As Monsters & Critics reported on Wednesday, MMA star Gina Carano, who played stalwart Rebel veteran Cara Dune on The Mandalorian for Season 1 and Season 2, was dropped by Lucasfilm over yet another social media controversy. The actress was also dumped by her representation, UTA.
The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal’s own inflammatory social media posts became a matter of discussion in the immediate aftermath. #FirePedroPascal began trending on Thursday.
In the face of multiple Twitter campaigns encouraging Lucasfilm to fire the actress for her views, Carano stayed on Twitter and Instagram, continuing to post outside-Hollywood opinions regarding voter fraud, use of pronouns in social media profiles, free speech, and mask mandates.
#FireGinaCarano Trended… Again
#FireGinaCarano has trended more than once, propelled by politically active Star Wars fans and those who do not follow the series, but who found her social media posts offensive.
On Wednesday, it worked.
A release from Lucasfilm stated that Carano’s “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
It seems that this line referenced a post that Carano shared on her Instagram stories which contained the following text:
“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?”
Pascal’s Inflammatory Holocaust Posts Re-Circulated
Carano’s defenders were quick to seize on Lucasfilm’s reasoning. They felt it was hypocritical of Lucasfilm to fire Carano when Pascal had shared Holocaust-themed posts of a similar nature.
Fan accounts began to circulate screenshots from Pascal’s account, one of which purported to show children in a detention facility next to a photo of Jewish children apparently in a concentration camp. He included the hashtag “#ThisIsAmerica.”
Pascal tweeted the meme in June of 2018. As of this writing, it is still live.
Reports later surfaced, one from Snopes, that the meme’s modern photo did not fact originate in the United States, but the West Bank city of Hebron. The cropped photo of the Palestinian children was taken in 2010 at a soup kitchen. They were waiting for donated food.
As the 2020 Presidential election raged, Pascal posted a meme on Instagram— later deleted– that some viewed as equating Trump-Pence voters with slaveowners and Nazis.
Like the Holocaust post, Pascal’s Instagram meme contained a reference to WWII Germany in the form of a Nazi flag. The image also showed a Confederate flag, which is sometimes associated with pre-Civil War slavery.
#FireDisneyPlus Strikes Back
The other stripe of the backlash consisted of Disney+ customers sharing screenshots of cancellation confirmations, along with the hashtag #FireDisneyPlus and #CancelDisneyPlus.
Further comment from Lucasfilm, Pascal, and Carano has not been issued as of the writing of this post.
Stay tuned to Monsters & Critics for updates on this developing story.