Whoopi Goldberg Slams Conservatives over “Barbie” Meltdowns
Whoopi Goldberg shreds conservatives, including Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz, who claim the "Barbie" movie is too political and too "woke."
Whoopi Goldberg slammed right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for their grandstanding and oversensitive reactions to the movie Barbie.
Speaking during a segment on Tuesday’s episode of The View, co-host Goldberg, an EGOT winner, appeared befuddled by the degree of manufactured outrage from conservative influencers and news outlets.
“It’s a movie!” said Goldberg. “It’s a movie about a doll!”
Both Cruz and Shapiro, who frequently rail against mainstream movies, music, and pop culture, and frequently present them as antithetical to conservative moral and religious values, have taken shots at the Greta Gerwig film.
Shapiro posted a 43-minute-long meltdown in which he burned three Barbie dolls and a Barbie “Dream Car,” complaining that Barbie was one “the most woke movies I have ever seen.”
Among Shapiro’s complaints?
The movie is “marketed to kids,” despite its PG-13 rating, that the film emasculates men, that the film’s overall message of rebelling against the “patriarchy” is a form of left-wing feminist indoctrination, that the film includes LGBTQ characters (some of the Kens are coded as gay and a trans actress plays one of the Barbies, although their actual sexual orientation or gender identity is never mentioned), and that a Black woman plays Barbie Land’s president.
Cruz, meanwhile, has repeatedly railed against the movie, calling it “Chinese communist propaganda” for depicting a nine-dash line on a crudely-drawn fake world map.
Cruz has seized upon a dotted line on the map as evidence of the “nine-dash line” in the South China sea, which Chinese propagandists have drawn on maps to lay claim to territory that does not belong to China.
The film’s production company has rejected the notion that there is any hidden meaning or pro-Chinese propaganda in the film.
“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a Warner Bros. Film Group spokesperson told Variety before the movie came out. “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.”
Goldberg appeared to imply that both conservative influencers are reading too much into the movie and looking for conspiracy theories or symbols with hidden meanings that do not exist.
“I thought y’all would be happy. [Barbie] has no genitalia, so there’s no sex involved,” Goldberg said. “Ken has no genitalia, so he can’t — it’s a doll movie! And the kids know it’s colorful and it’s Barbie…. It’s a doll movie, guys. I’m shocked that that’s what’s freaking you out these days.”
Goldberg was not the only one on the panel to point out the ridiculous nature of the conservative backlash.
“I’m so taken by some of these right-wing men who have all these thoughts on masculinity,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, Goldberg’s conservative co-host, said. “Like, somehow, the Barbie movie is going to make them feel emasculated. No, caring so much about it is honestly the most emasculating thing!”
Goldberg also explained that children won’t see the film the same way adults do, because they’re not looking at the movie through a political or a culture-war lens.
“The kids know it’s colorful and it’s Barbie,” Goldberg concluded. “They haven’t lived through what the adults have lived through. So when they’re seeing this movie, that’s not how they’re looking at it. The kids are looking at it as a Barbie movie.
“It’s a movie. That’s what we do. We make movies. We make movies about all kinds of stuff. We make movies about people who fly, we make movies about dolls who talk and walk.
“And they hit two things: they talk about the real world that everybody lives in, and they talk about Barbie world. And they’re two different things. And it’s meant to make you just think or pause, it’s not meant to do anything but give you a good time. Go see the movie!”
Barbie debuted alongside the biopic Oppenheimer last week and drew in a record $356 million worldwide. It is currently only available in theaters.
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