Fired Star Wars Actress Gina Carano Lands New Gig

Gina Carano, the actress just fired from the Star Wars series The Mandalorian on Disney Plus, already has her next gig lined up. Meanwhile, her firing from the Lucasfilm series is generating lots of controversy on the topic of celebs who hold conservative views. Coverage:

• New film: Carano will team with the conservative Daily Wire website to develop and produce a film, reports Deadline. Details are scant beyond that, but Carano sounds both defiant and jubilant. "I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob," she tells the outlet. "I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before, and I hope it inspires others to do the same. They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them.” The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro says Carano's crime was offending the "authoritarian Hollywood left."
• The tweet: Carano was fired over a since-deleted online post in which she drew a comparison between today's political climate and Nazi Germany. It read in full: “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's critics pointed to other online missives from her that made fun of mask-wearing and trans pronouns, and asserted that voter fraud was rampant.

• Blacklisting: At New York, Jonathan Chait compares what's happening to Carano and others to Hollywood's notorious anti-Communist blacklisting years ago. "It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers," he writes. As for the post that got her fired: "Overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany are quite common, and, more to the point, not anti-Semitic," he writes. And where's the scrutiny of Disney and Lucasfilm in any of the coverage? "The principle that an actor ought to be fired for expressing unsound political views has simply faded into the background."
• A defender: Ted Cruz was among those coming to Carano's defense. "Texan Gina Carano broke barriers in the Star Wars universe: not a princess, not a victim, not some emotionally tortured Jedi," tweeted the GOP senator, per Fox News. "She played a woman who kicked a-- & who girls looked up to. She was instrumental in making Star Wars fun again. Of course Disney canceled her." To which one person responded: "The issue is not with her character, who kicked a--. The issue is with the actor, who expressed horrific views that her employer does not want to be associated with."

(More Gina Carano stories.)