BY: THERESA KALLAL
Guest Contributor
Fans of the Disney+ hit series, “The Mandalorian,” are left wondering what to expect from the show next season, as the protagonist’s main ally, Cara Dune, has been cut, following the firing of Gina Carano. “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” is what a Lucasfilm spokesperson announced Feb. 10, 2021. Her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable,” he continued.
#FireGinaCarano was trending on social media right around the same time. So the million-dollar question to ask is, what could Carano, whom Bill Burr has called, “an absolute sweetheart,” have possibly said to merit such treatment from Disney and the public?
Just like any other social media user, Carano’s posts revealed her thoughts and opinions on the happenings in the world around us. Surprisingly, Disney, the company which promotes “values that are universal” as the CEO Bob Chapek claimed, didn’t like that.
One of Carano’s posts that started what she calls the social media “meltdown” happened in September 2020 when she posted “bop/boop/beep” next to her name on her Twitter Bio.
The public’s reaction was overwhelming. Her words were taken as homophobic and insulting, and Carano, alarmed, immediately tweeted an explanation which she later expounded upon to Ben Shapiro in an interview at The Daily Wire, “[My post] was 100% to go to the twitter mob that was telling you what to do, and it had zero to do with the transgender community…I literally turned to my friend and said, let’s put something in my bio just to show I can put whatever I want in my bio just like they put whatever they want their bio, like Trashpanda.”
Yet Carano’s publicist at the time demanded she call their transgender section to apologize, which she did. According to Carano, the LGBTQ representatives whom she talked to were extremely sympathetic, understanding that she meant no insult to them and that she had just stepped in “a landmine.” Allegedly, they even called Disney and suggested it unwise to remove Carano from the cast.
Yet Disney still felt it necessary to write up an apology for the actress, which she refused to read off, calling it “ingenuine.” She proffered her own apology, which Disney did not allow her to read.
Then Carano tweeted the following in November:
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.
2020 had been Carano’s first time voting and she explained her post to Shapiro, “I feel like there’s a lot of outrage about this (who won the election). And this is confusing to me as a newcomer […]. The experience I went through – there was no camera; there was no ID. I mean, it was on a beach.” Based on her own experience, she was offering a solution to a confusing problem everyone shared, no matter which political party they were. But Disney and Lucasfilm did not like what she had to say, and discomfort between the actress and company grew.
Perhaps the final straw that broke the camel’s back was when Carano posted a Holocaust picture with the caption:
“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.”
There is no referral to a specific political party, but Newsweek magazine explicitly said Carano’s post “compared being a Republican today to the experience of Jewish people during the Holocaust.” Furthermore, Brady Langmann of the Esquire called it “insensitive,” and this is what the Lucasfilm spokesperson claimed was “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities.”
However one looks at Carano’s remark, it remains a fact that Disney fired her shortly after and yet said nothing about Pedro Pascal’s post in 2018 comparing Holocaust Jews dying in Nazi prison camps to the children in detention centers at the Mexican border.
“I don’t have a problem with power, but I have a huge problem with abusive power,” Carano confessed to Shapiro. Everything Carano said on social media, even in other posts not highlighted in this article, she said from her conscience, standing up against what she saw as wrong. But Lucasfilm, Disney and others apparently do not share the same conscience.
So now Mandalorian fans are asking themselves, “Why is my nonpartisan science fiction show going to be changed because of politics in our country?”
Disney should not be rewarded for giving into peer pressure and firing someone on the grounds of speaking their mind. If you care about the power Lucasfilm and Disney has to silence those of different opinions, then end that power. Cancel Disney+ subscriptions, or at least make it known that you want to stand up for what is right.
#StandUpForGinaCarano #EndAbusivePower
