“Hey,” the bartender says of C3PO and R2D2. “We don’t serve their kind here.”
Forty-four years later, the Palpatines of the Star Wars empire say the same thing to rebels.
Disney wimps fired Gina Carano over social media for an opinion she expressed on social media. When did we reach the point where the latter rather than the former became unacceptable?
The former MMA fighter starring in The Mandalorian noted on social media that before the Nazis rounded up the Jews they incited ordinary Germans to hate and harass their Jewish neighbors. She then asked, “How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Though a reductio ad hitlerum almost always strikes as an unwise card to play, the fact that it remains obligatory rather than forbidden within the progressive rhetorical arsenal makes Carano’s termination an act of pettiness rather than principle. Pedro Pascal, who plays the titular character, tweeted out one image comparing the Confederate flag and swastika to a red MAGA hat and another image juxtaposing a Nazi concentration camp with a detention center for illegal immigrants. Disney fired Carano but kept Pascal.
Why?
We don’t serve your kind.
Warner Bros. and ABC nudged out longtime Bachelor and Bachelorette host Chris Harrison to receive reeducation before the possible opportunity to beg for his job back.
“We all need to have a little grace, a little understanding, a little compassion,” Harrison said of a contestant who attended an antebellum-themed party in college. “Because I have seen some stuff online — this judge, jury, executioner thing — where people are just tearing this girl’s life apart and diving into, like, her parents, her parents’ voting record. It’s unbelievably alarming to watch this. I haven’t heard Rachael speak on this yet. And until I actually hear this woman have a chance to speak, who am I to say any of this?”
Ironically, Harrison’s intolerable offense involved arguing for tolerance toward the past sins and social faux pas of others.
We don’t serve your kind.
Parler reemerged online this week after Apple and Google removed its app from its stores and Amazon Web Services abruptly stopped hosting the site.
We don’t serve your kind.
Parler’s popularity — it ranked first in the Apple app store upon its ban — springs from Twitter censoring such people and groups as Mike Lindell, MyPillow, Donald Trump, The American Spectator columnist Robert Stacy McCain, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Project Veritas, and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Notice what they share in common?
We don’t serve your kind.
Donald McNeil Jr., who started at the New York Times as a copyboy in 1976 and until recently reported on the top story of our times (COVID-19), lost his job because rich kids on a student trip sponsored by the newspaper took offense to his opinions and the fact that, after a youngster asked him whether a fellow student deserved a suspension for using the n-word as a 12-year-old, he used the n-word in asking if the student had used it while quoting someone else or rapping along to a popular song. Like John Cleese using “Jehovah” in Life of Brian, the rocks came flying fast.
We don’t serve your kind.
Students, faculty, and administrators at the University of North Carolina Wilmington hounded Professor Mike Adams from his job. Adams, who had experienced his employer spying on his emails and won a viewpoint discrimination lawsuit against the school, accepted an early retirement package presented to him last year in the wake of him ridiculing the state’s COVID lockdown issued by executive fiat. Then he killed himself.
We don’t serve your kind.
The purveyors of blacklists, ideological litmus tests, and cancel culture obsess over the injustice of others to a degree that limits their ability to grasp their own injustice. Like the Roundheads, the Jacobins, the Taliban, and other moral crusaders, they see their cause as so righteous as to blind themselves to their own wickedness. They are the kind of people who imagine themselves as exactly the opposite kind of person who says: We don’t serve your kind.
“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” Lenin quipped. The woke believe you will buy the propaganda that ultimately cancels you. No sensible person subsidizes what insults them. To the extent possible, people who support freedom should not support Disney, Amazon, Twitter, the New York Times, and university development offices.
Ideologues censor because it works not just in silencing the speaker but by muzzling anyone else who harbors similar ideas. But a silent majority always bristles at the powerful few who pick on the relatively powerless many. And so the bullying can backfires.
“You can’t win, Darth,” Obi-Wan Kenobi informed his student-turned-nemesis. “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”
One hopes life imitates art with Gina Carano.
