I must confess I’m not 100% sure who Gina Carano is. She evidently played a role in The Mandalorian, a television show that I’ve never seen. Yet somehow, someway, she managed to blow up my Google news feed this week nonetheless. Based on the breathless headlines that appeared on each scroll down my news wall, I determined that she must have done something utterly despicable for our national social media gatekeepers to have targeted her so unsparingly for immediate career termination.
And so I dug deeper to learn what atrocities Ms. Carano had committed against the American public. Evidently, tweets were her downfall — especially this last final tweet (from another user, but liked by Ms. Carano) that was her ultimate undoing: “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.”
And thus with these heinous words, Ms. Gina Carano was immediately and irrevocably canceled by the America public, or at least by the only part of America that matters — those with their finger on the trigger of the American social media machine. How dare she compare modern conservatives to Jews in World War II Europe? Unthinkable.
Except is that what she was actually doing? A more reasonable analysis of this tweet may arrive at a different conclusion altogether — that is, perhaps Ms. Carano and the original tweeter weren’t comparing modern conservatives to the Holocaust at all, but were instead making the entirely different — and actually quite thought-provoking — suggestion that the Holocaust did not explosively arise out of thin air, but actually had at least some of its roots in a series of smaller, often subtle transgressions that started many, many years earlier, and which accumulated over perhaps even decades before becoming so ingrained in the psyche of certain parts of the population that the road was more easily paved for subsequent inhuman acts to follow. Maybe that was her point. Maybe she was trying to say that small instances of intolerance and hate can grow into something worse over time. And if so — if that was the point she was trying to make — that certainly doesn’t seem to be that abhorrent at all. That actually is a pretty interesting thought that might merit broader consideration and social discussion.
But that’s not how Ms. Carano’s story ended. Social media rule-makers and gatekeepers, with their uncontested power, don’t look for subtlety or nuance or “other ways of looking at an issue.” They simply look for victims. And this week they found one…and promptly “canceled” her with a speed and vengeance that shook the entire internet with its joyful, celebratory exuberance. “One down, (fill in the blank) more to go.”
Then in swift succession, along came the next victim: one Ms. Rachael Kirkconnell from the TV show, The Bachelor. Rachael’s public termination was for, among other things, going to an Antebellum party in 2018.
Yes, Antebellum parties are racist. This is clear and obvious. But some questions did arise about Rachael’s particular situation. Did Rachael understand the full context of attending a Southern-themed party back in 2018, prior to the “great racial awakening” of 2020? Was there anything intentional in her behavior? Is every last, single piece of Southern history inherently evil due to association with its racist past?
One might think the answers to those questions could conceivably be “no,” “no,” and “not entirely.” But “no’s” don’t suffice when it comes to America’s social-justice power brokers.
The concept of “intention”? Sure, it may be at the heart of the US legal and justice system. The “it was a different year” argument? Sure, it comes in handy when erasing inconvenient truths like Barack Obama’s 2008 anti-gay marriage stance and his later reversal. And certain intellectual and societal contributions of the Old South? Yes, a few likely still manifest themselves in positive, constructive, healing ways in our society today.
But those arguments do not play in social media, popular culture, or modern society. As both Gina Carano and Rachael Kirkconnell found out so painfully this week, the social justice vortex operates by a set of rules entirely of its own construction. Simply put, behaviors, words, and opinions no longer need be malicious, purposeful, or even knowledgeable in order to be targeted for punishment; they can be unaware, unintentional, or even taken entirely out of context, yet still qualify their speaker for immediate condemnation and public cancellation.
Grace, forgiveness, the ability to allow others to apologize and grow, and the capacity for tolerating non-progressive opinions — these cultural values are now relics of the past.
Welcome to the age of social-justice career execution. Just remember to keep your head down and your arms tucked inside, as you may very well be next.
