Elon Musk joined the war against fun this week. After changing Twitter’s iconic blue bird to a boring X, the eccentric billionaire bandwagoned on joyless conservative hate for the Barbie movie’s “feminist” messages. Cockburn wants to know: would it kill just one middle-aged man to admit that he liked the movie?
“If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends,” Musk tweeted Monday, in a rip-off of someone else’s joke. He was responding to a “Barbenheimer” meme mocking his decision to rebrand Twitter’s logo from colorful and playful to somber and gray, much like the difference between Barbie and Oppenheimer. Twitter users quickly accepted Musk’s challenge with confidence. “Weird way of admitting to being a lightweight,” one responded.
Musk was perhaps inspired by Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro who released a forty-three-minute diatribe against the movie on Saturday. The video starts with Shapiro burning a Barbie in a trashcan bonfire before attacking the movie’s frequent invocation of the “patriarchy.” Shapiro claimed his producers “dragged” him to see the movie, but Cockburn isn’t buying it. Since the review was almost half as long as the movie itself, Cockburn knows he secretly enjoyed it — or, maybe just maybe, confected outrage is good for the Wire’s profits? His baby pink T-shirt and jean jacket were giving off some serious “kenergy” as well — nowhere near as good as Ryan Gosling, of course.
Other conservative figures that have weighed in on Barbie include Ted Cruz, who accused the move of pushing Chinese propaganda; Charlie Kirk who called it trans propaganda; and Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo who said it was a “Trojan horse” for the feminist agenda. Cockburn thinks these grown men are just jealous that they will never be Barbie girls in a Barbie world. He is also at pains to remind these leading lights of the right that they often argue that it’s the left that are the joyless dullards these days: don’t stoop to their level!
