BIGGIE'S PLACE

DISCLAIMER: I know I’m incredibly late to this story, but I got around to it, okay? I prefer writing with some perspective anyway as opposed to jumping in during the heat of the moment, battling others in the war for the hottest take.

I’m not a fan of Gina Carano. I don’t give a shit about MMA, so I never followed her career as a fighter. And over the last decade, she’s proven to be a mediocre actor. I would have advocated she have been let go from The Mandalorian simply because she’s a terrible actress. She had continued to get roles because she looked like a certain character needed to look. All the nutritionists and special trainers in Hollywood can’t get your typical skinny actress to bulk up the way Carano already has over years because of her MMA career. So when you really need a tough-looking female with actual muscles, you have to hire someone who’s already beefed up and hope they can learn to act because it’s much more difficult to get a good actress to look like a professional fighter. That’s logical, but it always boggled me why no other female fighters or athletes had gotten a similar chance at these parts.

Carano had become fairly popular among the many people who worship The Mandalorian, and Lucasfilm was even preparing to move forward on a spinoff series for her before she fatally erred with her Twitter posts and #cancelGinaCarano became a trending topic. I thought she was okay in her big screen debut in Steven Soderbergh‘s 2011 flick Haywire, but I didn’t care for her in Deadpool, I can’t even remember who she played in Fast & Furious 6, and she’s been awful as Cara Dune on The Mandalorian. I don’t like when mediocre actors are given prominent roles like this, and that’s been my only beef with her. I don’t care about her uneducated political views (she admitted in her big post-firing interview with Ben Shapiro that she only recently started caring about politics) anymore than I care about the liberal woke rantings and ravings of someone like Brie Larson. I care about the work they put on the screen. But in Hollywood, you’re only allowed to be outspoken politically if you also vote for Democrats. Inclusion is all the rage of late when it comes to skin color or sexual preference, but we still have a long way to go before diversity of thought gets its own hashtag and social media campaign.

It’s one thing to be fired by the studio and have Lucasfilm publicly condemn her, but to also have her agents simultaneously dump her basically signals she may as well find a new line of work, since she’d be poisonous to any other major Hollywood agency as a result. And why? Because she didn’t have acceptable political views. Now, she’s signed on with Shapiro’s company The Daily Wire to produce and star in a film for them. I doubt whatever conservative-leaning story resulting from that partnership will make any cultural impact and I’ll have little interest in ever watching it, but I’m glad she got the opportunity.

The meme she shared that became the final straw in her Hollywood career was dumb, but it was not overtly controversial. It did expose one of the great hypocrisies in Hollywood political commentary. People on the left are allowed to make ridiculous comparisons to Nazis when speaking about Donald Trump and other people on the right all day long. George W. Bush was repeatedly called a Nazi. Many people have pointed out that Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal once made his own Nazi comparisons on social media, one with regards to the “kids in cages” controversy on the US-Mexican border and then another, basically calling all Trump supporters Nazis. Nobody batted an eye at that, even though both were equally witless. I think any comparison between Hitler and Nazi Germany and modern American political issues is absurd. It’s an insult to the millions of people who suffered at the hands of real Nazis 80 years ago. Everyone needs to cut the shit with the Nazi comparisons.

PERFECTLY OKAY:

It’s worth noting that this “America, 2018” photo wasn’t even taken in America. It’s a photo of Palestinian kids in Israel circa 2015. BUT WHAT DOES THAT MATTER? You’re not going to have your ignorance challenged by people who agree with you in principle. Nevermind how blatantly insulting it is to compare any of this to Jewish youths in German concentration camps.

DEFINITELY NOT OKAY:

The idea that you can be silenced and your career obliterated for no other reason than you have conservative views is a terrifying prospect that can only be compared to McCarthyism. It’s insane I have to say this out loud, but…we ought not be bringing back the blacklist. It’s proof once again that the open-minded left is anything but when it comes to dissenting opinions. But good luck finding anyone in the mainstream who will say as much. Fear of the Twitter Mob (or the Blue Checkmark Brigade as they’ve also been called) controls every prominent TV personality and the decision-making of every major media corporation in America.

Hell, it controls non-media companies as well. Nobody wants to be left out in appearing to be on the correct side of the ideological fence. Did you see Oreo’s legendary tweet?

People on the right and some less-than-woke liberals call it “cancel culture”, which is accurate, by the way. Many left-wingers who love the practice retort by calling it “consequences culture”, and they only do that because ‘cancel culture’ now has such a negative connotation. On a nearly daily basis, you can go online and find someone saying “Why hasn’t ___ been canceled yet?” It is immensely disturbing.

We live in a scary culture. This fear of not being woke enough is affecting everything from what movies and TV shows get made to who gets nominated (or not) for awards. If a Republican gets elected president, we have to shame anyone who’s willing to perform music at the inauguration. It’s absurd. We have to punish people now for things they said 20 years ago in what was a vastly different world. I despise Donald Trump, but if you work in Hollywood (or anywhere else for that matter) and you voted for him because god forbid you have a different opinion about policy, it ought not mean your career is over. And for whatever reason, this phenomenon is mostly limited to the entertainment industry. For example, you’re not going to be kicked off an NFL team for having conservative views. Left-wing ESPN won’t cover you, but your job is safe. I admit I don’t have a solution to this gravest of Hollywood dilemmas. It boils down to this: people in prominent decision-making positions simply need to stop being afraid.

Here is Carano’s interview with Shapiro, which can be also be listened to in podcast form on The Ben Shapiro Show feed:

It’s not hard to see why she doesn’t speak publicly about her views. She sounds kind of dopey and confused in this interview. But so do most left-wing celebrities when they attend protests and make ludicrous acceptance speeches after winning awards.

READING:

-I strongly recommend Jonathan Chait‘s piece for New York Magazine: Firing Actors for Being Conservative is Another Hollywood Blacklist. Looking at his other articles, it’s pretty clear Chait is no conservative. I always like seeing someone being intellectually honest regardless of their own politics. It’s almost like that’s what all journalists are supposed to do.