About Gina Carano being fired NO WAIT COME BACK THIS IS DIFFERENT I PROMISE.

Famous Star Wars actor in popular, fan-centred franchise shares political beliefs, people get mad, campaign against her on every media platform, she gets canned, cancel culture free speech blah blah.

You know what happened at the same time? Mark Cuban, famous media figure, owner of the Dallas Mavericks (NBA ) decided to stop playing the national anthem before games. He also publicly supported Kaepernick and BLM. Paywalled, but it's here https://theathletic.com/2376670/2021/02/09/dallas-mavericks-anthem-nba-mark-cuban/

These two things happened AT THE SAME TIME. To recap: famous public figure who represents a popular media property with huge fan engagement they encourage, take a stand that's popular but politically untenable. What happened to Cuban? Media outrage. Uprising of protest.

Both regular people and big media, FOX News in particular, to everyone's shock I'm sure, screamed and threatened until the NBA made him back down. The situations, minus ideology, ARE IDENTICAL. Free speech cancel culture blah blah
I'll save you the google. https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/30874241/nba-issues-statement-saying-all-teams-play-national-anthem

My point isn't people are hypocrites, that's boring. My point is, if your bubble was outraged about Carano, you probably haven't even HEARD of the Mavs. And vice versa. Seriously, a million culture war outrage yellers, find me ONE that covered both. If you do, I'll share it.

I can hear the rationalist, data driven high-decouplers coming at me now. "Well I'm not team red OR team blue! I care only for free speech and both are bad!" Yeah, whatever. The point is, you didn't TALK about both. Deep down, one or the other makes you angrier.

Because (hot take!) fundamentally, we all agree. The SJWs with their metal straws, the libertarian tech genius, the alt-right. We ALL love free speech. We ALL hate shaming and shunning. We also ALL fight for truth and justice. We ALL support the little guy against the big bad.

And all this c*ncel c*lture, speech wars, complaints about dumb college students or spoiled rich kids or stuffy prudes or dumb hippies, are weapons. Ways to fight for your own ideology and against theirs, while pretending that with you, it's different. It's never an honest fight.

And it shouldn't be! Because Carano and Cuban aren't the point. We have moral beliefs and we're fighting them the way we know how, the way every culture in history ever has. Shaming. Narrative framing. Using what power we have, while believing we're the underdogs.

We've been doing these all throughout history, both the evil and the righteous, because we all believe the basic obvious morality. Free speech AND protect the little guy. We just don't disagree about the trans rights or what patriotism means. So celebrities are proxies.

I'm done now. Hopefully we can move on from these beyond tired "I'm a good person, you're a bad person, so it's different if I do it against you" arguments and I never have to see the words cancel or culture again.

@Pseudobadger you asked for this. Thanks for reading to the end!