Sen. Ted Cruz calls Barbie a Chinese propaganda, social media reacts

Sen. Ted Cruz of the United States, a known Princess Bride enthusiast, comes back with a fresh interpretation of the film. Cruz claimed that the next Barbie movie, which opens this weekend, pushes Chinese Communist Party propaganda on young women in an interview with the right media website the Daily Signal.

“The ‘Barbie’ movie is coming out right now. I’m the dad of two young daughters. This is going to be a big movie, particularly for a lot of young girls,” Cruz said. “There’s a scene in ‘Barbie’ where there is this map of the world, and it’s drawn with crayon. I mean, it’s really a very simple cartoon. They’ve drawn what are called ‘the nine dashes,’ which is, this is Chinese communist propaganda, 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.”

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“It’s blatantly false and it’s Chinese propaganda. Well, the stupid little cartoon map has the nine dashes drawn on there. And they did it for one purpose and one purpose only, to kiss up to the Chinese communist censors. And I got to say that is shameful,” Cruz said.

Social media users have not taken kindly to the senator’s comments.

The senator’s remarks come in response to Vietnam’s recent move to outright ban Barbie for displaying the “nine dashes” map.

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Cruz, on the other hand, appears to be staying on the Qanon-proximate side of Hollywood these days. Prior to the release of the 2023 movie The Sound of Freedom, in which Caviziel portrays a former federal agent against a network of child traffickers, the senator shared pictures of himself with Caviziel in June. In his public life, Caviezel openly subscribes to one of the more severe forms of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that a global cabal of elites tortures infants and young children in order to extract an industrial amount of a chemical called adrenochrome from their bodies.