And then along comes Donald Trump with his fascist charisma and his louche charm

And she runs off with him! She threw it all away . . . just to make Cancel Culture look ridiculous.

That’s one version of this story anyway:

Many of the reports of Carano’s termination string together the trumped-up offense of her post about Nazism with a series of controversial posts. The worst of them is a post insinuating elections are rife with voter fraud and should impose photo ID — a claim that, while provably false, is also a standard-issue Republican belief. The second-most controversial post in her history is a very small joke, in which she added “boop/bop/beep” to her Twitter profile, before apologizing for the insensitivity of seeming to mock the practice of including pronouns in social-media biographies. . . .

What’s most striking about the news coverage of Carano’s defenestration is the utter absence of any scrutiny of her employer or her (now-former) agency. The tone of the reporting simply conveys her posts as though they were a series of petty crimes, the punishment of which is inevitable and self-evidently justified. The principle that an actor ought to be fired for expressing unsound political views has simply faded into the background.

If you think blacklisting is only bad if its targets have sensible views, I have some bad news for you about communism. While some victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist were liberals or progressives who refused to turn in the names of their colleagues, others were bona fide communists. Dalton Trumbo — a Hollywood writer who was blacklisted, then wrote under front names, and whose story was told in a recent hagiographic movie starring Bryan Cranston — followed the Communist Party line in the Stalin era. When many fellow communists dropped out of the movement after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, Trumbo followed the new party line. . .

Of course the point with Trumbo and other blacklist victims was never the soundness of their thinking. Technically, the studios had the legal right to refuse to associate themselves with people who had abhorrent beliefs. But a fairer and more liberal society is able to create some space between an individual’s political views and the position of their employer. A Dalton Trumbo ought to have been able to hold onto his screenwriting job even though he supported a murderous dictator like Stalin. And actors ought to be able to work even if they support an authoritarian bigot like Donald Trump.

Jon does make a good point in this piece, which is that the post comparing the putative canceling of conservatives and their views in America today to the situation of Jews in Nazi Germany wasn’t anti-Semitic (as opposed to being merely stupidly over the top), and therefore claiming that Gina Carano got fired from the Star Wars franchise for trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes is wrong: She got fired from that plum acting gig because she’s an aggressively open Trump supporter.

. . . OTOH this is not a good look at all:

Now, is that like the Hollywood blacklist? No, it isn’t, and here’s why:

(1) The blacklist swept up everybody from unrepentant Stalinists, to people who had joined communist or communist-adjacent organizations many years earlier, to people who had even more tenuous connections to the Soviet regime, or indeed none at all. Jon acknowledges this, but takes the view that even if somebody like Dalton Trumbo was a hard core Stalinist in the 1950s (I understand the facts of that particular case are contested), it would still be wrong to refuse him work in Hollywood.

I just completely disagree with that. Supporting Stalin in 1952 — again I don’t know how many if any of the blacklisted Hollywood people met that definition — would not in my view have been all that different from supporting Hitler in 1942, and I assume nobody would consider it wrong to refuse to employ a Nazi in 1942.

(2) The other reason the Blacklist was as a general matter indefensible, besides massive over-inclusiveness, was that the studio system at the time made it no exaggeration to say that, if you were on it, you were pretty much shut out of the movie industry altogether.

Speaking of which, how long did Gina Carano’s years months days hours in the Cancel Culture wilderness last?

Less than 24 hours after her explosive ouster from Star Wars series The Mandalorian for incendiary social media posts, Gina Carano has hit back at her detractors and revealed a new movie project she is making with conservative website The Daily Wire.

Carano told us today: “The Daily Wire is helping make one of my dreams — to develop and produce my own film — come true. I cried out and my prayer was answered. I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob. 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.”

Behold the Magic of the Market, which in all other contexts is used as definitive proof by conservatives that at-will employment is an unmitigated blessing unto the shareholders nations.

ETA: Commenter WinningerR with an important clarification:

Carano wasn’t “fired.” She was not an employee of Lucasfilm, nor was she presently under contract. She wasn’t even a “series regular” on MANDALORIAN, she was a “guest star.” Lucasfilm/Disney was under no obligation to place her in future episodes, and L/D didn’t take anything away from her. It’s not at all clear she would have re-appeared on the show even in the absence of the current controversy. It’s important to acknowledge this.

But seriously, Carano got canned was not invited back to a particularly desirable gig because apparently Disney’s suits don’t want their multi-billion dollar franchise mixed up in the authoritarian white supremacist rackets, and she got what was coming to her. I’m a businessman, Gina. Fascism is a big expense.

Also seriously, what again is wrong with that? If the government made it illegal to hire Trump supporters, that would be bad. If the film industry was still an oligopolistic cartel that could end an actor’s career for dubious reasons, that would also be bad. But neither of these things are the case. If your occasional employer decides not to work with you in the future because you choose to use your massive social media presence to openly support the nation’s leading authoritarian white nationalist politician, that’s perfectly understandable, as a matter of both pragmatism and principle.

The airy generalization that we should “create some space between an individual’s political views and the position of their employer” sounds great from the conceptual equivalent of 30,000 feet, but everybody agrees that principle should have limits.

The problem down on the ground is that, right here right now, open support for Donald Trump in 2021 is every bit as good a reason for firing somebody as firing them because they’re an open white supremacist. In fact it’s the same reason.