This is the way. Last week, Mandalorian actress Gina Carano was fired for making a very yikes comparison between the United States and Nazi Germany. The firing was predictable, and I think inevitable. Before this most recent drama, Carano’s social media presence had already been deemed problematic by Disney. In particular, two earlier controversies caught a good amount of internet heat: one over mask-wearing (she was not sufficiently into the concept) and one over voter fraud (she was not sufficiently appalled by the concept). The energy she brought in all three social media controversies was a kind of anxious, low-key paranoid Trump supporter vibe: definitely right of center, and decidedly not woke. This all being considerably far afield of Disney’s present image, the corporate lizard people decided it was best to formally cut ties. Backlash against the firing was as swift and pronounced as backlash against Carano’s offending comments, but while cowardly and hypocritical I do think the decision is basically not that big of a deal.

Disney is in the business of producing stories that transport people to different worlds — this one, explicitly, to “a galaxy far, far away.” For many viewers, what an actor says on social media to some degree informs the way they think about the actor’s character, and therefore shapes the viewer’s experience of a fictional world. All signs indicate Disney spoke to Carano about her social media presence previously, and sternly, and she persisted in posting content with which Disney made clear it did not want to be associated. But dopamine thirst is a powerful thing, and Carano couldn’t stop herself. As Pedro Pascal, the star of the Mandalorian, himself compared America to Nazi Germany back when Trump was still our President, the question of bias has naturally been raised. Are Disney’s social media rules applied equally to actors on the political left as they are to actors on the political right? And what a silly question. Of course they’re not. This is also fine.

Disney is a left-wing company, which is legal, typical (historically speaking), and in my opinion not that dangerous. The house of Mouse is not our government, and it is not a globally-dominant speech platform. Disney is a media company with a perspective on the world. I understand the apprehension concerning broader cultural authoritarianism, and the uncomfortable fact that the Disney perspective is close to universal among elitist founts of media power. But there have always been dominant speech norms. While it’s certainly important to push back against cultural authoritarianism, the essential question we face on the topic of speech is not whether it should be more comfortable to voice dissent — it has never been comfortable to voice dissent. Our most pressing and important question continues to be whether voicing dissent will remain possible. Here, with so many figures working in both media and technology arguing on behalf of censorship, I do think we’re in some considerable danger.