Go Woke, Go Broke? Barbie’s Opening Weekend Sales Smash Expectations

The far right is constantly warning that if you go woke, you’ll go broke. But when it comes to the new Barbie movie, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Barbie, which follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they leave Barbie Land to explore the real world, earned a whopping $162 million in its opening weekend, Variety reported Monday. This is the biggest opening weekend of the year, and the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever.

The film had already made $22.3 million at the domestic box office from Thursday previews, the biggest preview haul of the summer. It blew the previous record of $17.5 million (made by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in May) out of the water.

Barbie has consistently made double the take of Oppenheimer—which opened opposite it and spawned the “Barbenheimer” meme—which made $10.5 million in previews and $82.4 million over the whole weekend.

All of this success comes despite conservatives trying their absolute hardest to smear the film as propaganda, either woke or Chinese. Far-right activists Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro slammed the film for featuring a transgender actress and dismantling gender norms (Shapiro was roundly mocked online for his review).

Representative Matt Gaetz and his wife went to the movie premiere, after which Ginger Gaetz declared the film highly skippable because it “neglects to address any notion of faith or family” and features “disappointingly low [testosterone] from Ken.” Some film critics have branded Barbie “anti-man.”

Other Republican lawmakers waded in, insisting the movie shows Hollywood is just a tool of the Chinese Communist Party. In one scene in Barbie Land, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.

China has used the nine-dash line to mark its controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Over the years, Beijing has tried to claim sovereignty over 90 percent of the region. Even though The Hague ruled in 2016 that China has no legal basis for its claims, the country has pressed on, building military installations on otherwise uninhabited islands in the sea. Republicans insisted that the shot was a clear indication that Barbie is just Communist propaganda.

But given Barbie’s explosive success just on opening weekend, it would seem all these far-right efforts simply are not Kenough.

Elon Musk has rebranded Twitter to “X.com”—but it seems a lot of people can’t actually make it to the new website.

Musk announced Sunday afternoon that “X.com” would redirect to “twitter.com” and unveiled a new logo for the rapidly tanking website. He had previously insisted on using the name “X” for what would become PayPal, a sticking point that led to internal disagreements and reportedly contributed to his ousting from the company in 2000.

Musk bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017, and apparently has been saving it for this momentous occasion (his site crashing and burning before our very eyes).

Much like everything else since Musk took Twitter’s reins, the rebrand rollout has not exactly gone smoothly. Ryan Mac and Brian Merchant, the tech reporters for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times respectively, both tweeted that X.com actually redirected them to GoDaddy, a domain-hosting platform.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey also experienced the website malfunction. When he tweeted about it, a current Twitter employee blamed the problem on the domain name system, or DNS. Supposedly, X.com’s data storage system was showing old data to some users.

The only problem is, that was Sunday night. Users who type “X.com” into the URL bar are still being directed to GoDaddy on Monday afternoon.

Musk has not commented further on the issues. He has said he wants X to be “the everything app,” but it’s pretty hard to be someone’s everything when nothing works.

As presidential hopeful Tim Scott slowly edges up in the polls, his 2024 opponents are gearing up to attack one of the only Black candidates for being soft on crime.

Republicans have increasingly insisted the United States is falling into a state of lawlessness, with violent crime on the rise and Democratic leaders unable or unwilling to do anything about it. (Violent crime has actually gone down in the past six months.) Many GOP candidates at all levels of governance are promising to be “tough on crime.”

Scott has actually been a big champion in Congress for police and criminal justice reform, making him a prime target for accusations of being soft on crime. He co-sponsored the First Step Act in 2018, which reduced some mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related charges and also allowed some people already incarcerated to request shorter sentences.

The South Carolina senator also pushed for police reform in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who was arresting him. Scott introduced the JUSTICE Act, which would withhold federal funding from local police departments until they changed their operating policies. (The bill went nowhere.)

Still, his little action on police reform seems like it will become fodder for his Republican rivals. Some Republican presidential candidates are already attacking the First Step Act. Ron DeSantis said in May he would want to repeal the law, while Mike Pence tried to be cute and said he wanted to “take a step back from the First Step Act.”

Except … DeSantis voted for an early version of the act in 2018, when he was still a Florida representative in Congress. Pence also championed the legislation while serving as vice president. And current Republican front-runner Donald Trump signed the act into law. So if this is the point they’re going to use to try to take down Scott, they all may want to look in the mirror.

Meanwhile, Scott may actually have sabotaged a bipartisan police reform measure so he could seem tough on crime during his presidential campaign. Excerpts released in June from Washington Post writer Ben Terris’s book The Big Break reveal that Scott worked with Democratic Senator Cory Booker to craft legislation in 2021. Shortly after Booker’s staff gave Scott a copy of the bill, it was leaked to the National Sheriffs’ Association.

“With the Sheriffs’ Association as a shield, Scott rejected the offer,” Terris wrote. “Even though the bill would have added millions of dollars to police department budgets, he accused Democrats of wanting to ‘defund the police,’ something that almost no one in Congress had been saying for months.”

As Donald Trump awaits his third and potentially fourth indictment, he seems to be making threats about what’ll happen if he actually faces legal repercussions.

Early Monday morning, the former president reshared a meme of himself on TruthSocial with the caption, “Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing.”

“‘Nothing can stop what is coming’’ is a popular phrase linked to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy and movement, which Trump has often amplified and whose followers were a big part of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This isn’t his first time endorsing this phrase. A couple months after the failed insurrection, and at the beginning stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump shared a meme with the same caption over an image of him playing the fiddle.

The ominous threat—and callout to his followers—is a sign of how much pressure Trump is under.

Trump could be indicted for the third time any day now. Last week, special counsel Jack Smith informed Trump that he is a target in the investigation into the January 6 attack and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Georgia prosecutors, meanwhile, are reportedly preparing racketeering charges against Trump for his role in attempting to overthrow the election.

Last week, a date was set for his trial on stealing and hoarding classified documents: May 20, 2024, smack in the middle of the Republican primary.

Ron DeSantis shocked everyone earlier this month when his campaign shared a deeply bigoted ad attacking LGBTQ people.

The video appeared to come from a conservative group made in support of the Florida governor. But it turns out that the video was actually made in-house and planted in the fan account.

The attack ad attempted to portray Donald Trump as pro-LGBTQ and cast DeSantis as a hypermasculine anti-LGBTQ crusader.  But instead, it came across as terrifyingly homophobic and oddly homoerotic.

The video (since taken down due to copyright issues) was originally posted on a pro-DeSantis Twitter account, which was then shared by DeSantis’s campaign. But in reality, a campaign aide made the video, The New York Times reported Sunday, and then sent it to an outside supporter to post first in order to make it look like the ad was made independently.

The ad features DeSantis shooting lasers out of his eyes, as well as clips from films and television shows such as American Psycho, Troy, and Peaky Blinders—all of which one would think are more of a lesson against the oppressive, militaristic approach to governance that DeSantis has been touting.

The poorly thought-out ad was part of a larger attempt to reinvigorate DeSantis’s struggling campaign. His bid for president has yet to take off, concerning both his team and his donors. In most polls, he is second to Trump, but the gap between them is large. DeSantis’s campaign has also been bleeding cash, to the tune of more than $212,000 per day on average, according to the Times.

Analysts say that there is still time for DeSantis to turn things around, but if the disastrous ad has shown anything, it’s that the Florida governor is struggling to find a message. DeSantis has focused on promising to fight “wokeness” but has failed to produce any actual policy ideas or a clear reason why people should vote for him over Trump. Attempts to portray himself as tougher or more ideologically right of Trump have backfired spectacularly.