She is a public figure currently under contract to a media company. According to US law, unless her contract permits her to make public brand-damaging statements or scandals, then there is nothing in US law that prevents Disney from firing her. In fact, the freedom of speech clause is the basis of why the government can't step in and force Disney to maintain their contract with Carano, whose pontifications on controversial conspiracy theories otherwise damage the company brand expression. In other words, it's Disney's right to express themselves in what way they want - and they can legally fire their employed public figures who violate their contractual duties for misconduct.

And there are other reasons she should have been fired too. Disney, as a publically traded company, has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to operate in the best interest of the company share value; so if maintaining Carano's employment could damage the brand, and Disney chose NOT to fire her, then shareholders could launch a lawsuit against Disney.

As Jewish people often point out, anyone who calls anyone a "fascist" is implicitly making a Holocaust comparison, which implicates like half the internet, both right and well mostly left of the political center of gravity actually. I used to do that a lot myself until a Jewish friend of mine I knew online confronted me with the insensitivity of such word choices. I consciously avoid hyperbolically charging people who aren't actual, swastika-brandishing neo-Nazis with "fascism" and "Nazism" and the like today as a result.

Anyway, the point for our purposes here though is that Holocaust comparisons, be they implicit or explicit, are unfortunately very commonplace; commonplace enough that this decision by Disney strikes me as a selective one made arbitrarily simply because Cararo's larger worldview is unpopular and thus 'tarnishing their image', which is precisely the essential thing (viewpoint discrimination) that Cararo was trying, in her own insensitive way, to lament.

(It's also not lost on me that many of the people celebrating this development are also themselves proud supporters of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, which I feel proves their actual level of concern for the well-being of the Jewish people. But maybe that's just me.)

Uhhhhh...

I'm not sure how often Jewish people point that out (never heard it and I know quite a few of them). If they do though, they're wrong. Nazis were not the first and not the only fascists. And one can be a fascist without committing genocide. Your friend is entitled to their opinion, but they don't speak for all Jewish people. Fascists are rectangles, and Nazis are squares. All nazis are fascists, but not all fascists are nazis.

Likewise, one can be concerned with the well-being of Jewish people and not support Israel's current government. Being Jewish does not require support of Israel. 

Ah, so you #cancelled a company because you disagree with their positions? Cool. Vote with your wallet man. 

Did you express your views "in a respectful manner" here? No. Should you lose your position at VGC as a result? Also no. Respectability shouldn't be a qualification for one's right to speak. You hold some views that I consider "abhorrent" as well. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be permitted to share those views without consequence for your position.

Of course it's LEGAL for Disney to fire her, but the question for our purposes here is whether it's the right decision, and what sort of message doing so sends out to the larger culture, especially given how commonplace these sorts of developments have become of late. The answer is that it sends a chilling one.

I believe in free speech not just in a legal sense, but also as a moral imperative, personally. Private companies that are richer and more powerful than some governments might legally have a right to engage in thinly-veiled viewpoint discrimination, but the question is 1) whether they should have that right, and 2) whether it's morally right, regardless. Many of our public colleges and universities in recent years have come to recognize viewpoint discrimination as a genuine form of cultural repression and enacted protections against it on-campus. I think viewpoint discrimination is a real thing and a serious inhibition to substantive freedom of speech that our larger society should address as well.

Narratives like this are really gross.  The people who stormed the capitol were trying to overthrow our Democracy.  Do you not realize how much death and destruction that would have resulted in the fallout?

Comparing the capitol riot to the police brutality protests is peak false equivalence.  Tens of millions of people participated in thousands of demonstrations across the country over a period of months, and the vast majority were peaceful.  If there was so much widespread death and destruction, don't you think it would be easy to spot in our every day lives at this point?  I live in Los Angeles, and with the exception of the curfew for a few days, there was a near zero impact on my daily life.

This is not to downplay the violence and hardships people did face, but merely to put in perspective how grossly exaggerated the BLM and antifa boogeyman is.  In regards to deaths, according to the Guardian (most comprehensive list I could find, but maybe someone could find a better list), it sounds like a rough estimate is 25 deaths, and only 11 of those were linked directly to the protests (and most of those deaths were BLM protesters).  In regard to the cost in damages, various sources range from $1-$2 billion dollars.  This damage is spread across the US, with some hot spots sustaining more damage than others.

By contrast, the Capitol riot was a single event that involved somewhere around ~10000 people and resulted in 5 deaths (similarly, most of the deaths were among the rioters).  This would make the capitol riot hundreds of times more deadly than the police brutality protests.  While I cannot find an estimated cost for the damages at the capitol, I did find that the cost of the deployment of national guard in response to the riot will costs upwards of $500 million.  This is probably not a fair comparison, as I'm sure the national guard, among other expensive resources, were deployed during the protests this summer too.

But all these numbers are just a distraction from talking about the core issue, to paint these events in a similarly negative light.  The main difference between these two events is that people protesting against the police this summer wanted to save lives.  The people that attacked the capitol wanted to take the control of the nation through force.

You're engaging in semantic worldplay here to dance around the point, which is about viewpoint discrimination.

"Fascist" and "Nazi" are charges leveled about as commonly and frivolously online all the time from every corner of the political spectrum and I really don't think most Jewish people care a lot about the minutia of what precise sort of fascist Hitler was so much as that the term is primarily identified with him and the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

Regarding the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, I DO have a problem with it. It's one thing to propose that military aid to the Israeli state should be cut off to avoid assisting their colonialist actions in the Palestinian territories, but another to propose a total de-legitimization of the nation of Israel itself, which is the only halfway functioning democracy in the Middle East and also the world's only majority-Jewish nation. I find that there really do tend to be anti-Semitic attitudes behind that particular position.

If my saying Gina Carano is an asshole is somehow detrimental to my ability to function as a mod, then yes, by all means I should be faced with consequences. If any of the views I express are abhorrent and the site owners do not wish to be associated with them, then yes, they should not allow me to be a mod. My allegedly abhorrent views don't seem especially relevant to this topic, but feel free to bring up these concerns to the head mod or site owners if you so choose. I'm perfectly happy to live with the consequences.

I'm a Disney executive right now. I care solely about doing what I feel is best for the company, which is actually a legal requirement for the board of directors which I can be sued for breaking (although it's generally hard to argue with a business judgment). If it is my honest opinion that continuing to employ Gina will be detrimental to the business, then explain to me why I should do so. 

Yup. I agree with you, not at all ironically. If you don't support what they're doing, you are under no obligation to patronize them. Cancel away.

I haven’t called everything far-left. I’ve pointed out that from reading this thread, it has become clear to me that VGC is overwhelmingly far-left. Before you even begin, I point out when I see far-right as well. The most amusing thing about both extremes is that neither can see when they are on those extremes. I certainly don’t think all left or right views are “far”, but many I’ve seen here, are. They are extreme views. 

I did chime in as you put it, but I didn’t chime in about the OP - just made a comment about what I was observing reading the thread. And as I stated originally, I found this interesting.

Fascists are fascists, and nazis are nazis. You can be one without another. This isn't semantic wordplay, it's what the words mean. If I say someone is a fascist, I mean that they support totalitarian government, not that they want to murder all Jews. If fascist=Nazi then we literally wouldn't have a word for fascists who don't share the Nazis views, of which they are many.

There's a very simple test here we can use to solve this. Is Kim Jong Un a fascist? Is Kim Jong Un a nazi? If you have different answers to those questions (which you definitely should), then the words mean different things. 

As a Jew that I do care about the distinction. I know many others who would as well. I do not have the knowledge to say what I think most Jews care about, but from my experiences Jews have radically different viewpoints on many issues, and I don't think there is a "most Jewish people" position here. 

If you don't support boycotts of Israel, whatever. Not going to argue about that. But I will argue against the implication that if you want to boycott Israel you are inherently anti-semitic or just don't care about the welfare of Jewish people. I'm sure some are biased by anti-semitism , but there are plenty of Jews who vehemently disagree with the Israeli government actions and see boycotts as a way to force political change. As well as non-Jews who care about Jewish people but also think boycotts are necessary. My personal opinions aside, I'm generally pro-Israel, you don't need to support the current Israeli government to have a valid Jew card any more than you need to vote for Biden to be black. We're not a monolith.