People are fired for offensive tweets every day, we all know what’s happened to Roseanne Barr, two months ago her racist tweet led to the cancellation of her show, her being dropped by her talent agency, and essentially being blacklisted by Hollywood…all by the same parent company who fired director James Gunn from Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol.3 after over 10,000 tweets about rape & paedophilia resurfaced. Earlier today the entire cast of Guardians Of The Galaxy wrote an open letter requesting that Gunn be rehired for the 3rd movie.
This comes after days of numerous celebrities such as Selma Blair, Dave Bautista, and Bobcat Goldthwait has voiced their support for the director’s return. 330,000 people have also signed a Change.org petition asking for Gunn to be reinstated. So why are so many people demanding Gunn be rehired? Better yet, will Disney do a 180 and bring Gunn back after denouncing him just two weeks ago? A better question is, why all the support for James Gunn that wasn’t awarded to others in similar situations in the past. The answer is really simple, politics.
What I find interesting is that the cast, as well as others, call out the epidemic of character assassinations and mob mentality when their industry is the biggest perpetrators of it. The #MeToo movement, a movement that originated in Hollywood to call out the sexual abuse that came from their own industry has now become a movement of character assassinations and weaponized mob mentality. Sure they got Harvey Weinstein, a guy who they all knew about his shady doings for years but never said a word for the sake of their careers.
But as we have seen this week with the reinstating of Chris Hardwick, what #MeToo has become is an avenue to make baseless claims against someone with no evidence outside of weaponized feelings to back it up. Despite AMC clearing Hardwick of any wrongdoing, has anyone’s image of him been repaired? Where there apologizes for jumping the gun and destroying his character? No. Many still believe that he did it despite the only evidence being the mere accusation.
Why are so many demanding we give the benefit of the doubt to decade-old tweets regarding James Gunn? Again Politics. We know that the mere fact of decade-old offensive tweets isn’t the reason to demand forgiveness from the outrage mob just looking at the situations with Sean Newcomb, Josh Hader, and Trea Turner (and they were teens when those tweets were written, not 40-year-old men). The reality is, we know what team James Gunn plays for, he is a member of the resistance.
Before Gunn was fired for offensive tweets, he largely spent his time calling Trump and his supporters ‘Nazis’, blaming him for mass shootings, calling people like Ben Shapiro ‘assholes’ and more. None of this bothered anyone in the cast or Hollywood because he was on their team. If Roseanne Barr said the same things about Trump on her twitter, do you think the backlash she got would have been just as severe? Of course not, because she was considered an enemy of the industry long before her fallout.
We also can’t ignore the elephant in the room, the fact that Gunn’s tweets were uncovered by Infowars reporter Mike Cernovich, who the left refers to as a “far-right Nazi” seems to be the main justification to forgive Gunn. Dave Bautista himself called the Gunn situation a CyberNazi attack.
So the rationale is if a Nazi discovers you wrote 10,000 tweets about pedophilia then the problem is clearly with the nazi…
I hate to compare this to the Roseanne situation due to the expected calls of a ‘whataboutism’ (also known as context) but there are many similarities here to ignore. The defense of “it was just a joke” well that’s what Roseanne said, didn’t stop the outrage mob. “Well Gunn apologized for the tweets” so did Roseanne…didn’t stop the outrage mob. So what makes what one did so much worse than what the other did? (By all means, give your arguments down below).
Disney has not responded to the cast’s demand but one thing is for sure, if Disney decides to bring back James Gunn, they will open the floodgates for a fiery political debate in the industry.
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