In his new book “Virtue Bombs,” film critic and RealClearInvestigations contributor Christian Toto finds Hollywood’s dream factory a woke nightmare for dissenters. But not everyone gives in. In this excerpt, Toto reports on pushback from "The Mandalorian's" weaponized Gina Carano, above.
By Christian Toto
Hollywood is all about female empowerment, when it’s not telling actresses to lose weight and get Botox, or ignoring starlets on the “wrong” side of forty.
Yes, the industry’s woke revolution is making sure all the sexism and inequality baked into the movie-making cake is replaced by strong, independent women and boundless opportunities.
Hollywood’s Future is Female ... to a point.
The saga of Gina Carano, groundbreaking MMA fighter and all-around “sweetheart,” according to her “Mandalorian” co-star Bill Burr, will be written about for years to come. Or at least it should be.
Carano’s rise to Hollywood glory could yield its own blockbuster biopic. Daughter of Dallas Cowboys quarterback Glenn Carano, she excelled at multiple sports before becoming an MMA fighter.
Her professional career wasn’t long, but she amassed an impressive 7-1 record and became the first women to headline a major MMA event. Her beauty, bravery, and fighting skills helped the sport in ways that would make professional victim/soccer star Megan Rapinoe green with envy.
Glass ceiling, crashed into a thousand tiny shards.
That’s when Hollywood came calling. Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”) spotted her last fight, in which she lost to a competitor nicknamed Cris Cyborg (gulp), and she left an impression on him. He offered to make an action movie around her, an offer any sane soul wouldn’t refuse.
The 2011 movie “Haywire” gave Carano her big Hollywood break and proved she could hold the screen with the likes of Ewan McGregor and Michael Fassbender. Plus, she brought an authenticity to her action scenes, something other actresses couldn’t match. How many times can we watch a 120-pound starlet take down thugs double, nay triple, her size in convincing fashion?
Or, as Soderbergh himself said at the time, “It’s so satisfying watching her beat the s*** out of the cast.”
An action star was born.
For every plumb gig like “Deadpool” and “Fast & Furious 6” there were blink-and-you-miss-’em titles like “Madness in the Method” and “Scorched Earth.”
Then Team Disney came calling.
Lucasfilm sent her to “a galaxy far, far away” to co-star in 2019’s “The Mandalorian.” The Disney+ series came along at the perfect time. The "Star Wars" brand had been brought down, in part, by a woke storytelling turn.
The 2017 film "The Last Jedi" stopped the narrative cold, mid-movie, to trot out a class-inequality subplot that went nowhere. Conservative critics dubbed new heroes like Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) "Mary Sues," perfect characters with little edge or flaws.
Neither could compare to Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, a beloved figure universally embraced over the past forty years.
That, and a new trilogy that lacked the magic and splendor of the original Star Wars films left the saga on cultural dry dock.
“The Mandalorian” brought George Lucas’s baby back to life, with an assist from Carano. She played Cara Dune, a take-no-prisoners type who quickly became a fan favorite.
The Mary Sue – the unofficial, online woke bible – couldn’t praise her performance in the series enough. Here’s just one fawning example:
Seeing Carano take on Cara Dune wasn’t just about seeing a woman in Star Wars. We’ve had that, and we’ve had it since the beginning, but it’s refreshing seeing Carano bring this new strength to the screen where it isn’t about being imposing, but rather just that she’s a woman who is strong and powerful, but that doesn’t have to be everything that defines her.
Disney even talked about a possible Cara Dune spin-off series, the ultimate compliment, until some of Carano’s social media messages went viral.
The woke mob rushed to grab its pitchforks.
Carano shared tweets that questioned the pandemic lockdowns and mask mania. She also pleaded for more voter security, arguing the public would have a greater trust in the electoral process if safeguards like Voter ID were employed.
Insane. Crazed. Out of control. Or, to a sober-eyed observer, reasonable arguments that put her gently to the right of center.
The crooked media quickly went to work, bending her social media musings to fit its agenda.
That means a tweet asking for better election security was akin to saying President Trump crushed Joe Biden before the Democrats stole the election.
Worst of all, she poked back at those demanding we all add our personal pronouns to our Twitter bios. Carano did as told, except her pronouns read, “Beep/bop/boop.”
Brilliant.
She explained her comments with this thoroughly rational message, one Dr. Jordan Peterson would heartily approve.
Beep/bop/boop has zero to do with mocking trans people π€& π― to do with exposing the bullying mentality of the mob that has taken over the voices of many genuine causes.
— Gina Carano π― (@ginacarano) September 14, 2020
I want people to know you can take hate with a smile. So BOOP you for misunderstanding. π #AllLoveNoHate pic.twitter.com/Qe48AiZyOL
She didn’t bow to the woke gangsters. Instead, she oh, so gently told them to take a hike.
A publicist insisted she put out an apology, but she did it her way. “Can I just do my own research?” she told them.
That wasn’t good enough.
“I don’t have any hate in my heart for anyone.... I stepped on a land mine,” she later told Ben Shapiro.
Meanwhile, Lucasfilm employees were savaging Carano on social media without repercussions. The company wanted her to go on a Zoom call with forty-odd colleagues, some of the same folks saying awful things about her on Twitter.
She refused.
“I think it’s a bit abusive that you want me to talk to forty people... forty people...a lot of them had been [slandering me]. I don’t feel like I really deserve this,” she said during that Shapiro interview.
Remember, Hollywood is all about female empowerment!
Hacky movie blogs feasted on anything tied to Carano, hoping to generate clicks and a possible pink slip from Disney. Other allegedly more mature sites, like the far-left Men’s Health, piled on as well.
Slowly but surely, the ever-expanding "Star Wars" universe has started to resemble the diversity of its fans. Viewers who aren’t straight, white men can see themselves reflected in a growing roster of inclusive characters. Unfortunately, that can be a fraught process, as "Star Wars" die-hards are finding with the case of Gina Carano and "The Mandalorian."
Just make sure that “diversity resemblance” doesn’t include half the country.
Most stars would have handed their social media accounts over to their publicists to avoid future problems. Others would hit the “delete” button or even quit Twitter in the grand Alec Baldwin fashion. Or, they would have done some serious virtue signaling to repair the “damage.”
Not Carano.
“My whole perspective on this is, I’ve seen people get bullied off of Twitter on both sides. I don’t like bullying, and if I don’t stay present, which I don’t even necessarily want to stay present that often, I want to make art, art is my passion, but if I don’t stay present then other people win.”
For the record, that’s the sound of an empowered woman speaking.
So, when Carano sent out an Instagram post comparing how Germans treated Jews in public during the 1940s to a growing mistreatment here in the states, Disney had the cudgel it needed to crush her "Star Wars" career.
Here’s her actual verbiage:
Yes, after four solid years of liberals calling both President Donald Trump and his fans Nazis, this proved too much for Disney.
It gets worse.
Did it matter that fellow "Mandalorian" star Pedro Pascal played the Nazi card on his social media account, but in an angrier fashion that insulted nearly half the country? Just spit-balling here, but you think there’s a good chance that half might want to pay a monthly fee just to watch "The Mandalorian"?
The Mouse House called Carano’s comments “abhorrent” weeks after we learned how the company kissed up to China for letting it shoot portions of the live-action Mulan near the Uyghur Muslim concentration camps.
You literally cannot make this up, but it’s par for the gaslighting course in today’s culture.
And, of course, the media took Disney’s side and couldn’t wait to escort Carano out of Hollywood. Even more female empowerment!
It wasn’t enough to fire Carano from arguably the most popular TV show in the galaxy. Disney temporarily erased her appearance on the Discovery Channel’s “Running Wild with Bear Grylls,” taped prior to her “Mandalorian” dismissal. Disney would neither confirm nor deny the move, but a listing of the show’s upcoming season showed her name missing from new episodes. Corporate cowardice run amok.
Cooler heads prevailed, and the Carano episode eventually aired.
The erasing didn’t end there. The toy manufacturer Funko stopped producing their Pop! Vinyl figure based on Cara Dune. Hasbro, in turn, ended its Black Series and Vintage Collection toys fashioned after Carano’s character.
Disney, toy manufacturers, and the corrupt mainstream media did all they could to “un-person” Carano, and they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those rascally kids at The Daily Wire.
Mere days after Carano’s termination, she teamed with the conservative news empire co-founded by Shapiro, bringing her career back from the grave. Carano would produce and star in a new movie for the website, part of its efforts to build an alternative Hollywood where empowered women could speak their minds and stay employed. Shapiro, the man so many liberals want banned from college campuses nationwide, did more for true feminism than any other public figure.
Who didn’t come to Carano’s rescue during the debacle?
Certainly not her cast mates. They’d initially praised her after she caused some initial ruffles on social media.
Here’s Carano showering love on co-star Ming Na Wen via Twitter months before Disney canned her:
I just adore this woman.. you can feel her heart exploding with happiness. SO deserving! Shining bright over there @MingNa π I’m geekin out for you too.β€οΈ https://t.co/sVJ1OfxDCU
— Gina Carano π― (@ginacarano) December 21, 2020
The response from Wen?
I love love love you, girlfriend!!!
— Ming-Na Wen (@MingNa) December 21, 2020
β€οΈβ€οΈβ€οΈβ€οΈβ€οΈ
Thank you for geeking out with me! I’m so happy @themandalorian not only got me into @starwars, but also bringing you into my life. π₯°ππ₯°
Let’s keep kicking butt!!ππΌπͺπΌ
Once the Mouse House laid down the hammer, though, Wen and Co. fell silent. Dan Rather’s famous “courage” sign-off took a knee in response.
"The Mandalorian" co-star Bill Burr clearly wanted to speak out about Carano’s mistreatment. Still, as a comedian straddling the line between stand-up clubs and sound stages, he understood how quickly he could be canceled next.
So, he probably wasn’t happy when his podcast partners brought up Carano during an episode of “The Bill Bert Podcast,” which he records with fellow comedian Bert Kreischer. Burr wasn’t fully open about the situation, but he captured both Cancel Culture and how the stacked deck against those who waver from liberal groupthink.
“She was an absolute sweetheart. Super-nice f***ing person...and you know, whatever, somehow someone will take this video and they’ll f***ing make me say something else and try to get rid of my bald action figure!”
“Unless you did some truly horrible s***, you know... if you’re saying overtly racist s***, yeah,” Burr said, opining more broadly on the empty concept of cancel culture. “If you make a bad comparison...”
Who else didn’t come to Carano’s rescue? The Women’s March. The National Organization for Women (NOW). Chelsea Handler. Sarah Silverman. Amy Schumer. Piper Perabo. Scarlett Johansson. And, by this reporter’s calculations, groups dedicated to empowering women in film and TV.
The following shouldn’t surprise anyone who watches Saturday Night Live in the modern era: not only did the show not rush to Carano’s side, it joined her critics in piling on. Today’s “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” earn their name over and again, misconstruing Carano’s Nazi tweet to create a limp laugh line.
Oh, so predictable.
