Disney CEO Bob Chapek denied that the company had a “left-leaning” bias when asked at its annual shareholder meeting Tuesday about the decision to fire right-leaning actress Gina Carano.
Conservatives railed against the entertainment giant after Carano was canceled from The Mandalorian last month over a social-media post comparing Democrats’ hostile rhetoric to that of the Holocaust.
The UFC fighter-turned-actress warned in her offending Instagram post that scapegoating attacks from the Left could lead to a tyrannical state.
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children,” Carano wrote in the now-removed post, according to Variety.
She noted the gradual approach that Adolf Hitler’s regime used to gain public acceptance of its anti-Semitic “final solution” before condemning millions to die in concentration camps.
“Because history is edited, 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,” she said. “How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
After Twitter slacktivists launched the hashtag #FireGinaCarano, Disney accused her of “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities” in ways that were “abhorrent and unacceptable,” Variety reported.
Yet, it previously had allowed Mandalorian lead actor Pedro Pascal to compare President Donald Trump’s supporters to the Southern Confederacy and Nazi Germany.
Pedro Pascal, who plays the Mandalorian on Disney Plus, was not fired for this post on Instagram comparing Trump supporters to Nazis and Confederates pic.twitter.com/Tgh3jJ6lLc
— Travis Wines (@TWines4congress) February 11, 2021
Disney officials claimed that Carano’s firing was the culmination of her outspoken political posts and not an isolated incident.
For instance, she had earlier offended PC police by putting “beep/bop/boop” in her Twitter bio—a reference to the absurdity of alternative gender pronouns.
But David Almasi, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research‘s Free Enterprise Project, remained skeptical, according to Breitbart.
At Tuesday’s shareholder meeting, he asked Chapek about the decision to fire Carano but retain Pascal.
“It’s clear there’s a new blacklist punishing conservatives in the entertainment industry,” Almasi began.
“Disney+ actors Pedro Pascal and Gina Carano tweeted similar analogies of current political events to Nazi Germany,” he continued. “Yet, only Carano—who is considered conservative—was fired from ‘The Mandalorian.'”
Chapek responded that Disney’s values cut across political lines, even though the company has been derided several times recently for its virtue-signaling concessions to the “woke” mafia.
“I don’t really see Disney as characterizing itself as left-leaning or right-leaning, yet instead standing for values—values that are universal,” Chapek claimed. “I think that’s a world we all should live in, in harmony and peace.”
According to a recent poll by Public Opinion Strategies and Survey Monkey, 90% of Republicans and 47% of Democrats rejected the identity-based values of diversity and inclusion, Breitbart reported.
The researchers also found that 65% of Americans surveyed felt “companies like Disney have taken political correctness too far,” while only 34% disagreed.
Majorities in every age group said that Disney and other far-left American corporations have embraced too much political correctness.
However, Chapek maintained that Disney’s unique legacy in contemporary American culture put it in a unique position to engage in social-engineering efforts—which just happened to align with the progressive agenda.
“The fact is that we have a tremendous opportunity now to bring this country back together and unite people,” he said. “One thing we can all agree on is the power of Disney to unite us all.”
Almasi said Chapek’s use of platitudes disguised his inability to defend Disney’s mistreatment of Carano.
“Disney CEO Bob Chapek was quick to throw around words like ‘respect’ and ‘inclusion’ with shareholders, but he couldn’t explain how two actors on the same show said similar things but were treated substantially differently,” he said.
“It’s because he can’t,” Almasi continued. “It’s obviously because Gina Carano is labelled a conservative, Pedro Pascal is a leftist and Disney is part of the Hollywood blacklist.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
