Disney settles with Gina Carano: It was the right thing to do

Actress Gina Carano, Lucasfilm and its parent company Walt Disney Co. have settled the federal lawsuit filed in which Carano claimed that, in 2021, she was wrongfully terminated from her role in “The Mandalorian” after she expressed her conservative political views on social media.

The settlement details have not been made public, but Lucasfilm released a statement praising Carano’s on-set professionalism and expressing the hope of “identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”

I am here to beg everyone to remain calm and avoid using the four Cs: cancel culture (is this the end of it?) and corporate capitulation (is this another example of it?)

No and no.

Cancel culture has long been an amorphous and often recklessly applied term, used to describe a litany of events, including but certainly not limited to male predators losing their jobs, students protesting their school’s choice of graduation speakers and outrage over J.K. Rowling’s stance on transgender women.

Recently, however, it has taken a far more concrete shape that looks astonishingly like the White House where President Trump continues to literally cancel all manner of things, including U.S. membership in the World Health Organization, the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency and huge portions of Medicaid. Recently, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the bureau documented weaker than expected numbers for July and downward revisions for the previous two months.

Corporate capitulation, too, is alive and well, with law firms, universities and media companies falling like dominoes before Trump’s lawsuits and threats of defunding. Last year, Trump sued ABC and its parent company Disney for defamation after anchor George Stephanopoulos wrongly stated on air that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping E. Jean Carroll — Trump had been found civilly liable of sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll. Disney settled for $15 million, paid to Trump’s presidential foundation and museum.

Even more troubling was Paramount Global’s decision to pay a $16-million settlement in what many consider a frivolous lawsuit brought by Trump against “60 Minutes.” After late-night host Stephen Colbert called the move a “big fat bribe” designed to ensure Paramount’s recent acquisition by Skydance, CBS, which is owned by Paramount, announced that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” was being canceled due to financial considerations.

So while it is tempting to see Disney settling with Carano as a piece of a larger and very worrisome whole, particularly when Elon Musk financed her lawsuit, it was in fact simply the right thing to do.

Carano is a former mixed martial artist turned actor who has been vocal about her support for conservative causes and President Trump. In 2020, she had caught some flack for posting “beep/bop/boop” as her pronouns in her Twitter bio, which some took as her way of mocking trans people. She denied this, changed her bio and expressed support for the trans community.

There were also posts that criticized masking policies and shutdowns during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as one calling for an investigation into voter fraud after the 2020 election.

But it was a repost on Instagram that cost her her job — in February 2021, she reposted a famously horrific image of a half-naked Jewish woman fleeing from a mob with a moronically simplistic message about divisive politics: “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?”

Landing just a month after then-President Trump sent an armed mob to attack the Capitol in the hopes of overturning an election he refused to believe he had lost, the post, which appeared to compare MAGA supporters in 2021 America with Jews in Nazi Germany, sparked #FireGinaCarano.

And that’s exactly what Disney did. Calling her posts “abhorrent and unacceptable,” Lucasfilm excised her character from “The Mandalorian” and canceled an upcoming spinoff in which she was to star. Her talent agency, UTA, dropped her and Hasbro canceled a line of toys based on her “Mandalorian” character.

It was an overreaction that smacked of fear and pandering. I do not agree with the sentiments Carano expressed in her posts, but compared with the blithely toxic abuse regularly used on social media, they are relatively benign, based far more on genuine ignorance — most people are in fact aware of the vicious antisemitism leveraged by the Nazis as well as their institutionalized tactics of fear — than anything else.

Of course, those who attempt to be politically provocative on social media (and reposting a photo of a victimized Jewish woman in such context is the definition of political provocation) cannot then feign shock and dismay when people are provoked, especially at a time when far-right tweets, including the president’s, had led to a violent attack against lawmakers. (Hence the irony of Musk’s support — the platform he renamed X was in large part built on its ability to harness all manner of just and unjust hashtag campaigns.)

But as my colleague Robin Abcarian noted when Carano filed her lawsuit in 2023, the social media mob’s decision that a woman, who was far from a household name, deserved to lose her livelihood, and more important, Lucasfilm’s agreement with that decision, was extreme.

Bad publicity is never good for an entertainment property and whether it was explicit in her contract or not, Carano did represent, to a certain extent, “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm and Disney. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry’s increasing reliance on social media has created a world in which actors and other creative types are expected to amass millions of followers on platforms that tend to reward the outspoken and outrageous over the thoughtful. Encouraged to reveal themselves “authentically,” stars can find themselves prodded by fans to comment on current events and excoriated when they refuse or respond in a way that certain followers consider insincere or politically incorrect.

Telling people to stay off social media is not the answer; neither is regulation by hashtag campaign.

While Carano’s case is certainly reflective of many perils that face us at the moment, the fact that she reached a settlement, including an apparent promise of more work, is not a sign of further deterioration.

The fear that our cultural landscape is being attacked by political forces that would strangle the notion of free speech and competing ideologies is real and justified. But in this case, the capitulation came not when Disney and Lucasfilm decided to settle with Carano, but when they fired her in the first place.