According to Forbes, the firing of Gina Carano was a huge mistake for the Disney company. Likely, it was also a bad mistake for Lucasfilm, too. Gina Carano first garnered controversy when she politely declined to put pronouns in her bio, as many Twitter uses also don't do, and the outrage mob began harassing her. After the attacks went on for some time, she, as a joke, decided to put beep/bop/boop as her pronouns. Needless to say, when the fact that someone doesn't want to partake in your identity politics makes a joke about it, it doesn't appease the people who are so outraged they can't function if they aren't being a militant activist against someone.
As a conservative, Gina often did what many conservative influencers on social media have been doing lately: being angry at mask mandates, downplaying the risk of the coronavirus, etc. Whether you agree with her on these matters or not is a nonissue.
What is an issue is that she was never threatening anyone who agrees with mask mandates or fears the virus. This is where freedom of speech comes in. I wear a mask quite gladly and was more than compliant with shelter-at-home orders, but I can't tell people who don't agree with mask mandates that they're evil. I can tell them that I think they're wrong, but that's the extent of it. As long as they aren't going to rip off my mask and I'm not going to try and lock them in their homes, for example, we just have to agree to disagree.
You know, like decent human beings.
What finally drove the outrage mob to start trending #FireGinaCarano on Twitter was an Instagram post she made:
“She's comparing being Republican to being a Jew during WW2!” came the cries. Disney and Lucasfilm (I don't know if this was actually a decision by Kathleen Kennedy or Bob Iger), not wanting to deal with any bad PR, caved to the mob and fired her from the hit Star Wars show The Mandalorian.
What makes her firing perplexing is that her costars have shared similar posts, albeit with a leftist slant to them. Pedro Pascal, who plays the Mandalorian himself, posted a picture of refugee children being kept in ICE cages alongside Jewish children in similar conditions. He mistakenly said that this photo was from 2018 when it was actually under Biden's administration (not that ICE conditions have changed dramatically, and they absolutely should be condemned), and even as bad conditions are in ICE's detention centers, those kids still aren't being murdered. It was a bad comparison, but he didn't get fired for it.
Stranger still is that she wasn't actually comparing Republicans to Jews during the Holocaust, she was simply saying that the reason why the Nazis weren't met with massive amounts of resistance when they started rounding up Jewish people was because they were already disliked by the masses. The idea was that if it's socially okay to hate someone, that can lead to bad things down the road. It still isn't a great comparison to make, but it's disingenuous to say that she was actively comparing conservatives to Jews living in this time.
Moreover, we all know that everyone has been pointing fingers at people they disagree with on both the right and left, calling them “Nazis” and/or “literally Hitler” for some time now. It's a bit hypocritical, in this author's opinion.
Some are predicting that this insane action could be the tipping point that brings us back to sanity after an overdose of cancel culture. I'm going to reserve judgment on that for now, as I'm not sure which way it will teeter at the very end.
However, I think we need to look at how we got here so we can see where this can head.
Shaming: The Precursor to Canceling
A college girl decided to make a nasty, hastily filmed video for her vlog in 2011. Japan had just been devastated by a massive earthquake and tsunami, leaving many who were studying abroad to make frequent phone calls, inquiring about their loved ones. Frustrated, she used these students as scapegoats and vented. Within days, she was thrown out of college. No chance to take down the video on her own or apologize, she was just done and over.
The Internet went wild, assuming that because she was blonde, she wasn't that smart anyway, and they doubted that she was a good student. After all, rational people don't get angry and make stupid decisions, right?
Later, a woman was on a plane to South Africa for a new job. She didn't have many Twitter followers and tweeted out a racist “joke” that no one would ever laugh at. She took a nap, and when she awoke, her career was gone. The tweet had gone viral, and the denizens of Twitter had made sure she would never personally or professionally recover from her moment of stupidity.
It Starts in China
No, I'm not talking about shaming in general, which even Americans have a long history of. I'm talking about online witch hunts that don't stop until someone is thoroughly disgraced with no ability to repair broken trust or to turn a new leaf. This particular form of shaming actually began in China.
In 1991, Chinese slang picked up some new vocabulary: human flesh search. The translation sounds terrible to us, but this was meant to be something lighthearted, even whimsical. The Internet was still very new, so there weren't any ill-thought-out social media posts to rage against. Instead, in the same way the anonymous users of 4chan have been known to come together and solve crimes or just track down information most of us couldn't, the Chinese would use primitive search engines to weasel out information about figures (sometimes just objects) of interest.
It wasn't meant to be vicious, just a thing that some fandoms did. That is, until it wasn't anymore. Very quickly, they realized that they could track down the supposed wrongdoers and morally bankrupt members of society. Some of them, such as anyone who partook in “crush videos” (please, please don't look that up; you will be traumatized for life) were definitely doing things that were illegal, but others were far more innocent, their evidence of wrongdoing stemming from supposition rather than fact.
Are you a low-level employee with a nice watch? You must be corrupt!
Once an Internet group was onto you, proof of wrongdoing or not, you were basically expelled from public life, hounded by an army of online strangers. You don't know if they're a vocal minority or a large force to be reckoned with, as the nature of the Internet means a single person, with enough accounts, can make themselves look like two people or more.
The funniest part of all of this is that Americans were extremely perplexed by this behavior. In a collectivist culture, such as China, they reasoned, this type of thing is just bound to happen. In individualist America, however, it could never take root. Sure, the concept of “doxxing” existed, but it wasn't this widespread, organized hunt like the Chinese were doing.
However, now this is American culture. The Internet has become a weapon wielded by vocal groups to silence anyone who disagrees with them and no longer are they content to just go after low-level people who made a single, stupid mistake.
The Puritans Paved the Way for America
We like to look back at the Puritans as being a quaint, thankfully extinct brand of fundamentalism. After all, these are the people who literally canceled Christmas when they seized power in England! The only positive thing we seem to be able to credit them with is Thanksgiving (which didn't quite go down the way the myth says) and good books by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Otherwise, the mention of their name conjures up images of witch hunts, particularly in Salem, and fire and brimstone sermons like “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Thanks to Mr. Hawthorn, you may also think of letters sown onto the garments of cultural transgressors, forever broadcasting to the world their sin. You think of Hester Pryne and her scarlet “A” emblazoned on her bosom for the adulterous affair that spawned her daughter. She is forever marked and shamed by a culture that has no room for moral wrongness.
It's asinine to look upon the Chinese and say, “That can't happen here,” when the legacy of the Puritans is staring at us from the earliest abyss of our own history and the pages of American literary classics. America's earliest settlers created a shame-based society that controlled people through humiliation and the loss of reputation. It doesn't matter if you consider yourself conservative or liberal – all humans are capable of wielding the power of shame and canceling to enforce a specific worldview and to police “problematic” behavior.
Cancel Culture Flies in the Face of Progressive Values
More problematic than taking that first step and admitting that we have, and always have had, a problem with canceling is that no one, specifically on the left, points out how insanely hypocritical it is to engage in such behavior. Progressives typically pride themselves on believing in restitution over retribution; of rehabilitation over punishment.
It is largely the progressives who champion the reform of our long-broken criminal justice system, who ended the segregation laws, and gave women the right to vote. They abolished slavery, led the way to a new government that didn't rely on a powerful bloodline, and more. Freedom of speech was a radical idea!
Yet now, just as such causes are championed, anyone who doesn't toe the line on any and all issues that the left has vowed to take up is guilty of Orwellian wrongthink. Instead of the Puritan conservatives shaming people who step out of line or the McCarthy government advising people to turn in Communists, it's the woke left that attacks people who question the capacity of minors to drastically alter their bodies, people who believe in non-interventionist foreign policy, and people who hold conservative views in general. Then lazy journalists use trending hashtags to write their hot takes, often out-of-context, validating these outrageous views, and starting the whole toxic cycle to start over again.
This is what causes progressives in the modern age to lose credibility, and this country is becoming increasingly divided. I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that people cannot simply agree to disagree anymore. There has to be a clear winner and a clear loser. Black and white thinking has transformed our society into one of hate and mistrust.
In her Instagram post, Gina Carano said that the Nazis were only able to succeed in their endeavors to remove Jews from society because society had been conditioned to think it's okay to hate Jews. Today, professors are predicting that we are on the brink of another Civil War. Perhaps she was right after all?
