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I am going to take a few steps out from this for a couple of reasons. One, I really hope it is instructive. Truly. Two, I think we haven't done as well with confronting anti-semitism as we should. https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1360359972048171008
The claim, as I understand it, is that a Hollywood actress was fired for making a Facebook post that compared political conservatives in the U.S. to Nazis by virtue of their unfair labeling and persecution. I absolutely concede she was being hyperbolic.
My first instinct, as a general critical reader, is "huh. that seems odd." It seems odd because people are not, empirically, routinely fired for social media posts. They just aren't.
If Carano is an exception, I would then wonder what made her case so exceptional. Carano's post is, according to Chait, benign but not anti-semitic. I do not think that is for me, a non-Jewish person, to judge.
What I can do is think critically about how likely it is that a white woman actress was fired from her job for a social media post that may or may not be anti-semitic but that is about Jewish people and the Holocaust.
Here's where I am confused by everyone's easy acceptance that this is true, likely and probable. Why do you accept that? That's the thing about make a case of a single incident. There is a pattern of people being anti-Semitic and employed as actors.
There's no defensible pattern of targeting and punishing political conservatives in Hollywood that is in anyway similar to the Blacklist. That is just an empirical claim. They aren't similar in scope, organization, legitimacy, strategy - nothing.
Here is where it gets sticky. If there is no evidence that she was actually fired for said post and there is no pattern of targeting political conservatives, claiming that she is victimized actually reinforces anti-Semitism whether her post was anti-semitic or not.
You have to draw on the anti-semitic tropes of "powerful" shadowy Jewish people to make this isolated firing anything more than a single instance of a fired actor.
So above and beyond buying this narrative wholesale based on an objective fantasy about free speech, the very acceptance of the facts of the issue reinforces the anti-semitic vibes that Carano was supposedly fired for.
The right instinct, in my view, is to question why anti-Semitism is used as a justification for firing someone when they can be fired for any reason...and why we all accept that as likely, when it is statistically unlikely.
Because while it isn't common to fire someone for a Facebook post, it is super common (and empirically observable) to fire someone and then to blame it on the evil, unnamed minorities.
