Ben Shapiro has a new obsession: Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster Barbie.
In a wild, 43-minute tirade posted to YouTube, the 39-year-old conservative political commentator appeared to be trying to spark mass protests against the 13+ film. Shapiro begins by burning Barbie dolls, then begins a tirade shaming a trans woman cast as Barbie, and goes over his other criticisms in the “page-long notes” he made about the film while watching it.
Shapiro saw Barbie earlier this week on Wednesday. Although he hasn’t officially made the connections, social media users pointed it out wore the same outfit Ken (Ryan Gosling) wears in the film.
“If you look at the audience, it’s mostly mothers,” Shapiro recalls of his viewing experience. “Young moms, middle-aged moms with their 6, 7, 8-year-old girls. That’s the whole crew.” (And let’s not forget Shapiro himself, who was obviously in the audience.)
In the video’s caption, Shapiro whined that Barbie was “one of the most alert movies I’ve ever seen.” In the video, he goes on to explain that Ken’s performance upset him. Shapiro argues that Ken has become “annoying and ridiculous,” which is at odds with the original Barbie dolls.
Then Shapiro becomes interested in Hari Nef’s Barbie. Nef is a trans woman and plays a lively Doctor Barbie in the film.
“One of the Barbies is a trans Barbie,” says Shapiro. “And that is true! Totally normal, as if that were a female barbie – with a voice deeper than my own.”
He also claimed the film was “specifically intended to separate men from women” and described it as “angry feminist babble that alienates men from women.”
Social media users flocked to tease Shapiro for his fixation on destroying the Barbie film. “Ben Shapiro is a 40-year-old man who was so upset by a children’s film about Barbie dolls that he wrote a 43-minute review,” shared a Twitter user. “It’s… pathetic.”
In the time it takes a viewer to complete this video, they would have read nearly half of Barbie. Barbie is in cinemas now.