Republican lawmakers are now focusing their ire on an unlikely target: Barbie.
Members of the GOP are accusing the makers of the hit movie of advancing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, reported POLITICO on Friday — and it all has to do with a drawing seen in one part of the film.
"The detail in question is a dashed line drawn on a map off the coast of Asia that critics have identified as the nine-dash line, a contested maritime boundary that Beijing draws more than a thousand miles off its own coast to claim the vast majority of the South China Sea as its territory," reported Daniella Diaz.
Speaking to POLITICO, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), who runs a House panel on China affairs, said that "the fact that a cartoonish, crayon-scribbled map seems to go out of its way to depict the PRC’s unlawful territorial claims illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors."
A spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), meanwhile, said that Hollywood is "altering and censoring their content to appease the Chinese Communist Party."
Warner Bros., for its part, has denied any political motivation behind the map in the film, saying that it was not intended to "make any type of statement."
Republicans are not alone in their criticism. The maritime map boundary in the film has triggered anger internationally as well, with Vietnam, which has competing claims to the South China Sea, banning the movie outright.
Other right-wing figures in the United States have had different reasons for going after the movie, which releases to theaters later this month. A pro-Trump Tennessee megachurch pastor recently proclaimed a "curse" upon the movie for supposedly being "full of transsexual, and transgender, and homosexuality."
