Alright… Let’s get into the REAL reason why this matters.
Long story short, well-meaning liberals (*cough* tumblr *cough*) are falling for manipulation by straight-up nazis, and this info really needs to be shared.
In case anyone here is out of the loop, James Gunn was fired by Disney from directing GotG3, or any further films for the company, because of some repulsive and creepy jokes he made on twitter a long time ago. This has sparked some passionate reactions– from agreement that he should be fired, to a quickly growing petition to rehire him. The latter is mainly supported by those who saw his apology as genuine, (he apologized for this YEARS ago,) and see his hatred of his younger self as a reassuring sign that he’s changed.
But this is so much bigger than one man and his career. Let’s be real, Gunn will recover. This isn’t about him at all.
HOW this stuff got brought up, and WHO got him fired in the first place, is what really matters right now.
Yeah…. you’re probably aware of exactly where this is going, now.
Yes, the crack-down on Gunn was started by a bunch of bad faith conspiracy theorists who are ~*~ strangely ~*~ obsessed with pedophilia. And yes, the reality is that Disney is capitulating to a fucking Pizzagate conspirator over shit they already knew blown up into “pedophiles run Hollywood” nonsense. This is validating far-right conspiracy theorists who know they can take down anyone who dare criticize Trump.
The Gunn case sets a dangerous, terrible precedent, and Disney needs to walk it back.
Seeing their success at what should be a non-starter, there are already far-right ops in place to take down other “Hollywood pedophiles” like Patton Oswalt and Michael Ian Black and others who use their platform to criticize Supreme Leader.
This is why the push to rehire Gunn is bigger than Gunn himself – he’ll be fine. His career will recover regardless of who directs GotG v. 3. But Nazis are confident that they are in control of hollywood now, and this isn’t something we should just roll our eyes at and ignore.
To be clear about Disney’s intentions, they likely wanted to cut it off before the story started getting picked up by major outlets. They’d be hit with the narratives that there’s a double standard based on politics. (Gunn can get away with it, but Roseanne can’t.) Which, yes, is unfair, since Roseanne also got a second chance, and she didn’t change. Gunn used his to change, and he hasn’t reverted back to his older self. Meanwhile Roseanne tweeted racist things just this very year.
But hey, has Disney ever been fair?
(Also– They’re the same people who still hire Johnny Depp.)
This whole game is that the Left has a sense of moral accountability, the Right doesn’t, and the Right has learned to weaponize the Left against itself. Gleefully.
So please, listen to others who can put this stuff into words so much better than I can:
“Even if you think Gunn’s old deleted tweets were gross, and I do, this entire thing was built on a lie.
It was dug up, repackaged and purposefully lied about by someone with a hostile agenda to accomplish exactly what it accomplished.
And the worst part is as long as people keep falling for this. Every time MSNBC fires a reporter because of Weird Mike and then rehires him after discovering they got had. Everytime ArenaNet gives into a mob and fires a woman for a tweet, it’s a signal to escalate.
Gunn’s firing is pouring blood in the water and telling the sharks that it’s open season on everyone they want to target.
To them this has nothing to do with any kind of moral outrage or genuine concern. It’s all bad faith gaming of systems to destroy ideological opponents.
And part of that is weaponizing a liberal desire to expel abusers.
It’s pointless to point out that Weird Mike constantly brags about raping women and says the most vile, edgelord shit on a daily basis, because their is no moral equivalence. They will never hold themselves to the standards they know liberals will hold themselves to.
These are the people who campaigned for and supported Roy Moore, an actual pedophile, and engaged in bad faith tactics like making fake robocalls to frame Washington Post, or Project Veritas pretending to have info on Moore and totally failing to entrap reporters.
Actual morality and truth are entirely inconsequential to these people and they will destroy as many people as possible to make sure the white supremacist con man in the White House is never challenged.”
–Ashley Lynch
There’s further views linked here. Please take the time to listen to these people, and try to understand why they’re taking this particular stance. (Lindsay Ellis’ twitter right now is especially informative.)
This summarizes my feelings on the matter. For me, it’s a fairly simple equation. Firing James Gunn over mistakes that he’s accepted responsibility for and tried to redeem himself from, because of an orchestrated campaign on behalf of a fascist white supremacist that was literally lying about Gunn in order to get him fired, is reprehensible.
Call out culture is immoral. It’s authoritarianism masquerading as social justice, where people weaponize public opinion to allow them to shame their targets into submission. The context doesn’t matter. If the target committed their ‘sin’ in their childhood, it doesn’t matter. If the call out is actually a lie and it never happened, it doesn’t matter. If the people orchestrating the call out can get enough people on board, they have a weapon and they’re going to use someone to hurt it.
All people make mistakes. Everyone will at some point do something that’s offensive. Yes, even you. In order to have true justice, you must leave room for people to make those mistakes and learn from them.
Sometimes the mistake will be too great. Sometimes the offense will go too far. But those are outlier cases, and far more likely you’ll two types of people, people who are unrepentant and wish to continue doing harm, and people who have learned from the mistakes of their past and are trying to redeem themselves. Call outs don’t differentiate, they just look for a target and they strike.
I think this is a perfect example of why it’s such toxic behavior. First, it was founded on a lie. Don’t forget that Cernovich is one of the driving forces behind Pizzagate, the bullshit conspiracy theory about a pizzeria being involved in a child trafficking ring that inspired a jackass to harass the staff at the restaurant and fire off a gun on their premises. Second, it was targeted at someone who was vulnerable specifically because he had grown out of being an asshole, exactly the kind of person that we want to inspire others. Because angry asshole white guys that have a chance to stop being angry assholes are a hell of a lot more likely to be inspired by someone like James Gunn than they are the rest of us.
Finally, here’s what James Gunn said in relation to the firing:
“I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then. All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies.”
Let’s be honest. People who manipulate and deceive are never that hard to see through, it’s just that they’re hard to see when you’re right up next to them. At a distance, they always out themselves, because they can’t help feeling proud of what they’ve done, or desiring of getting another shot in at someone. That’s not the kind of person that writes an apology like this.
He’s apologizing again. He’s taking full responsibility for what it happens. He’s affirming his dedication to continuing to learn to do better.
You’re damn right that James Gunn getting fired was total bullshit, but that’s the world we live in now that we have to teach people to fight fascism all over again. We should all feel ashamed by this. We should all do better.
I’m only just catching up on all this, I didn’t even know who James Gunn was, but it is really fucking screwed up.
These guys wholeheartedly believe that “the left” is going around getting people fired for “petty” reasons. You know, like only a little holocaust denial or child molestation. They also believe “the left” does this not out of any actual moral qualms but to just punish conservatives.
So they believe they’re “leveling the playing field” if they do just that; dig through the past of anyone who happens to disagree with their politics and see if they can find anything that they understand is “offensive” to the “other side.” They sure as hell don’t actually think it’s offensive. They were the ones defending that same kind of shitty humor themselves until they realized they could use this to their advantage.
They’re aping what they falsely believe their enemies have done to them, and huge multi-billion-dollar employers don’t have time or reason to know the difference so they’re just going to play it safe and fire anyone a large number of people voice complaints about.
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