Ex-Mandalorian star Gina Carano has said and tweeted many offensive things over the past couple of years. Yet the one that finally convinced Lucasfilm to fire her from their hit TV show was, ironically, a right-wing commonplace: comparing the persecution of American conservatives to the Nazi persecution of Jews.
Carano’s tweet—deleted but, of course, preserved and reposted—featured this statement, in quotation marks: “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up 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?”
Now, this is obviously idiotic and offensive – more on that in a moment. But what’s striking to those of us who follow such things is that conservatives say things like this all the time. They compare cancel culture to Nazism, COVID safety protocols to Nazism, gun control advocates to Nazis, the list goes on and on. It literally happens every day. Perhaps it happens so often that people like Carano have no idea how absurd and offensive it is. But it is.
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First, the endpoint of Nazism was the murder of six million people, including most of my grandparents’ generation in my own family. Whether it’s right or wrong to fire Carano, it’s perhaps not the same magnitude of evil. (That hasn’t stopped some of her defenders from arguing that her firing proves the “point” of her Tweet, which was, itself, a retort to the #FireGinaCarano campaign).
To so grossly trivialize the Holocaust is, on one level, purely narcissistic. Poor, poor me, Carano is tweeting. But on another level, it’s simply antisemitic to equate the near-genocide of the Jewish people to people being mean to an actress on Twitter--or even getting her fired. It suggests that she has either no understanding or no empathy for what genocide really is, what hate really is, what street violence in Nazi Germany was really like.
That is why, in Lucasfilm’s words, Carano’s “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” If you think you’re just like a victim of the Holocaust, you are denigrating the people who were.
Second, while I’m sure some people may hate Carano, most of the people posting #FireGinaCarano weren’t attacking her personally; they were attacking the offensive garbage that she endlessly spouts on social media: mocking Covid restrictions and alleging a government conspiracy, disparaging Black Lives Matter, mocking the practice of stating one’s personal pronouns, and finally joining the mob on Parler. This isn’t hate—it’s opposing the expression of it.
Carano’s numerous posts aren’t merely stating political opinions, after all. They’re spreading lies, and contemptuously dismissing those she disagrees with. Like Trump, she’s a bully and an ignoramus.
So no, Ms. Carano, you are not being hated like my grandparents were hated. You are saying things that many people think are repulsive, and those people are saying “that’s repulsive.”
All of this, to me, seems obvious. And yet, Carano is far from alone.
Last month, after Twitter de-platformed Donald Trump, conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck told fellow conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson that “This is like the Germans with the Jews behind the wall. They would put them in the ghetto. Well, this is the digital ghetto. You can talk all you want—Jews, you do whatever you want behind the wall… And that’s where we are.”
(Of course, Jews were not put in ghettos so that their speech would not be heard on a social media platform. They were put in the ghetto to prepare them for deportation and extermination, and in the ghettos many starved, got sick, and died.)
Not to be outdone, Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro said that Amazon deplatforming Parler for failing to curtail hate speech was “a kind of censorship that is akin to a Kristallnacht where they decide what we can communicate about.”
(Kristallnacht was a night of bloody pogroms in 1938, during which 267 synagogues, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, and over 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. It was not an act of censorship.)
The Covid pandemic has also provided numerous opportunities for ridiculous Nazi analogies. For example, one popular right-wing meme shows a picture of a Nazi officer accosting a Jew wearing a yellow star. On top, the caption reads “Just put on the star and quit complaining, it’s really not that hard.” On the bottom, “Just put on the mask and stop complaining.” (The meme was even posted by a county Republican party Facebook page.)
And in July, a newspaper on Kansas owned by a Republican county chairman published a cartoon depicting Kansas governor Laura Kelly wearing a mask with a Jewish star on it, superimposed on a historical photo of Jews being forced onto Nazi cattle cars, with the caption “Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask… and step onto the cattle car.” (I’m not clear why the supposedly Nazi-like governor has a Jewish star on her mask, but whatever.)
More broadly, liberal policies have been endlessly analogized to Nazism. Obamacare was routinely compared to Nazism; Sarah Palin’s lie about “death panels” evoked Nazi eugenics, while the Washington Times made the connection explicitly. So is gun control; numerous conservative pundits compared the Parkland students advocating for greater gun control to Hitler Youth, and Ted Nugent compared an anti-NRA documentary to the work of Joseph Goebbels. And so are reproductive rights (since abortion kills people just like the Holocaust killed people).
Now, all of these remarks have been duly condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish organizations. But they keep coming. Conservatives seem unable to help themselves; anything they don’t like is Nazism, anyone who doesn’t want to promote conservative ideas is a Nazi, any restriction on any activity, no matter how dangerous, is like putting Jews on cattle cars.
Carano is hardly the first conservative to make these antisemitic and absurd analogies. She’s just the first to face any consequences.
