MAGA, blame, and punishment

'The Mandalorian' Star Gina Carano Fired Amid Social Media Controversy

"Gina Carano will not be returning to The Mandalorian or the Star Wars galaxy after sharing a post on social media implying that being a Republican today is like being Jewish during the Holocaust."

On Wednesday, the hashtag #FireGinaCarano was trending following an Instagram post from the outspoken conservative actor and former mixed martial artist that was met with severe backlash. The post has since been deleted, but screenshots were widely shared by users on social media who called for her firing from the hit Disney+ Star Wars show.

Hollywood has always struggled with this. Actors are front and center in the product of the company that hires them, for long after that product is "manufactured", but actors are still essentially contractors. They're hired; they do the work; they're unemployed again. Part of that gig involves promoting the product they were hired to create, and part of that is maintaining their "brand". If you stir up controversy that pollutes the public's vision of the characters you play, well ... you may be a great actor but you're not so great at maintaining your career portfolio as a contractor.

If you're an electrician, your portfolio is a bunch of well-wired houses. If you're an engineer, it's shipped products. If you're a scientist, it's papers published, patents, your standing with various boards... You don't have to manage your public persona to maintain that portfolio. There's little or no opportunity cost for you butting out of all social media. Actors ... They feel like they need a presence, to raise their value when it's time to promote a project. If you're well-liked by an army of followers, you've got proof of a built-in audience for your next gig. I don't have any direct experience but I bet it has real effects on their pay rate.

So, it was Carano's game to lose. She chose to court people on the right in her public persona, her latest statement took it to a stupid place, and Disney felt the need to appease all the people on the left who got holier-than-thou pissed off. They didn't have to, they probably shouldn't have, but the mob wanted blood.

Our modern public persecution hell (where Twitter is the innermost circle) is almost entirely about virtue signaling and willful misinterpretation and very little about justice. The people taking part in it choose to interpret something as offensive, then choose to take the offensive thing and spread it around to everyone else - strangers and family alike - blowing it up into an event and an excuse to punish someone, and then choose to disregard all attempts to explain or atone, instead anchoring the offending event permanently to the person, and so on. There isn't any step along that course that remotely resembles sane conflict resolution. The entire process spits out anger on one side, and radicalization on the other. Yes, radicalization. Allow me to outline that, using the example at hand:

Any veteran of the internet knows Godwin's Law. You run afoul of it, you immediately open yourself up to people taking your statement to the worst possible place. It's one of the classic blunders, like getting involved in a land war in Asia. Consequences are inevitable. But the goal of any free society is not to teach people that "if I say something that someone else interprets as hateful, I will be harmed." The goal is not to instill a fear of an all-powerful thought police. The goal is to teach people "if I say something hateful, I am harming others," and instill an honest desire to avoid that. If you switch the second goal for the first, then you are on a course to demolish free speech ... and potentially a lot more.

Now, I would never say that speech should be "consequence free". But there's a lot of range to define those consequences. Carano said dumb stuff on her social media, clearly intending that everyone who knows her on Twitter should read it. I'd be happy to see people come out of the woodwork and say she's being ignorant or hateful, and talk about why, and demand that she change her mind. And keep on her, and keep getting in her face in a nonviolent way, until she changes her tune. And, that is where I'm happy to draw the line, not just for her sake, but for the sake of everyone watching the exchange from the sidelines, trying to decide where their respect is due.

Instead her consequences were: An onslaught of very personal and existential threats, and sudden ejection from her job. Her response to those consequences: Lift a big middle finger at everyone who called for her firing, loudly declare that she's doubling down on her beliefs, then go take up a job with The Daily Wire. Radicalization was the only option that promised any dignity, or anything like a safe landing.

Carano's been paid well for years and could retire whenever she wants. She's worth waaaaaayyy the heck more than I ever will be. This is the new direction she wants to go? That's a shame. Now instead of her celebrity being due to a role model character in Star Wars, her celebrity will be about "pwning the libs". It's no great loss if her character is written out of The Mandalorian. But the loss of a potential ally sucks. Yes, she could have become an ally. She could have been drawn into a change of heart, or at least an honorable hearing of differences. Now it's a matter of honor for her to never become an ally. Radicalization is her revenge on all those people who threatened her.

And what about her actual statement? Setting aside the Godwin's Law blunder, her point was: Trump supporters as a group are being blamed for things they have not done or said, and it's all terribly overblown. She has a point.

MAGA people have been accused of massive evildoing, from the demise of democracy to the destruction of the planet to the beginning of World War III, while all the overwhelming majority of them did was exercise their right to free speech to support and/or vote for a populist asshat. They’re obviously not in the same league as the German Jews like Carano implied, but there’s no doubt they’re being scapegoated for issues way larger and older than them.

Sure, many self-declared MAGA people say horrible and stupid things. So do people on the left who want nothing to do with Trump. I've personally heard plenty of asshat statements from people mixed into protests here in the Bay Area. People calling for the assassination of the president, for the deportation of all white people, for the execution of all cops. I've called them on their bullshit, face-to-face, in the moment, and there's always more. There is no monopoly on stupid in either party, or in independent parties, but if you treat one party according to its worst members, you invite an equivalent response. And once again let me point out something that no one on my chosen side of the political spectrum ever wants to think deeply about, despite it being hugely meaningful:

Half the voting public voted for Trump in 2020. Just like they did in 2016. Even after four years of absolute existential panic in the media and minds of the left, they gave him the largest turnout of any sitting president.

If the people around me would actually pause and think about that, maybe they would wonder whether they're seeing their opposition clearly.

Trump's statements and demeanor are the least "presidential" of any in my lifetime. By far. It is absolutely true that his divisive, self-aggrandizing, grievance-filled rhetoric nurtured a broad groundswell of hate and fear. It's nothing but refreshing to have him knocked off the major social media networks. They were bending over backwards to violate their own standards to keep him around, due to the importance he lent to their platform. The Twitter and Facebook management were especially venal, styling themselves as a "neutral" platform, avoiding responsibility for their role as agents and amplifiers, while making concessions to parts of his base that were truly ugly behind the scenes in order to serve their one concern that trumps all others: Market share.

Over the years, of course, The Donald had already said dozens of things that were ban-worthy, but it was his reach as president that caused the most harm. I think on sites like Twitter there should be an official rule that the more reach a user account has, the more scrutiny it can expect, and the stricter the rules become about things like inciting violence and using hate speech. Then the management could have - should have - been able to smack his ass with the ban hammer shortly after he began lobbing degrading insults at private citizens from the "POTUS" account. That was never acceptable, and Twitter allowing it was a clear dereliction of duty.

(Good luck getting social media companies to take up such a rule, since it might impact their market share, and reveal their obvious role as selective editors of everything their platform contains, which would destroy their fig-leaf illusion of an excuse that they can't be liable for what they show due to "respect for free speech".)

It annoys me to admit it, but it's too much to ask these platforms to be responsible for everything horrible that users post. But we can certainly hold these companies' feet to the fire when they are clearly failing to enforce an ethical code of conduct and prevent hate speech from rising to the level of an infestation on their platforms. It's not an easy case to prove, and would require action in the courts just to gain access to the internal metrics kept by the platform to show just how much reach a given inflammatory account or message has, but if we can get some precedent established that will help. Weighing the punitive cost of spreading hate speech is another tough matter: If it's not high enough, the large platforms will just pay it and keep on festering. I'm of the mind that we really should be either breaking up Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, etc, and/or forbidding them from acquiring competitors or excluding them with anticompetitive license agreements, and/or going after their ability to make commercial revenue, so the social media landscape becomes more fragmented.

That way, something dumb like what Carano said might be "trending" on FoopChat, but since there's also BlonkScape, Twooter, Snarkbook, Boopagram, Vaguebot, Wootclick, Shazonk, Hoot, Idiotmatic, Scribe-O-Tron, and Thwerp, Disney won't be compelled to lay her off because it can be reasonably assured that the set of people who are Mandalorian lovers and the set of people who are aghast at something dumb on FoopChat only slightly intersect. And we can all rail against Carano and implore her to change, without automatically enabling the people who are just bullies pushing for retribution. ...As much.

The modern press is absolutely enthralled by whatever happens on Twitter, since the breathless speed at which garbage spreads on it makes for exciting copy. With a bunch more diversity in the market place, perhaps - just perhaps - that will be forced to change. Or hey, maybe what we all need is to collectively go through an epiphany and just log off, because ultimately, I don't care enough either way to say whether Disney did the right thing firing her, and neither should you.

Idiots should be allowed their platform: Make it a nice wide platform, next to another platform stacked with banana cream pies, in tins with convenient throwing handles. If people don't air their gross views out loud, they never get challenged. And if people know that for airing their gross views - for speaking - they are going to be mobbed by a group of people whose members are calling for them to be fired, kicked out of their house, burglarized, and even to be raped or murdered or have their family or children hunted down, well hey, the only solution is to find like minded people in secret behind closed doors, where they can spew and amplify and solidify their bile without detection. That's exactly the sort of scenario that free speech exists to prevent: The breeding of radicalization in the dark, where sensible ideas cannot reach it.