Ted Cruz isn’t about to let the Barbie movie “controversy” go to waste. During a recent interview, the Texas senator used the film as an excuse to slam Hollywood for allegedly pushing “communist propaganda” even though the studio has thoroughly debunked the claim.
At issue is a map that appears in the film that shows Barbie’s journey from her world to the real world. It looks like a child drawing complete with crayon illustrations and whimsical touches to show Barbie’s path. However, to show her journey, there’s a few dashes next to Asia, which set off an international controversy because it looked too similar to China’s nine-dash line used to mark its disputed claim over much of the South China Sea.
Never mind that the Barbie drawing only has eight dashes and is nowhere close to being geographically correct, conservatives like Cruz have had a field day blasting Hollywood over what’s clearly a honest misunderstanding.
Via Raw Story:
“I mean, it’s really a very simple cartoon. And so they have this blockish thing that is called ‘Asia,’ and then they’ve drawn what are called the nine-dashes.
This is Chinese communist propaganda in which the Chinese are asserting sovereignty over the entirety of the South China Sea, and they don’t have any right to it under international law, but they are trying to take it away from their neighbors there.”
When the Barbie map controversy first started, Cruz was one of the first to jump all over the latest culture war bauble by having his spokesperson issue a statement to USA Today.
“China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think,” the spokesperson said. “And they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing CCP propaganda—just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map.”
Here’s the “propagandist” map. If you’re not filled with sudden desire to do communism, then you must be looking at it wrong. Ted Cruz doesn’t die on these hills just for kicks. (He does.)
Barbie opens in theaters on July 21.
(Via Raw Story)