Conservatives Start #CancelDisneyPlus Campaign After Gina Carano Fired Off ‘The Mandalorian’

The self-proclaimed opponents of “cancel culture” are mad at Disney for dropping Gina Carano over her offensive comments

gina carano was fired from the mandalorian for being terrible and conservatives are mad because they are also terrible Disney Bob Chapek
Lucasfilm

Gina Carano was fired from the “Star Wars” Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” after she posted on Instagram that being a Republican in America is pretty much the same thing as being a Jew in Nazi Germany. And, predictably, conservatives are pretty mad about it, to the point where some have gotten on board with a #CancelDisneyPlus campaign on Twitter.

The idea behind this push is that conservatives say Disney fired Carano for her political beliefs. But that’s not true. The actual reason is that Carano’s Instagram post was “abhorrent,” as Disney described it in a statement.

Judge for yourself:

“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,” Carano wrote.

It’s a false comparison, since your political beliefs cannot be equated with an ethnicity. One is something you’re born with and can’t help. The other is something you choose. And so, more broadly, people being annoyed with you because of your political views is not the same as being murdered because of the family you were born into.

But this is a false equivalence that conservatives have been making for a long time.

The backlash to Carano’s firing didn’t begin with a hashtag. It started with some far-right Twitter pundits like Dave Rubin and former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch.

It’s not clear who started the #CancelDisneyPlus hashtag, but conservative Twitter guy Jack Posobiec — best known for very loudly and very falsely claiming Disney added anti-Trump scenes to “Rogue One” during reshoots — has been pushing it pretty hard and posting images of the hashtag’s ranking in Twitter’s trending topics.

But for the most part, #CancelDisneyPlus has been taken away from those defending Carano. Instead, if you search the hashtag on Twitter you’ll be greeted by just as many people mocking it as there are embracing the idea.

And many of those folks are pointing out the irony of these folks, who so often rail against so-called “cancel culture” of once again engaging in the thing they’re complaining about while they complain about it. See below a sample.

Carano, by the way, has quite a history of such social media posts. She’s caught plenty of flack in the past for being transphobic and pushing conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.

Conservatives tried something similar last summer with Netflix in response to the movie “Cuties,” but it didn’t seem to make much of an impact — the streaming service had its biggest year of growth ever in 2020.

Phil Owen

Phil.Owen@thewrap.com • Twitter: @philrowen

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