Director James Gunn poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’, in London, Monday, Apr. 24, 2017. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

I have to admit that until yesterday I’d never heard of James Gunn. Via Wikipedia I’ve found he’s some high-speed/low-drag Hollywood type and while looking at his entry I also found I’ve never watched any of his movies. Full disclosure here: I could really give a flying whatever if another episode of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” is ever made though I understand YMMV.

As I understand it, the saga began when a couple of questionable fringe-right personalities, for whatever motive, decided to go through Gunn’s tweets and extract this charming collection to push out on Twitter (my colleague Brandon Morse has the backstory):

This is some disturbing stuff and it is difficult to see how it is possible to not think this speaks to something a little more significant than a desire to be edgy.

Disney, who was producing the project Gunn was working on, fired Gunn. This, I have to admit, was something of a shock as I thought pedophilia was part of Disney’s business model.

Since his firing another battle had erupted on the right between people saying he should be fired:

Wow. These #JamesGunn tweets are just horrible. Child rape is no laughing matter. As Texas SG, I handled far too many child sexual assaults. Truly evil. I’m glad Disney fired him, but if these tweets are true, he needs to be prosecuted. pic.twitter.com/1IgHC18J4x

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 21, 2018

and people who think it was wrong:

No. This is wrong. His old tweets were 100 percent offensive and gross, but this is not how we judge people. This is not how we determine the fate of a person’s career: https://t.co/U8hcO403Lw

— David French (@DavidAFrench) July 20, 2018

Though, somewhat ironically, French was in favor of Roseanne Barr being fired…

And, showing the same lack of introspection as French, the noxious little man-toad who hunted down and threatend to dox the guy who’d made the gif of President Trump wrestling CNN but magnanimously settled for a public apology weighed in only to find he’d messed with the wrong guy:

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1020724104599654400

Andrew, how do you know they’re jokes? Several tweets refer directly to his having had sex w/ kids. If someone tweets confessing to a crime (repeatedly), it should be investigated. If he’s telling the truth—if he has in fact molested young children—then he should be prosecuted.

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 21, 2018

For the record, I have no problem with what happened to Gunn. I feel much like the way cartoonist Bill Mauldin felt about occupied Italy in World War II:

Gunn has exactly one person to blame for this: Gunn. No grown man has any business having sexual fantasies about children much less writing about them. If he writes about them and puts them on the internet for world to read then, at best, he’s attempting to normalize pedophilia as a political gambit:

at worst, you’re advertising your sexual deviance and trying to dress it up as a joke.

Either way, there was nothing nefarious about searching Gunn’s Twitter timeline for the tweets and there was even a socially uplifting moment as Disney, a company that has made billions out of producing content that sexualized barely pubescent kids, found something too foul for it to stomach.

The second part of the argument that I’m seeing on the right is the one I find most inexplicable. The idea is that it is okay for the left to go after people on the right based on things they’ve said at some point in the past (my heaven, a nominee for a seat on the Ninth Circuit was just sandbagged by articles he wrote as a college student that weren’t sufficiently appreciative of political correctness), but TRUE CONSERVATIVES are better than that, we’ve better things to do, like, for instance, purge our own side by driving out those are insufficiently pure in thought.

The left, naturally, is bleating about this being some kind of right wing conspiracy:

The “dangerous precedent” this goon is talking about is outrage mobs coming from the Right—it’s fantastic when coming from the left. https://t.co/OmoRtjR8L0

— David Reaboi (@davereaboi) July 21, 2018

Enjoy your New Rules.

When you want to go back to the Old Rules, let me know. I'd like that. Until then, hey, consequences, player. https://t.co/vQ1qohJaOz

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) July 20, 2018

(BTW, I shudder to think what the left’s morality is.)

This is my favorite…people just don’t grasp the context:

Mike Cernovich has a nasty track record of slandering media figures and trying to get them fired, often with old out-of-context tweets. One would hope the media industry might understand this by now. https://t.co/JAS8uK0pm0

— Luke O'Brien (@lukeobrien) July 21, 2018

Gunn chose to write pedophilia-infused fantasies (we should hope Ted Cruz is wrong), no one hacked his accounts and manufactured those posts. He was found out and exposed. He was fired. It is really that simple. Gunn being a raging lefty is just icing on the cake. I find it hard to believe there was ever a time when such writings becoming public would not have resulted in a person being fired…unless Roman Polanski wrote them, then its Academy Award time.

I’m completely with Schlicter on this. Hunting through people’s writings and social media comments is not something we invented. It isn’t conservatives who demand people be fired for WrongThink. It isn’t conservatives who SWAT people. It isn’t conservatives who harass kids of political targets or assault them in restaurants. But those are the new rules. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to go along with unilateral disarmament and unconditional surrender.

=========
=========
Like what you see? Then visit my story archive.
Follow @streiffredstate

I’m on Facebook. Drop by and join the fun there.
=========
=========