By Mike Huckabee
July 27, 2023
|
|
The new “Barbie” movie had a huge opening weekend, pulling in $155 million. But conservative critics are calling it a triumphant bait-and-switch by Warners’ marketing department, who kept it secret that the movie was not the light, funny, nostalgic family film viewers expected. That enabled them to use Barbie to dupe parents into taking their daughters to watch two hours of relentless man-hating and woke feminist lectures. They are predicting that grosses will tumble fast once word of mouth gets out.
And word of mouth is brutal. Ben Shapiro despised it so much that he made a 43-minute video savaging it as “horrific,” “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen on every possible level,” and “a flaming piece of dog(BLEEP) piled atop an entire dumpster on fire, piled atop a landfill filled with dog(BLEEP.)” He said it’s a heavily political movie explicitly designed to divide men from women, with its negative message directed at kids.
On the other hand, maybe some audience members did know what they were getting into, and they’re gaslighting the makers. Athena Thorne at PJ Media reports that young men are making memes celebrating “patriarchy Ken” and pretending to have gotten the opposite message the woke filmmakers were sending, just to make their heads explode.
I haven’t seen it, and even with grandkids, I have no intention of doing so. But just from all the reviews and clips, I get the idea that Barbie ventures out of Barbieland into the “real world” and discovers it’s a hotbed of male-dominated chauvinist piggery where strange men slap her rear and sexually harass her on the sidewalk in broad daylight.
But here’s my thought: she’s in Los Angeles. Isn’t that the deep blue city in the deep blue state wherein live all the enlightened leftist celebrities who lecture us constantly about our various isms and lack of wokeness? I don’t know any Trump-supporting small town where women would be treated so disrespectfully. Maybe the filmmakers seriously believe that everyone still treats women like bimbo sex objects because they live in L.A. and work in the business that protected Harvey Weinstein for decades.
Or maybe “progressives” have to pretend that women’s rights have made no advances since the 1950s for the same reason they have to pretend racism is worse than it was in the 1950s: if they acknowledged how much actual progress has been made, there would be no need for them. (Spoiler alert: there is no need for them. They’re actually turning back the clock and undoing women’s rights and racial equality.)
Related: I also noticed that “Sound of Freedom” added another $20 million over the weekend, bringing its gross so far to $124.7 million. Even more impressive, it was third at the box office, beating out the new “Mission Impossible” movie by about $600,000, despite being on about 1,500 fewer screens.
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/
This has caused leftwing outlets from Rolling Stone to NPR to amp up their efforts to keep people from seeing it, which is only turning out more viewers. Their hollow claim that this fact-based story of child sex trafficking is “rightwing, QAnon conspiracy theories” is being undermined every day as more and more stories appear of pedophile slimeballs being busted, some of them part of the same media that’s trashing the movie. Like former ABC News producer James Meek, who just pleaded guilty to sending and receiving child porn, and ex-CNN producer John Griffin, who was sentenced to 19 years for raping a nine-year-old girl.
For those who have a VIP subscription to PJ Media, Kevin Downey Jr. has an excellent write-up of this story, complete with multiple links to stats and news stories proving that the problem of child sex trafficking is all too real, and the people busted for it have ranged from media figures to teachers to CIA employees.
If anyone at PJ Media reads this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider making this story non-paywall. It’s something that everyone should be able to read.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2023/7/barbie
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.