stupid things he tweeted in the past.

I dislike Carano’s politics but I don’t think she should lose her job because of them. (She should probably be smarter about what she posts, though, if she wants to keep getting roles like Cara Dune).

And I probably agree with her on some issues. Unless we’ve really lost our collective minds, people are still allowed to have a grab bag of ideas and beliefs that don’t actually fall into “Democrat” or “Republican” or “Left” or “Right.” It’s actually kind of remarkable how much people actually agree on, and how often the things we disagree about have almost become abstract.

You toss people into this political climate—constant opining on TV news shows; echo chambers on social media; right-wing talk radio on the dial and the woke brigade on Twitter; all the loudest, most divisive voices always rising to the top—and it starts to feel like all we have are differences and disagreements and discord. I’m not sure why it’s happened, but it’s like everybody is obsessed with politics these days. I don’t think it was always like this. There’s more to life than the parties we vote for and frankly people need to stop caring so much. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Give it a rest.

There’s a better way than outrage and dogpiling. It’s not easy but, as Dumbledore once said, “there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.”

You don’t convince people to be better or think deeper by screaming at them and going after their livelihoods. You don’t beat someone bloody and expect them to see things your way—any more than sharing a divisive meme will successfully lead to less division.

Instead of this, we could just talk. We could calmly talk about why this post is misguided, and why the sensible bits are undermined by the outrageous comparison. Instead of dogpiling and making her feel exactly like the meme she was sharing, we could try to change her mind, or at least nudge her in the right direction. Opinion-makers on the right are already using Disney’s decision as proof that her post was justified to begin with. And around we go.

If black musician Daryl Davis can befriend members of the KKK in order to help convert them away from racism, surely we can have a calm conversation with people we disagree with on social media. And if members of the KKK can be redeemed and come to the light, surely we can all find redemption. Maybe it isn’t always likely, but it’s possible. And if we can’t, maybe we should just stop doing the social media thing altogether.

Maybe we just need to forgive Gina Carano. We don’t even have to engage with her at all, or with people we disagree with on social media. We can just think. Be mindful of what we say and do. Breathe. And then we can let it go. We can not take it personally, not let outrage rule us.

We can forgive the mob, too. A mob is just people. The mob thinks it’s on the side of justice and progress when it’s often just weaponized boredom. Justice is just a guillotine without reason and compassion to guide it. There’s a lot of anger out there on social media. It’s a sickness. You can’t fight that sickness with more of the same. An outrage arms race only helps the outrage peddlers, and probably not even them, not deep down. Can you imagine being upset so much of the time? So angry? So ready to lash out? It sounds exhausting. The weight you have to carry. The burden it becomes.

We discussed Maya Angelou on Tuesday. Let’s invoke her once again.

"It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive,” she once said. “Forgive everybody."

This is the way.

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