I watched all of Ben Shapiro's Barbie videos so you don't have to
Taking a peak behind the silliness of the culture war a-gender efforts
Hi, it’s been a while but that’s because of laziness and working in my free time on this project.
This isn’t a deep dive into what he (and Piers Morgan) said about the movie itself, as I already did that in the form of a YouTube video (which you should watch please). Instead this is a look into the batshit ‘culture war’ voices I had to suffer through which took way longer than actually watching the movie.
The attacks on the Barbie movie offered a unique insight into the nature of ‘culture war’ commentary, as you can tell from the moment you see Ben Shapiro holding his little doll that he burns in a lame attempt to seem edgy and cool as the intro to his first of five videos on the topic, that inherently this is a very silly topic for the pantomime that is political ‘debate’.
Look at this silly man playing with the toys that his toys his billionaire daddy funders paid for. Is he trying to appeal to the average age demographic of the kids he ‘debates’?
Anyway, this film promoting a doll in a way to try claw back the losses that Warner Bros keeps facing somehow ended up in the middle of tantrums from some of the world’s leading men who claim to be smart political commentators, purely because the movie critics the capitalist patriarchal society we all live in.
While many might think, ‘ok but why not just ignore the movie since their audience wasn’t going to see it anyway and it’s just a movie about dolls?’, when it comes to people like Ben ‘Pussies don’t get wet’ Shapiro and Piers 'the Phone Hacker’ Morgan are incapable of doing that for two reasons:
Stirring controversy drives viewership
To do so would be to miss an opportunity to deny the existence of the problems in society that they benefit from
See this whole thing is just an act, playing to a low common dominator that is wealthy and gives them power. None of their arguments are in good faith, nor are they consistent with any of their other arguments.
This can be seen by the fact that Ben Shapiro made 5 videos on the topic and Piers Morgan started slamming it before the movie even came out, declaring:
“It’s not just an attack on Ken, but on all men.”
Later when the movie came out, Morgan doubled down the over-the-top claims by saying that if he made a gender swapped version of the movie (despite that being what most movies are), feminists would want to see him beheaded (which personally I don’t need him to make a movie in order for me to think that would be good tv).
The Human Centipede of Shit…
Following the article, Piers did another tv segment where he said the rest of his family saw the movie without him and liked it, but since Morgan had seen Ben Shapiro’s review where the later claimed it was one of the worst 5 movies of all time, he stayed headstrong with saying the movie was awful.
This gives us a unique insight into what the ‘culture wars’ really are, just a human centipede of shit that flows from asshole, into the mouth of another before being dumped into the mouths of the audiences.
A common tactic in ‘culture wars’ deceptions is to state things as if they are true, add in commentary that implies the truth and getting mad at the false truth you they concocted, always leaving just enough room for them to disingenuously claim a plausible deniability to whether they actually said it was true. Just bullshit from start to finish.
Normally they will claim that their audience would never take away the implication they clearly put out there and when pressed about it will just go on the attack claiming they are being lied about. However, since we have Piers Morgan’s retelling of Ben Shapiro’s talking points while both middle aged men got mad at the movie about dolls, we can see first hand that it’s all bullshit.
Shapiro tried to slam the Barbie movie by claiming that it would be a ‘twist’ to audiences to discover that the doll was originally invented by a woman, despite there being a character representing the creator and her being a woman literally being a big part of the climax of the film (the deniability set up there being that he would be saying that finding it out during the film would be a ‘twist’). He also tried to slam the parody of boardrooms (which the movie shows as being like 20 men), Shapiro’s argument which he ‘had to google’ during his scripted video was that it’s unfair to criticise Mattel for being run by a man now as a previous CEO was a woman; something that people who actually saw the movie would know as it is literally said as a joke to parody the sorts of dumb arguments that idiots who benefit from the patriarchy would say.
Piers Morgan of course, said both of Shapiro’s assertions directly as a way to claim that the movie never acknowledges either point.
Hell they both even argue that the movie is bad because it doesn’t follow the decades of lore around Ken and Barbie’s relationship, as if any of those two middle aged men actually care about the lore of Ken and Barbie.
Shit just followed from one asshole into his mouth and then into the mouth’s of that asshole’s audience.
Consistency?
Culture warriors will claim that they demand consistency, however the offer anything but that.
Piers Morgan hates ‘cancel culture’ and the inability of society to ‘take a joke’, it’s why his terrible show is called ‘Uncensored’ because of it is. Yet he called for people to avoid this movie without ever seeing it, only to go on to endlessly whine about the jokes in the movie all of which he only heard ‘out of context’.
A point that led his own panel to refer to him as a ‘snowflake’ for.
Ben Shapiro is a huge defender of the ‘free market’ as the ‘ultimate judge’ of quality. It’s why he boldly predicted that the free market would abandon the movie after the first week, something that ultimately proved to be humiliatingly untrue.
Instead of backing down, the film expert whose production company put out an anti-woke movie that grossed $840 at the box office, doubled down saying that he was being persecuted for speaking ‘the truth’ and that the only reason that the ‘woke left’ was going to the movie was because we are apparently all scared of seeming like we don’t support Greta Gerwig.
However by his own regular logic, only one of them should be able to say what is and isn’t a “dogshit movie, piled upon more dogshit” deserving of a ‘negative infinity’ out of 10 rating.
‘Politicisation’
One of the biggest inconsistencies (so big that it get’s it’s own subheading’) is the accusation of ‘politicising’ something.
‘Politicising’ a topic is a very serious allegation that sounds awful, until you think about it and realise it’s a nothing term that means fuck all.
Essentially people on all sides of politics know that most people hate ‘politics’ as when they think ‘politics’ they aren’t thinking about the issues in society that politics claims to focus on (which is how politically active people describe politics), instead most people just see ‘politics’ as powerful groups of people arguing a lot and doing silly photo ops in order to lie about wanting to help people (hence why they can’t stand ‘politics’).
This means when you accuse the other side of ‘politicising’ something you can say that you mean they are bringing politically discussed issues into something, but you know that your audience hears that stupid arguments from privileged people are being brought in and they immediately feel tired.
While they decry the ‘politicisation’ of things like how the movie ‘brought feminism’ to a doll about how women could be anything, they also actively sought out ways to sneak in their own bullshit.
In multiple of his videos, Shapiro brings up the fact that one of the Barbies is played by a trans-woman (something the movie doesn’t acknowledge) to suggest that it is shoving ‘politics’ down our throats, before going on to claim that her voice is deeper than his own which is both not true and also something that is true of many cis-women.
Even more than that Shapiro makes up an entire conspiracy theory about how the movie is secretly a coded message a coded message for how the democrats plan to defeat Trump in 2024 and install Kamala Harris as president. Since republicans relate to the Kens, the Kens tried to build a wall (which we all know is something only Donald Trump does) and President Barbie is black.
It’s all just a bunch of nonsense really.
‘Debate fetish’
When culture warriors really want to seem like they are the ‘height of intelligencia’ they take part in the biggest pantomime of them of ‘debate’.
Debates are bullshit, they are all an act to give the illusion that there is respect and common ground, but their actual stances wont ever change from debate. But what it does do is that it gives these idiots a chance to look smarter by dunking on people they choose to take on.
And yes, even when discussing the dolls movie there was debates.
Shapiro tried to debate his own employee Brett Cooper about whether the movie was good. He ended up revealing that he didn’t realise that Barbie and Ken weren’t human and that Barbie wanted to become human instead of what he assumed was her just wanting to grow a vagina (again these people are not smart).
The common ground failed Hollywood wannabe turned anti-feminist Ben Shapiro and his opponent failed Hollywood wannabe turned anti-feminist Brett Cooper ‘found’ was that the feminist messaging of the movie was bad, the patriarchy isn’t real since men allowed women to vote as well as make this movie, and that the solution all the problems the characters faced wasn’t self-growth/work but instead was to get married.
Ken’s lack of self dependence and attitudes towards women, Barbie wanting to leave Barbieland and even Barbie not being into Ken; all of this is apparently solved if they just give up on their dreams an settle into a loveless marriage instead.
Even worse than that ‘debate’ was Piers Morgan’s. Piers also debated the quality of the film and it’s message, this time against a socialist woman who didn’t like the movie, an anti-feminist woman who didn’t like the movie, a Love Island star who was in the movie and a social progressive who liked the movie. So if you are counting, the odds are stacked one way.
Piers chose specific points to argue with each individual, and by argue I mean give himself a bunch of time to make his point before either throwing to them to agree or asking a gotcha question and talking over them if they try to expand on it.
No where in this ‘debate’ was Piers’ mind going to change, all he wanted was to get those who liked the film to ‘concede’ points they weren’t arguing. Like if the parody of sexism would be treated differently by women if it was just being sexist against women.
The worst of the shitstorm came when Piers decided to argue that the Patriarchy doesn’t exist by responding to a woman bringing up the rate in which women experience sexual violence by saying that men get stabbed more on the street than women, a terrible enough point that they didn’t even have time to delve into that men are also most likely to be doing the stabbing.
Of course in both debates the points that people who have seen the movie that you would assume they would concede on like the critics of the original idealised matriarchy and the critics of ‘girl boss’ feminism are completely brushed aside by these annoying men as to concede those would be to concede to the ending of the film which suggests that things need to change.
These aren’t actual debates, they are just boring WWE.
Fear and Naivety
No matter how much these grifters talk say ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings’, above all else they weaponize feelings and the lack of facts.
Piers Morgan opened one of his videos bemoaning the term ‘patriarchy’ before suggesting that no one knows what it means, including him, before ‘guessing’ “that it means that all men are evil unless they can prove otherwise” suggesting that is what the movie’s real message is.
Of course the movie’s real characterisation of the Kens is that they are misguided by the patriarchy into oppressing women in order to distract from their own insecurities. Plus there is Allen, a man who the movie portrays quite well as an ally of the Barbies, however because he isn’t objectifying the Barbies and he doesn’t like patriarchy, the culture warriors hate him and just call him ‘gay’ as an insult.
Which brings me to Ben Shapiro, who goes even further as to also accuse all the Kens of being “gay and homoerotic” as a plot by the movie to indoctrinate young kids into being queer.
Ben also claims that the jokes aren’t jokes but are actually indoctrination against religion, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, men, Zac Snyder, Mattel, conservatives and Barbie.
The goal here isn’t to make coherent points, or even base the points on reality, it is to add to a growing list of things they want everyone to be afraid of. While on it’s own, these bizarre allegations and conspiracies against the film are laughable and weird, when you are feeding an audience these messages day-in day-out with different targets, it slowly creeps into their brain that they should be afraid of everyone but them and to treat any messaging designed to deprogram their societal brainwashing as the real brainwashing propaganda.
Packing up the silly and the scary
I’ve been doing deep dives like this for years and going into this I was excited because of how extra silly it is, but I didn’t factor in how much extra scary it would be.
As an Australian, the ‘culture war’ nonsense is still picking up unlike in the US where the top cable news show was Tucker Carlson (before he was fired). This meant I got to see what happens to a society further in the trenches and it stood out to me how gross it gets.
In Shapiro’s fifth video on Barbie, which is just him calling the Canadian Prime Minister gay for seeing the movie the sponsor felt like a dystopian horror. It was a charity wanting to provide ‘free healthcare’ during pregnancies, by giving people free ultrasounds in order to try and pressure parent’s into not getting abortions.
The ‘culture wars’ not one we want to fight, not because we won’t win (since let’s be honest they aren’t sending their brightest), but because they aren’t trying to win. They just want enough noise to help distract from their incremental nudges pushing society backwards.
Also Ben Shapiro said that I’m Just Ken was a bad song, so like the dude is literally just living in denial.
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