Gina Carano Destroys The Cancel Culture Death Star

Elon Musk-financed lawsuit settlement ends in Lucasfilm capitulation

Gina Carano, the former MMA fighter who portrayed Cara Dune, the most popular character on the Disney+ streaming series The Mandalorian, has settled her lawsuit with Disney and Lucasfilm.

Carano was summarily dismissed from the show and dropped by her talent agency after posting an Instagram story that compared “hating someone for their political views” to the mistreatment of Jews prior to the Holocaust in Germany.

However, Carano had already drawn the ire of cancel culture for her wrong opinions about Trump and the 2020 vote count as well as Black Lives Matter. Her greatest thoughtcrime was putting droid sounds, “boop/bop/beep”, in her Twitter bio instead of pronouns.

In an ironic twist, Carano sued Disney, the owner of Lucasfilm, citing California labor codes that were enacted to protect Hollywood communists from blacklisting. In her complaint, Carano alleged that her political opinions were targeted while those of men were not.

“Carano was responsible for over half of the talent engagement on social media related to Season 2 by early November 2020,” reads the complaint. “Defendants terminated Carano’s employment and took other retaliatory actions to limit and deny her future employment opportunities, including but not limited to making maliciously false statements about Carano with the intention of damaging her reputation and, thus, her ability to find and retain work.”

Now she is back in good graces as if nothing ever happened.

A Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement provided to Variety, “The Walt Disney Company and Lucasfilm are pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement with Gina Carano to resolve the issues in her pending lawsuit against the companies. Ms. Carano was always well respected by her directors, co-stars and staff, and she worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect. With this lawsuit concluded, we look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”

“I have come to an agreement with Disney/Lucasfilm which I believe is the best outcome for all parties involved,” Carano tweeted. “I hope this brings some healing to the force.”

“I want to extend my deepest most heartfelt gratitude to Elon Musk, a man I’ve never met, who did this Good Samaritan deed for me in funding my lawsuit,” Carano added. Not by coincidence, Disney CEO Bob Iger, once a Democratic presidential hopeful, incurred Musk’s wrath in 2023 and ultimately capitulated in the dispute after the November election result.

“Thank you Mr. Musk and [the X app] for backing my case and asking for nothing in return,” Carano wrote. As in the case of Maya Forstater, who was able to outlast her employer in court because she had the backing of author J.K. Rowling, Musk made it possible for Carano to get all the way to trial, which was scheduled for September.

Disney settled to avoid that trial, likely because it would have embarrassed the entertainment giant. For even as Carano received the most vicious treatment from Lucasfilm, Star Wars actors John Boyega, Mark Hamill, and the late Carl Weathers were all free to express their own, more liberal-left opinions without interference.

As if to double their indemnity, Lucasfilm falsely claimed that Carano had denigrated unnamed groups of people for cultural or religious reasons. This claim was “false,” and “also made with knowledge of its falsity, with the purpose of harming Carano, and to distract from Defendants’ illegal termination and treatment of Carano,” reads the complaint.

In announcing Carano’s termination, Lucasfilm made the following public statement: “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

“Defendants targeted, harassed, publicly humiliated, defamed, and went to great lengths to destroy Carano’s career, all because she made political statements that did not align with what they believed was an acceptable viewpoint,” reads the complaint.

During 2020, Carano was “constantly harassed and bullied on social media to support various causes, adopt various ideologies, and hold herself out in certain ways in her social media profiles” by supposed fans of Star Wars.

Carano removed the droid pronouns shortly after posting them. She credited a conversation with Pedro Pascal for the change. “Pedro & I spoke & he helped me understand why people were putting them in their bios,” Carano tweeted.

“I didn’t know before but I do now. I won’t be putting them in my bio but good for all you who choose to. I stand against bullying, especially the most vulnerable & freedom to choose.”

Of course, this compromise was unacceptable. Carano never had any real way to defuse the situation, least of all with humor or grace. She had blasphemed the new sacred class.

Pedro Pascal has a brother, ‘Lux’, who identified as transgender during 2021. Pedro’s role in the pressure campaign against Carano is therefore understandable, and may run deeper than is publicly known.

Yet “unlike Carano, when Hamill was accused of ‘liking’ a ‘transphobic’ tweet, his explanation was accepted by Defendants without question,” the complaint notes. But Hamill is a man, while the people screaming ‘transphobia’ do in fact know what a woman is, after all.

Thereafter, Lucasfilm “subjected Carano to long phone calls demanding an explanation and criticizing her for not embracing what some see as mandatory solidarity with a vocal element of the transgender activist community,” according to the complaint.

“Even when she expressed that Defendants’ demands were excessive and asked for some time away from the constant meetings, Defendants refused, demanding that she continue with her ‘reeducation’ program.”

Any victim of the institutional ‘gender identity’ inquisition will recognize the genre.

There is evidence suggesting that the social media pressure campaign was coming from inside the company. When Carano found a Lucasfilm employee fundraising with a GoFundMe page that was critical of her, the employee was not punished.

“Defendants went so far as to try and convince Carano’s publicist to force Carano to issue a statement admitting to mocking or insulting an entire group of people, which Carano had never done.” Mao never held a more exhausting struggle session.

Kathleen Kennedy, the now-embattled head of Lucasfilm who declared “the force is female” and tried to rebuild the Star Wars franchise around a female lead, is rumored to have been behind this campaign against her own best female star, and was named in the complaint. Legal discovery could have been quite juicy.

Weathers had also posted Nazi analogies, but “Weathers’ comments were interpreted to attack Republicans, so he was given a pass by Defendants.” The same was true of Hamill and Pascal. “Pascal was active on social media, often expressing his view on the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ+ rights, protests for abortion rights, and the 2020 election,” the complaint notes.

Indeed, Pascal had compared Trump to Hitler on Instagram in 2017, compared immigration enforcement to concentration camps in 2018, and compared Trump supporters to both Nazis and the Confederacy in 2020. Nothing happened to him, since his politics were the correct ones.

On June 27, 2020, Pascal posted two Disney-owned Muppet characters, Bert and Ernie, as activists waving a transgender and LGBTQ+ pride flag and promoting “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police.”

Upon information and belief, Pascal was not disciplined, required to review documentaries on any of these topics or speak to individuals with contrary points of view, or pressured to apologize for any of his posts. His employment was not terminated, and Defendants made no public statements about his social media posts, much less refer to them as “abhorrent.”

Pascal stars in the new Fantastic Four: First Steps. Reportedly a good Marvel film, it is still bombing at the box office nevertheless due to brand damage. Pascal is supposed to star in The Madalorian & Grogu next year, another attempt to revive a deeply damaged brand, and was until now a potential witness in Carano’s lawsuit. Disney had many reasons to settle.

At Deadline, Dominic Patten calls the settlement “a distinct win for the openly conservative Carano,” though it is unclear just what it actually means for her future as an actress.

While no specific details on the settlement have been revealed — like whether she getting her Rebel shock trooper Cara Dune role back as desired or any of the millions in damages she was seeking — Disney and Carano clearly are back in business. To that, a source close to Carano told me she is “happy with how things were dealt with.”

Gina Carano says her “desires remain in the arts.” She is probably not going to reprise the role of Cara Dune, and would be well advised to decline a return to Star Wars in any case. She has her reputation back, and should have a chance to show her talents in some other role, in a galaxy far, far away from the one Kathleen Kennedy has destroyed.

Let Pedro have that one all to himself.