“I’m the Dad of two young daughters,” Ted Cruz says at the beginning of a clip from a recent appearance on the conservative The Daily Signal podcast. That, apparently, makes him an authority on the upcoming Barbie movie and its entanglement in Asian maritime disputes, thanks to a map that’s either a “child-like crayon drawing” or an endorsement of the controversial “nine-dash line,” depending on whom you ask.
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Cruz, for one, is siding with the Vietnamese government, which has banned the release of Barbie thanks to the map, shown briefly in the film, that they say depicts a disputed dash-line used by China to claim the South China Sea. Vietnam’s state-run newspaper called it an “offending image”; Cruz calls it “Chinese communist propaganda,” which he seems gravely concerned will brainwash the young girls who go see Barbie this weekend. The film’s distributor Warner Bros. has emphasized that the line was intended to “depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the real world. It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
Cruz has been fixated on Barbie for a while now—though he must be used to picking fights with pop culture icons that are inevitably going to remain way more popular than he is. (And to pledging fealty to other pop culture icons that want absolutely nothing to do with him.)
Back in 2021, the senator accused Big Bird of promoting government propaganda, and earlier this year he launched an investigation into Bud Light. He tried to claim that Disney was on its way to showing “Mickey and Pluto going at it”—he really did!—and got so fixated on some anti-racist children’s books that he wound up driving up their sales. That could very well be what winds up happening with Barbie, which is currently projected to make as much as $100 million domestically in its opening weekend. For anyone who was on the fence about seeing Barbie but enjoys sticking it to Ted Cruz, your decision has just been made.
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