Democrat Smears Gina Carano as a 'Nazi.' Should Carano Sue?

Actress Gina Carano lost her job with Disney’s The Mandalorian for warning against the Nazi-like dehumanization of others and the awful places that can lead.

Former Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp recently smeared Carano as both a “Nazi” and as someone who hangs around “white supremacists” during a segment on Bill Maher’s Real Time show.

Carano noticed, and called Heitkamp out on Twitter.

Here we have more of the dehumanizing phase of cancel culture.

-Repeat lies over and over until the population takes them as “truth”.

False, disturbing & disgusting language coming from a former US Senator. @HeidiHeitkamp

You knew as soon as you said it you were liable. https://t.co/O4AiHVMYFH

— Gina Carano 🕯 (@ginacarano) March 29, 2021

Democrats have been getting away with such smears for years now, decades. They’ve called all Republican presidents in my lifetime either Nazis or racists or some variation on that theme, including Ronald Reagan and both Bushes. While dishonest and despicable, those insults targeted political figures. They’re inexcusable but probably not actionable.

Carano is a private citizen, here being targeted on national television by a former Democrat senator after she lost a job due to leftist cancel culture.

The Daily Wire picks up the story.

“Who was the woman in ‘The Mandalorian’? What did she do? She liked something?” Maher asked.

“She’s a Nazi,” Heitkamp responded.

“Oh, that’s different. I’m thinking of somebody else,” Maher said mockingly before defending Carano as someone who is “not a Nazi.”

Heitkamp doubled down, alleging that Carano is “involved with white supremacists.”

“Okay, everyone’s a Nazi now,” Maher replied in rebuke.

Heitkamp further accused Carano of being someone who “does hang with white supremacists.”

Maher, taken aback, pressed Heitkamp to elaborate. The former senator responded by questioning if her accusations would make her “subject to defamation.”

Heitkamp’s accusations are utterly false. She seems to know enough about Carano’s story to know that. Yet she proceeds, evidently feeling secure enough to smear an innocent person who is not even present to defend herself.

Why wouldn’t Heitkamp believe she would get away with it? Leftists use smears as a matter of mind-numbing routine now. Nearly every instance of cancel culture involves leftists smearing others, often behind the veil of anonymity, as racists and the like with the obvious intent to silence them and deprive them of their means of making a living. This chills free speech generally and destroys individuals specifically.

Carano noted Heitkamp’s potential liability in her tweet.

There’s an ongoing legal case at the University of North Texas involving its music department. There, a small group of students accused a professor of being a racist. Why? He defended a 19th-century composer’s work. The smear spread and is damaging his career, along with the careers of some of his students.

UNT’s Journal of Schenkerian Studies is under investigation following calls from around the country for it to be shuttered and for one of its advisers, UNT music theory professor Timothy Jackson, to be fired. The journal’s sin? Following criticism by scholar Philip Ewell that 19th century music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whose influence on music theory is “hard to overstate,” was an “ardent racist and German nationalist,” the journal presented an edition including debate among scholars on racial issues and music theory.

The issue led a group of graduate students to write to UNT College of Music Dean John Richmond on July 29, expressing concerns about the journal and, in particular, Jackson’s involvement in the issue. The students called for the journal to be dissolved, Jackson investigated and potentially fired from his teaching position, an anonymous contributor to be unmasked, and the issue to be publicly condemned by the university.

“If this doesn’t send chills down your spine, I suggest you take another look at history,” said Samantha Harris, FIRE senior fellow. “Each of us holds views that someone else would deem controversial. If we don’t see our own freedom as threatened by this situation and the countless others like it, that freedom will perish swiftly and silently.”

The graduate students claimed that Jackson had used the journal “to promote racism” by defending the music theorist after Ewell wrote that Schenker’s “racist views infected his music theoretical arguments.” Jackson’s article, one of several defending the composer in the 2019 edition of the journal, contextualized Schenker and his changing views on race, which were partially due to the rise of Nazi Germany. (Schenker was Jewish; his wife was arrested by the Nazi regime and died in Theresienstadt concentration camp.)

The professor in this case, Dr. Timothy Jackson, is fighting back in court according to the Denton Record-Chronicle.

“It does make it more difficult to get one’s students positions,” he said. “And students are afraid to study with one. I had one student who told me didn’t want other students to know that we were communicating. So it’s extremely damaging.”

Michael Thad Allen, Jackson’s attorney, said the university and music theory community’s censure is especially harmful for graduate students studying with the center.

“I can speak with authority as a former academic myself… it is common, disturbingly common, for academics to retaliate against each other by taking it out on each other’s graduate students,” he said. “It’s a community that does and should take ideas extremely seriously. As it should be. Sometimes, [it] crosses the line where professors begin to think the people who disagree with them are somehow evil.”