Free Speech Absolutist Elon Musk Very Mad At Disney For Its Speech, Funds At Least One SLAPP Suit

The free speech absolutist" is at it again. Despite his claim to be an absolutist, Elon Musk has an uncanny ability to magically keep finding himself involved in lawsuits that are attempts to suppress the free speech rights of others.

And he's at it again. Earlier this week, actor Gina Carano sued Disney almost exactly three years after Disney announced that she would not be returning to The Mandalorian, after she posted a bunch of utter nonsense on social media about mask wearing, the 2020 election, and the Holocaust (specifically trying to equate hating someone for their political views" with how the Nazis convinced people to hate Jews).

The lawsuit is... not good. It's extraordinarily bad. They hired lawyers who appear to be decently experienced... to basically embarrass themselves with an obvious SLAPP suit, designed to punish Disney for its own free speech rights. Like so many performative lawsuits these days, the text of it seems designed to rile up idiots on 4chan and some of the sketchier subreddits, but seems unlikely to convince a judge.

Here's the thing: Disney has every right to hire and fire who it wants, and they can do so in response to someone's speech. That's how free speech works. Sometimes, you say something stupid and there are consequences to your speech, including that others do not want to associate with you or work with you. Yet, Carano seems to argue that somehow no one can criticize her for her speech.

This is a civil action arising from Defendants' wrongful termination of Carano's employment in retaliation for Carano's lawful exercise of her right to speak and express her views. Specifically, Defendants-under the regime of former Disney CEO Bob Chapek-fired Carano because of her posts (the Posts") on various social media platforms including X (formerly known as Twitter). Carano composed and published the Posts while she was off-duty and away from the workplace.

In her Posts, Carano expressed her personal political views, opinions, and beliefs. In retaliation for Carano's exercise of her speech rights, Defendants terminated Carano's employment and took other retaliatory actions to limit and deny her future employment opportunities, including but not limited to making maliciously false statements about Carano with the intention of damaging her reputation and, thus, her ability to find and retain work.

She also complains that other similarly situated male co-workers" were not disciplined for their speech. Except, um, that's not what happened. She points to Carl Weathers, who sadly just passed away. He had posted about Nazis pushing hatred through things like book banning and encouraging hatred.

Except, that was not the exact same message" nor was it posted in the same context (context matters). Carano's post was at a time when lots of people were discussing her other posts, in which she was pushing nonsense Fox News talking points, and then tried to equate how Nazis drove hate to people disliking your politics. That is... very different.

She also claims that co-star Pedro Pascal wasn't disciplined for his tweets, including one that compares Donald Trump to Hitler. And, so fucking what? Disney is allowed to not employ someone for their views and to employ someone else with different views. That's how the rights of association work.

Bizarrely, the lawsuit is full of totally random tweets from random people, some of whom are annoying internet trolls, but who should have no bearing on any of this.

This is the legal equivalent of: And another thing: I'm not mad. Don't put in my SLAPP lawsuit that I got mad at random trolls online."

The actual claims in the lawsuit are nonsense. Wrongful discharge and sex discrimination. Even though, earlier in the lawsuit, she claims that Lucasfilm defamed" her by accusing her of being a bigoted' actress," and later that mischaracterizing her social media posts is also defaming her, they don't bother actually filing a claim for defamation. This is either because her lawyers know that's not how defamation law actually works, or they realize that putting in defamation claims would make it that much easier for Disney to file an anti-SLAPP motion, leaving Carano on the hook for the Mouse's legal bills.

Indeed, it seems like the decision to go with the claims they went with are yet another attempt to try to hide from an anti-SLAPP motion by claiming that this has nothing to do with speech, even though the rest of the complaint makes it painfully obvious that it has everything to do with speech. It would not surprise me if Disney files an anti-SLAPP motion and makes a strong case that this is a SLAPP suit, to which Carano's lawyers will play all innocent and claim that it's got nothing to do with speech, even though the whole complaint says otherwise.

Now, you might have read this far and wondered why the post started off talking about Elon Musk and his willingness to get involved in suing people over their speech rights. Well, it's because apparently Elon is funding Carano's vexatious lawsuit.

Apparently, this is part of what Elon promised last year, when he talked about how he would fund with no limit" lawsuits for anyone fired for tweets. That apparently still does not apply to all of the former Twitter employees he fired for their tweets. I mean, literally a week ago, Elon had lawyers in court claiming that of course ELON can fire people for their tweets. His lawyer called it a no-brainer."

But, now, he's funding Carano suing Disney, and asking for more people to join in.

Once again, as is all too common these days, the answer seems to be it's okay if Elon does it, and it's the worst thing in the world if it's done to people Elon likes." He can fire people for tweets, but others fired for tweets must sue.

Of course, the fact that it's against Disney is probably even more appealing to Musk, since he's super salty about the fact that Disney chose (again, a free speech choice) to no longer advertise on ExTwitter. In some sense, this looks like Elon trying to imitate his former colleague, Peter Thiel, in how he destroyed Gawker with mostly frivolous lawsuits.

But Disney is not Gawker. And Disney's lawyers don't fuck around (much to our own annoyance regarding copyright).

The free speech absolutist Elon Musk has also been going on a conspiratorial days long rant about how awful Disney is... for deciding that it should use its own speech to introduce audiences to more diverse characters in its shows and movies. Hilariously, he posted Disney's inclusions standards" as if he got it from a deep mole within Disney, even though it was published in Variety 3 years ago.

Either way, an actual free speech absolutist would support Disney's right to have its own speech standards, Carano's right to say whatever nonsense she wants to say, and Disney's right to decide not to associate with Carano or Musk when they feel that their values diverged. Those are all forms of free speech.

But, tellingly, Musk seems to think some of them are not allowed.