To no surprise, Texas Senator Ted Cruz is picking a fight with Hollywood — again. This time, he’s picking a fight with Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film Barbie.
Cruz is upset about one scene in Barbie that he’s describing as, wait for it, “Chinese communist propaganda.” No, we’re not kidding.
“There’s a scene in Barbie where there is this map of the world, and it’s drawn like with crayon,” Cruz said in an interview with The Daily Signal on Sunday (July 16). “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.”
China’s U-shaped “nine-dash line” is a disputed representation of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Cruz continued: “This is Chinese communist propaganda in which the Chinese assert 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.”
Earlier this month, Cruz alleged that “kowtowing to the Chinese communists” is something that Hollywood does. “They recognize that repeating what makes the Chinese Communist Party and the government happy increases the chances that the government will allow the movie to be sold in China,” Cruz said on his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz. “But I got to say it is shameful to see Hollywood acting as a mouthpiece for the Chinese communists.”
According to Variety, Warner Bros. officials pushed back on the assertion that the drawing of the map is political. Barbie was banned in Vietnam because of the crayon map.
“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a spokesperson for Warner Bros. said. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world.’ It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Barbie being covered here wouldn’t exist.