Three years after her Mandalorian firing, Gina Carano still doesn't get it

Gina Carano doesn’t understand what she did wrong. Following a years-long controversy that’s currently awaiting litigation against Disney, the entertainment conglomerate that fired Carano over a series of social media posts that offended, well, pretty much everyone, the actor maintains that she was a victim of “one of the most aggressive unnecessary cancellations in Hollywood history.” To be clear, here’s a list of things that got Gina Carano fired:

• Promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theories amid a global pandemic that has killed more than 7 million people thus far and continues to kill
• Posted a photograph of a boy chasing a Jewish woman during the Holocaust and wrote, “How is this any different from hating someone for their political views?”
• Posted a photo of an infamous anti-semitic mural featuring businessmen playing Monopoly on a table covered in gold and held up by naked Black men, with the caption “All we have to do is stand, and their little game is over”
• Changed her pronouns on Twitter to “boop/bop/beep”
• Shared public skepticism regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election

It’s not hard to figure out why people think Carano is a member of “this extreme right-wing thing,” as she puts it. She posts like one and works with them. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Carano reveals what we all assumed: She still doesn’t get it.

Upon her forced exit from Disney, the company said in a statement, “Her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” Is that true? Well, her posts featured hateful stereotypes of Jews, degradation of other gender identities, and used a victim of genocide to support her conspiratorial thinking. Like many others who share these beliefs, Carano leaned on plausible deniability, telling The Hollywood Reporter: “I had no idea […] Stuff like that I deleted because I don’t want to be associated with anything like that.” Except she is associated with things like that, because that’s what she posts about. All conspiracy theories, no matter how kooky or silly, whether it be Flat Earth, 9/11 Truth, or anti-vax, crossover, at some point, into bigotry—usually landing on the Jews controlling the world. Her thoughts weren’t expressed in a vacuum. They’re part of a consistent worldview that her fans or employers wanted nothing to do with. Instead, she downplays and prefers that each should be discussed separately as if people reading and hearing her thoughts have never heard someone making a hard right turn.

“Boop/bop/beep?” she asked. “Seriously? This was the start of the end for me? A 20-year career, the blood, sweat, and tears of fighting? I never compromised myself for a job. I never ended in a bad situation where I did anything inappropriate. I had a clean and clear climb to where I got to and was going to just keep going. And boop/bop/beep was that harmful?”

Was it that harmful? Probably not. But after a string of harmful posts, a victimization press tour that led her into the open arms of The Daily Wire, and very little remorse, it shouldn’t be surprising that, as she put it, “The Hollywood press and major news outlets coupled me into this extreme right-wing thing that I am not.” The reason the Hollywood press coupled her with “this extreme right-wing thing” is because she shares the same views as those within “this extreme right-wing thing.”

No matter how much she wants to reduce sharing a meme from a genocide to a simple, romantic message of “don’t hate your neighbor,” she can’t. There is nuance, complication, and implication to what she’s saying and doing that many people can clearly see. The Anti-Defamation League diplomatically put it in the article, “Such comparisons are generally not indications of antisemitic animus; however, they are often used to further a political agenda. Such references are outrageous and may be profoundly hurtful to Jews, many of whom lost family members or carry memories of the trauma.” But that’s giving her the benefit of the doubt that she’s taking advantage of, turning her struggle into a branding exercise. She’s now one of the free speech warriors unwilling to “perfectly conform at a time when emotions were running wild in the world.”

Funded Elon Musk, which, considering the amount of antisemitic, racist, and conspiratorial recklessness he’s expressed and allowed to fester on his platform, doesn’t help her case, Carano is currently suing Disney for wrongful termination and discrimination. Does she have a case? Who knows. The mysteries of the law are beautiful and strange. It’ll probably just get settled, but Carano will likely never star in her own Star Wars spin-off and will continue making movies with Ben Shapiro that reportedly bring $800. (Carano disputes this number, but c’mon, more people probably saw Coyote Vs. ACME than Terror On The Prairie.) But if she wants to convince people that she’s not part of this “extreme right-wing thing,” maybe she should consider not playing the part anymore.