Gina Carano was fired by Lucasfilm from the cast of The Mandalorian for publishing a series of increasingly intemperate social media posts. That much is clear and indisputable. But has she been cancelled? If she has, is that a bad thing? 

Now, a good writer would build suspense from their lede, captivating the reader in mystery and intrigue so they would willingly choose to continue engaging with the writer’s material. I, however, am not a good writer, so (for once!) I shall cut to the chase. Gina Carano will undoubtedly continue to collect royalties for her roles in various blockbuster films, including Deadpool and Fast & Furious 6. She will also remain a respected former mixed martial artist and, last I checked, she will also remain the daughter of Glenn Carano, one of the several Caranos running the gaming empire formerly known as Eldorado Resorts.

Put more succinctly, her floor is much higher than many of our ceilings. We would all be lucky to be so “cancelled” — and I haven’t even touched on her post-Mandalorian career.

However, I have been informed from reliable editor-titled sources that saying the rich, successful daughter of a rich, successful Nevadan gaming executive (sorry, Ted Cruz, but the only thing “Texan” about Gina is her birth certificate) is going to remain, well, rich and successful is, in a word, boring. It would also lead to an alarmingly brief column — after my last doorstop, I’m sure said editor-titled individuals would appreciate publishing something briefer than 4,400 words under my byline, but “250 words, give or take” is probably pushing matters a bit far in the other direction.

Besides, I still have a follow-up question to answer — would it be a bad thing if Gina were cancelled? 

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First thing’s first — what does it mean to be “cancelled”? 

As Will Wilkinson pointed out after he was fired from his job with the Niskanen Center for an intemperate social media post (sound familiar?), part of the problem with cancel culture discourse is nobody really has a clear, operationally consistent definition of the term. Were the Dixie Chicks “cancelled” when their fans burned their CDs and radios refused to broadcast their songs after they criticized President Bush in 2003? Was Colin Kaepernick “cancelled” from the NFL after he kneeled during the national anthem? Was Tomi Lahren (like Gina, a fellow UNLV graduate) “cancelled” from The Blaze for being openly pro-choice?

No less so than Gina Carano, perhaps, but each example nicely illustrates how many of the conservative pundits decrying “cancel culture” are more interested in the motes in the eyes of their ideological opponents than the beams in their own eyes. Otherwise, however, no, I don’t think so.

When I personally think of “cancel culture,” I think of otherwise anonymous people who suddenly find themselves the main character on social media. As if struck by lightning, their lives are randomly overturned as millions of strangers across the world decide, in a once in a million moment, that they are inhuman animals, undeserving of so much as a single shred of human decency. These aren’t people with access to public relations staff, social media managers, or deep pockets of money and social capital to fall back on in case of an emergency. 

A good early example of this would be the woman who took a picture of herself flipping the bird at the Arlington National Cemetery roughly a decade ago. As Reply All described several years back, that single photo, taken in jest and carelessly posted on Facebook, led to the loss of her job, her privacy, and a constant barrage of death threats. It eventually took a social media reputation management company to scrub that photo from the internet and restore her reputation — and the only reason she had access to that service was because the CEO of the company wanted to demonstrate their capabilities to paying customers by successfully managing one of the hardest cases in internet history. 

Thankfully, these sorts of stories are fairly rare — rare enough, at least, to still make news when they happen.

These stories, however, are covered and opined upon by people with considerably greater experience and resources. They (well, we, if I’m being perfectly honest) would really appreciate it if you subsumed your perfectly legitimate fear of being at the wrong end of a social media lightning strike into our fear of losing access to you, our audience. 

Losing access to my privilege to publish weekly columns for your edification and entertainment in The Nevada Independent, however, is not the same thing as having an angry mob call a SWAT team on my home in the middle of the night and it’s frankly obscene to suggest otherwise. If I lose my column space here, I can still write on my personal blog — I’m just not entitled to the audience drawn to this publication by the work of the excellent staff.

Similarly, Gina Carano is not entitled to the audience drawn to the Star Wars universe. It existed well before her and it will exist well after her. Lucasfilm’s primary responsibility is to build and grow the audience drawn to the Star Wars universe and its various properties. Since more fans were repelled by Gina’s behavior on social media than were drawn in by her acting in The Mandalorian, they made a business decision, just as the Niskanen Center did with Will Wilkinson, just as country music radio stations did with the Dixie Chicks, just as the NFL did with Colin Kaepernick, and just as The Blaze did with Tomi Lahren.

Of course, every single person I just listed still has the right and ability to draw their own audience and actively still does so. According to TMZ, Gina Carano was just hired to star in a movie produced by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro. Will Wilkinson is on Substack. The Dixie Chicks are on Spotify. Tomi Lahren is a Fox News contributor. The one person previously listed who might arguably have been cancelled (in a way) would be Colin Kaepernick, who hasn’t played a single down of professional football since his protests in 2016. Even he, however, still received sponsorships from Nike after his football career ended and currently enjoys a wide audience due to his political activism, so it’s not like he’s been cast into the outer darkness of total obscurity. He was just pushed into a somewhat premature career change — a career which, if we’re being honest, brings far more good to the world than anything he did for the 49ers.

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Given all that, clearly Gina has not been cancelled. She already has a new job. I also expect she will have a long future ahead of her of following in the footsteps of Tim Allen and Kevin Sorbo, two openly conservative Hollywood has-beens who turned their fifteen minutes of fame from starring in popular television shows over two decades ago (yes, it’s been over two decades since Hercules and Home Improvement were last on the air) into a petty grievance industry by peddling the notion that the utterly predictable arc of their careers was the product of anti-conservative bias in Hollywood. 

I’m sorry, dear reader, but Tim Allen and Kevin Sorbo are in their sixties. The reason they don’t get new roles isn’t because they’re conservative. It’s because they and what they bring to the set are old. 

This still doesn’t answer the question of whether Gina should have been fired. Yes, Lucasfilm made a business decision, but why did it make it? Why were so many fans up in arms about Gina’s social media? Was it justified?

The short answer is Gina’s character in The Mandalorian, Cara Dune, did not appeal to the same audience Gina Carano’s social media persona appeals to, and vice-versa. 

As Wired pointed out, Cara Dune was a tough, competent female warrior who widely appealed to the progressive wing of the Star Wars fan base. Gina Carano, on the other hand, seldom found a talking point from former President Trump which she didn’t want to reflexively parrot herself, including anti-mask messaging and complaints about voter fraud. She is, in other words, exactly the sort of person Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald would love to recruit as a gubernatorial candidate against Gov. Sisolak in 2022. 

Fans, intrigued by Cara Dune, followed Gina Carano on social media, only to learn the actress behind the body armor was far more likely to fight for the Empire than the Rebellion. Naturally, they expressed their disappointment, as people often do on the internet. Gina responded to that disappointment by comparing criticism of her personal politics to the Holocaust, a rhetorical move which is fundamentally a twin sibling of Godwin’s Law. As a general rule, comparing criticism of your social media posts to the Night of Long Knives, Krystallnacht, or Auschwitz is widely regarded as a bad move. 

To begin with, it’s lazy — if you’re a conservative looking for a historical example of people being killed en masse for their political beliefs instead of their ethnicity, the Cultural Revolution is considerably more germane and has a higher body count to boot. Alternatively, if you’re looking for people being killed based on class characteristics, there are plenty of examples from Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union, including the Holodomor and the Great Purge. 

Additionally, making such a comparison suggests a complete lack of self-awareness and perspective. Being yelled at by strangers on the internet is no fun, I agree, but you can always turn Twitter off. Anne Frank, on the other hand, could not simply leave the attic.

Put everything together and you have an actress whose personal brand was in conflict with the brand of her character, whose sensitivity to criticism was absurdly out of proportion from reality, and whose sense of gratitude for the audience her role granted her was largely nonexistent. Would you want to work with someone like that? Would you want to hire her if you had the option to hire just about anyone else? How many other actresses do you suppose Lucasfilm could attract to an audition, anyway, and would any of them be easier to work with? 

Unfortunately, these questions strike at the core of most “cancel culture” punditry, the large majority of which is produced to protect those with immense cultural and financial privileges from consequences for their actions. In an open and competitive society, it should be hard — impossibly hard, in fact — for one person to retain such privileges for long without someone else out-competing them for those same privileges. All it should take is one stumble, one mistake, for one of the millions competing against you to grab you and pull you back to the pack while they pull ahead.

Gina Carano made a mistake — a series of mistakes, in fact. At her level of accomplishment, those mistakes have unavoidable consequences because, at her level of accomplishment, every mistake costs someone millions of dollars. There are, however, far worse fates than being a former actress for The Mandalorian, and most of them are frankly far less stressful and subject to far less scrutiny. Don’t cry for Gina Carano — she’ll be just fine and so will you.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].