Ex-Mandalorian star Gina Carano has said and tweeted many offensive things over the past couple of years. Yet the one that finally convinced Lucasfilm to fire her from their hit TV show was, ironically, a right-wing commonplace: comparing the persecution of American conservatives to the Nazi persecution of Jews.
Carano’s tweet—deleted but, of course, preserved and reposted—featured this statement, in quotation marks: “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Now, this is obviously idiotic and offensive – more on that in a moment. But what’s striking to those of us who follow such things is that conservatives say things like this all the time. They compare cancel culture to Nazism, COVID safety protocols to Nazism, gun control advocates to Nazis, the list goes on and on. It literally happens every day. Perhaps it happens so often that people like Carano have no idea how absurd and offensive it is. But it is.