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    Trump Dominates GOP Presidential Rivals as Biden Approval Tanking

    By
    Paul Crespo
    -
    4
    Donald Trump via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    ANALYSIS – Even as the indictments pile up, or maybe because of them, a new national NBC News poll finds former President Donald Trump expanding his national lead in the Republican presidential nominating contest to 43 points over his nearest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

    Trump leads the first-choice field with 59% of national Republican primary voters. In comparison, Ron DeSantis gets support from 16% — followed by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley at 7% and former Vice President Mike Pence at 4%.

    The poll also includes an all-time high disapproval of Joe Biden’s job performance. Fewer than 4 in 10 voters (37%) approve of his handling of the economy. This is huge.

    As NBC News reported: 

    Deeper inside those numbers, Biden is underwater among voters between the ages of 18 and 34 (46% of them approve of his job performance), all women (46%), Latinos (43%) and independents (36%).

    What’s more, the NBC News poll finds 37% of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, and 41% approve of his handling of foreign policy.

    Biden is also taking a big hit for his open borders policy and unprecedented waves of illegal immigration on his watch, as also shown by a recent The Washington Post-ABC News poll. 

    Axios noted: 

    “A variety of factors may be at play,” [ABC News’ Gary] Langer writes in his analysis. “Biden’s poor performance ratings, the extent of economic discontent, the immigration crisis and doubts about his age clearly are relevant.”

    Axios added: “In the Post-ABC poll, 44% said they’re worse off — the most for any president in the poll since… 1986, ABC News’ Gary Langer said in his poll analysis.”

    “In NBC, Biden’s disapproval rating is the highest of his term for that poll.”

    NBC News also noted that: “Another 60% have major concerns (45%) or moderate concerns (15%) about Biden’s possible awareness or involvement in the business dealings of his son, Hunter, including alleged financial wrongdoing and corruption.”

    “This [NBC] survey is a startling flashing red light for an incumbent party,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies. McInturff conducted the September 15-19 poll with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt and his team at Hart Research Associates.

    “Yes, the numbers for Biden aren’t where he needs them to be,” said Horwitt. However, Trump and Republicans have challenges, such as the GOP front-runner’s unpopularity with the general electorate.

    Most polls show that both Trump and Biden have high unfavorability going into a general election.

    NBC News reported: “Three-quarters of voters say they’re concerned about President Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness, while nearly two-thirds have concerns about the multiple trials former President Donald Trump faces, a new national NBC News poll finds, casting a gloomy shadow over the upcoming 2024 presidential election.”

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Biden Defies Law Requiring Release of COVID Lab Leak Docs While Meeting with Communist China

    By
    Donny Ferguson
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    3
    Joe Biden via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    President Joe Biden has defied a federal law, which he signed, requiring him to declassify all government documents on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, including intelligence on leaks from Communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.


    And, as U.S. Senator Mike Braun (R-IN) notes, Biden’s failure to release the documents under a mandated 90-day deadline came on the same day his administration met with Communist Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

    “The White House is now overdue to declassify their COVID lab leak intel, and there is no ‘Secretary of State is meeting with Xi Jinping’ exception in the law President Biden signed,” Senator Braun said. 

    “We need to know the truth about how this pandemic started and China’s role in covering it up, and the White House must respect the text of the law passed unanimously in both chambers by the people’s representatives,” Braun added.

    “Last week, Senators Braun and Hawley sent a letter to President Biden demanding he implement the COVID Origins Act of 2023, and declassify and release all information related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” a statement from Braun continued.

    That letter asked Biden to comply with the COVID Origins Act of 2023, which Biden signed into law in March, requiring Biden to “declassify intelligence related to any potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the Covid pandemic within 90 days.”

    That deadline passed June 18, while the Biden Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with, and praised, Xi.

    That has not stopped others from uncovering more evidence of the role of Communist China’s regime in causing the global pandemic.

    “Last week, reporters Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi reported the names of the three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers who were the first to contract COVID, as sourced from multiple government officials,” Braun’s office notes.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Investigate the ‘Other Insurrection’ – BLM’s 2020 ‘Battle for Lafayette Park’ and White House

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    2
    A protester holds up a Black Lives Matter sign outside the Hennepin County Government Center.

    ANALYSIS – The incessant drumbeat of the left’s campaign to keep the Capitol Riot in the news every day for nearly two years had some of its intended effects. 

    It probably helped persuade some voters not to pull the lever for those ‘dangerous’ MAGA Republicans during the midterm elections.

    It also may dissuade others not to vote for Trump or the GOP in 2024.

    And some of that concern may be justified.

    But the GOP and the right also failed miserably by not forcefully pushing the truth about the ‘other insurrection’ – the one against Trump and the White House by violent leftists under the BLM flag in May/June 2020.

    I was a risk advisor to foreign TV news crews during both violent riots. 

    I also strongly condemned both, writing of the Capitol rioters at the time: “…many were goons and criminals, and yes, ‘terrorists.’ No better than Antifa or BLM, or the #NotMyPresident rioters who disrupted Trump’s Inaugural four years ago.”

    I added of the violent Capitol rioters: “Whoever they were, they should be seen and treated as criminals. Arrested and prosecuted.”

    This sentiment didn’t apply to the hundreds who simply entered the Capitol non-violently, but that’s another issue altogether.

    Unfortunately, the left, colluding with the establishment media and Democrats in Congress and the White House, only ‘remembers’ one riot and erased that other one from history.

    If they mention the violent BLM riot at the White House at all, they focus on Trump’s Bible photo op the next morning at St John’s Episcopal Church, the site across from the White House of an attempted arson the night before.

    They also forget how they aggressively attacked any attempt by Trump, and federal and local authorities, to bring order to the violence.

    I even had a Canadian TV news reporter claim to me months after the protests at the White House that they were totally peaceful. 

    She said this nonsense despite the fact that the violence was reported, albeit briefly.

    And I had to forcibly intervene to protect one of her colleagues, a cameraman who was savagely beaten by two ‘BLM’ assailants without justification, while the crew was simply changing batteries and reorganizing away from the main battle lines.

    The cameraman fortunately was wearing a helmet at my suggestion, and ‘only’ suffered a mild concussion.

    I personally witnessed hundreds of rioters almost break through the thin improvised line of U.S. Park Police and Uniformed Secret Service in the park, while DC Metropolitan Police, for political reasons, assembled on the sidelines.

    As a security expert, I was concerned that there weren’t enough police to stop the large violent mob from crashing the fence at the White House; a concern apparently shared by the Secret Service who at one point that night rushed Trump to the protected underground bunker.

    A claim Trump sadly denied.

    I also witnessed everything described by CNN below, and more.

     As CNN reported at the time on May 31, 2020:

    More than 60 US Secret Service Uniformed Division officers and special agents were injured starting Friday night through Sunday morning near the White House as protests rocked Washington, DC, following the death of George Floyd last week, according to a statement from the Secret Service.

    The officers and agents were injured when protesters threw “projectiles such as bricks, rocks, bottles, fireworks and other items,” according to the statement. “Personnel were also directly physically assaulted as they were kicked, punched and exposed to bodily fluids.”

    CNN teams were on hand for much of the protests and witnessed protesters throwing objects at officers and pulling temporary fencing away from them. 

    Eleven Secret Service employees were transported to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. A secret service officer suffered a head injury after being assaulted by BLM & far-left rioters trying to storm the White House. Dozens of other Secret Service agents were injured as well.

    This was also a violent riot, or call it an insurrection, but in this case against President Trump, the Executive Branch, and the politically sacred space of the ‘People’s House.’ 

    Perhaps with GOP control of the House, we can see a real congressional investigation of this ‘other insurrection.’

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    CDC Now Doling Out Controversial ‘Advice’ For New Dads

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    0
    Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    ANALYSIS – Your federal tax dollars, hard at work – The far-left l*nacy has taken control of so many formerly respected American institutions, it’s tough for some of them to outdo themselves. 

    The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) though wasn’t content just m*sinforming Americans about C*VID-19’s o*igins, risks, m*sking, and l*ckd*wns, it is now promoting l*ftist ins*nity and likely endangering the health of babies.

    And it is time for Congress to investigate.

    The CDC, with a $12 billion budget and more than 12,000 employees, is an Atlanta-based federal agency tasked with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other public health threats. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, ex-head of the CDC under Joe Biden resigned effective June 30, without explanation.

    Previously an infectious-diseases specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Walensky had no experience running a government agency prior to being picked for the job by Biden.

    The agency recently published advice for ‘tr*ns-id*ntified’ and ‘n*n-bi*ary’ individuals (aka m*n) on how to bre*stfeed their infants, which the health agency called “ch*stfe*ding.” 

    Biological men who tr*nsition to women can produce a form of br*astmilk by taking a cocktail of h*rmone drugs that mimic the changes a woman’s body undergoes during the late stages of pregnancy and shortly after the birth of a child.

    Initially developed for biological women who adopted or had a child via surrogacy and wanted to bre*stfeed, it’s called the N*wman-G*ldfarb pr*tocol, and it tricks the body into l*ctating.

    The CDC’s Health Equity Considerations page explains that these bi*logical men don’t need to physically have a child to feed a child from the ch*st: “An individual does not need to have given birth to br*astfeed or ch*stfeed,” the CDC website reads.

    The now thoroughly discredited agency also notes that br*astfeeding can be referred to as ‘b*dyfeeding’ which sounds like it’s describing something gr*tesque out of a ho*ror movie. 

    It notes: “Some families may have other preferred terminology for how they feed their babies, such as nursing, ch*stfeeding, or bo*yf*eding.” 

    Jay W. Richards, a senior research fellow in religious liberty and civil society at the Heritage Foundation, called for greater review of the health agency from congressional leaders. 

    He told The Christian Post that the CDC showed a willingness to put politics ahead of public health during C*VID, adding that the “latest debacle” over “ch*stf*eding is even worse.”

    Encouraging bi*logical men on off-label g*nder ch*nge drugs to ‘ch*stfeed’ babies is crazy, and risky.

    The Christian Posts added:

    “The agency seems to be tacitly endorsing males’ chestfeeding’ infants with the help of experimental drug cocktail now proves that the CDC has been captured by an ideology that puts the fetishes of disturbed men over the wellbeing of infants,” Richards stated. “It doesn’t even pretend that these experiments have been carefully tested. Its commitment to so-called ‘health equity’ seems to override any old-timey concerns about the effects of drugs, and weird discharges from male bodies, on defenseless infants.”

    The CDC’s endorsement of biological men feeding infants directly from the breast has also received pushback from several health experts, who warn that the long-term impact of the practice is not well-known. 

    U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, who served as an Obstetrician for 25 years and delivered over 5,000 babies, said in a statement that the CDC statement is “irresponsible”  “defies science and safety.”

    “In my opinion, the CDC has lost all credibility and is in direct conflict with the FDA for marketing a non-FDA approved drug,” Marshall said. “A biological male filled with hormones and a concoction of other drugs that have not been studied that could harm a baby should NEVER be encouraged. When will the Woke Left wake up and realize what they are doing to our country?”

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Conservative Pundit Walks Off Washinton Post Live Show

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
    -
    3
    Daniel X. O'Neil from USA, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

    Tensions are running high…

    On Friday, Conservative radio host and political pundit Hugh Hewitt stormed off a Washington Post live event after an argument over former President Trump’s rhetoric on election integrity ahead of Election Day.

    “Is it me or does it seem like Donald Trump is laying the ground work for contesting the election,” Post host Jonathan Capehart asked Ruth Marcus, who was appearing with Hewitt as part of the live event. “By claiming that cheating was taking place, but suing Bucks County [Pennsylvania] for alleged irregularities … ”

    Marcus replied Trump has been “laying the ground work” to contest the election for months, setting Hewitt off.

    “Jonathan, I’ve gotta speak up,” he tried to interject.

    “Let Ruth finish, Hugh,” Capehart shot back.

    “Well, I’ve just got to say, we’re news people, even though it’s the opinion section,” Hewitt said after Marcus finished. “It’s got to be reported. Bucks County was reversed by the court and instructed to open up extra days because they violated the law and told people to go home. So, that lawsuit was brought by the Republican National Committee, and it was successful. The Supreme Court ruled that Glenn Youngkin was successful,” he added, referring to the GOP Virginia governor’s efforts to purge some 1,600 people from the voter rolls.

    “We are news people, even though we have opinions, and we have to report the whole story if we bring up part of the story. So, yes, he’s upset about Bucks County, but he was right and he won in court. That’s the story,” Hewitt said.

    After a brief pause, Capehart told Hewitt, “I don’t appreciate being lectured about reporting when, Hugh, many times you come here saying lots of things that aren’t based in fact.”

    “I won’t come back, Jonathan, I’m done,” Hewitt said, ripping his earpiece out and standing up.

    “I’m done. This is the most unfair election ad I’ve ever been a part of,” Hewitt continued, his face no longer visible on the screen. “You guys are working, that’s fine, I’m done.”

    Watch:

    The host was eventually forced to end the event early, saying, “Everybody if you’ve been watching … you know these conversations can be interesting, contentious.”

    “You just saw Hugh Hewitt leave which is lamentable, unfortunate. It is what it is. Thank you very much for joining us,” he continued and urged viewers to subscribe to the Post.

    After the incident, Hewitt announced his resignation from the Washington Post.

    “I have in fact quit the Post but I was only writing a column for them every six weeks or so,” Hewitt told Fox News Digital, adding he’d recently offered to write another pro-Trump column for the paper ahead of the election. He informed editorial page editor David Shipley on Friday morning.

    Tulsi Gabbard is SICK of the woke mob. Help Trump defeats Kamala Harris! Will you Donate?

    Anti-Trump Political Witch Hunt or Valid Criminal Indictments?

    By
    Paul Crespo
    -
    8
    Gage Skidmore Flickr

    ANALYSIS – Former President Donald Trump faces a slew of legal onslaughts, the latest being a federal indictment by Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) for violating the Espionage Act by mishandling classified information.

    Like the FBI raid on his Florida home, this divisive and politically charged indictment is an unprecedented development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government.

    And the political fallout will be huge.

    Trump denies any wrongdoing and is calling the indictments a witch hunt. And yes, he has been unfairly targeted before – many times.

    But is this case really part of that same anti-Trump vendetta? And does it matter?

    The latest indictment is for the willful retention of highly classified national security documents at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements.

    Many will point to the later discovery of classified documents in Joe Biden’s homes and properties connected to him without him facing criminal charges (yet) as proof that this is an anti-Trump witch hunt.

    Last week, the DOJ also cleared former Vice President Mike Pence of any wrongdoing after a small number of classified documents were found at his Indiana home in January.

    Trump posted a slew of angry social media posts against federal investigators Tuesday highlighting different treatment.

    “The Marxists and Fascists in the DOJ & FBI are going after me at a level and speed never seen before in our Country, and I did nothing wrong,” Trump wrote in one of several posts.

    And yes, as I have repeatedly written about, the DOJ and the FBI have been heavily politicized, or even weaponized against conservatives.

    But, as with Richard Nixon and Watergate, the problem for Trump here is the cover-up. Had he simply returned the documents once they were discovered, it would have been far less likely he would have been indicted.

    Instead, Trump repeatedly refused to turn over the materials to federal officials once he left the White House, and then provided a series of bizarre justifications for his actions, before the FBI raided his home.

    A separate special counsel is investigating Biden’s handling of classified material after documents were found at his Wilmington, Del., home and a Washington, D.C., office from his time as vice president. 

    The difference here is Biden’s team alerted federal officials upon discovering the documents and promptly turned them over.

    Trump’s own former Attorney General Bill Barr pushed back on Trump’s claims that a special counsel’s ongoing documents probe is politically motivated. 

    As reported by The Hill:

    “Over time, people will see that this is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt,” Barr said in an interview on CBS on Tuesday. “In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the president, and this would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”

    The indictment carries serious legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he’s convicted. Trump will appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on June 13.

    In March, the notoriously liberal, Soros-backed Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicted Trump on state charges related to hush-money payments to a former porn film star in 2016. 

    That local indictment appears far more political and ‘Trumped-up’ (pun not intended) than this federal one. The trial for this case begins in March 2024.

    Jack Smith, the special counsel coordinating federal investigations into the Espionage Act indictments, oversees other inquiries related to Trump, including those regarding the Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021.

    But none of this will prevent Trump from continuing his campaign for president. “Nothing stops Trump from running while indicted, or even convicted,” University of California, Los Angeles law professor Richard Hasen told CNN.

    The Constitution requires only three things of candidates. They must be a natural-born citizen (not a naturalized one), at least 35 years old, and residents of the U.S. for at least 14 years.

    So theoretically, Trump could be convicted and still be elected President.

    Not only won’t this keep Trump from running, but it will probably help him with his core base of supporters in the GOP primary.

    And Trump won’t even go to trial for any of this until well into the next presidential term.

    But the optics and politics of all this is the biggest issue.

    As the Daily Caller reported Pence as saying: “I think this is going to be terribly divisive for the country. I also think it sends a terrible message to the wider world that looks at America as a standard of not only democracy, but of justice.”

    The question is when does all of this come to a head? And what will happen when it does?

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Amanda Head: New WOKE Disney Movie Utterly BOMBS!

    By
    Amanda Head
    -
    1

    Disney is committed to learning this lesson the hard way: Go woke, Go broke.

    Disney’s latest woke venture “Strange World” is on track to cost the company more than $100 million.

    Watch Amanda break down the spectacular flop below:

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Amanda Head: Ben & Jerry Have Always Been Commies

    By
    Amanda Head
    -
    1

    Their latest stunt isn’t new to the woke ice cream brand…

    On the Fourth of July Ben and Jerry’s ice cream released a statement bashing America’s heritage.

    Watch Amanda explain the latest controversy below:

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Supreme Court Discrimination Ruling Undermines Corporate Wokeness

    By
    Paul Crespo
    -
    2
    Duncan Lock, Dflock, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

    ANALYSIS – BOOM! – The landmark Supreme Court decision against racial and sex discrimination by schools and universities (under the guise of ‘affirmative action’) will also impact corporate ‘diversity’ programs based on the same flawed, discriminatory ideas. 

    In what has become a major legal development in a growing wave of anti-wokeness, corporations will soon have to reconsider all their – likely illegal – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. 

    While pushed by the increasingly leftist establishment, most of these woke programs have been illegal under U.S. state and federal laws, which explicitly prohibit discrimination by race and gender. But until now the courts let them get away with it.

    Now the Supreme Court has made it official. Affirmative action (aka – discriminatory ‘diversity’ efforts) are out.

    The court held by that Harvard and University of North Carolina’s (UNC’s) admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

    Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group, sued Harvard and UNC over their ‘race-conscious’ admissions programs, arguing they intentionally discriminated against Asian American applicants.

    In the decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

    He added:  “We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

    Previously, the Supreme Court in the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, ruled that “the use of an applicant’s race as one factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if the policy is narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of promoting a diverse student body.”

    This was intended to be a very narrow exception, but soon became far more. And this helped woke corporate America justify its own discriminatory DEI programs.

    A 2022 Harvard Business Review 2022 survey, reported by The Epoch Times, showed that more than 60 percent of U.S. companies had a DEI program, which separates employees according to race and gender. 

    After the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots, major corporations announced explicit race-based hiring and promotion policies.

    But now that the 2003 decision has been superseded, they will all need to revisit the legality of their DEI programs. As Kevin Stocklin explains in The Epoch Times: 

    In an amicus brief regarding the Harvard and UNC case, the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and attorney Ilya Shapiro argued that “what this Court authorized in Grutter as a temporary, grudging exception to America’s ideals and generally applicable law of Equal Protection … has metastasized into a threat blooming across the legal landscape, the economy, and society as a whole.”

    The exceptions granted by the Grutter case were narrowly tailored to government-funded universities’ admissions policies, and were intended to be a temporary remedy that would include “sunset” provisions. But corporations have applied them as a precedent to race-based policies on staffing and training, and expanded them to include new racial goals.

    “To the extent that corporate America has thought that Grutter provided some kind of fig leaf to the illegal discrimination they’ve been engaging in for the last two decades, this would be a really good time for them to rethink that,” Morenoff said. “It never made sense for corporate America to argue that there was a diversity rationale exception to our civil rights laws,” he said.

    However, if the Supreme Court decision reverses Grutter or the Johnson executive order, even that questionable pretense would be gone. Rather than standing on thin ice, Morenoff said, “they’re standing on no ice at all.”

    This is the next battleground – using this Supreme Court precedent to eliminate discrimination by sex and race from corporate America.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    ‘Barbie’ Movie Banned in Vietnam as Hollywood Again Kowtows to China

    By
    Paul Crespo
    -
    1

    ANALYSIS – China’s outrageous claim to almost the entire South China Sea – everything within a “nine-dash line” drawn on Chinese maps – has taken its most recent victim – the movie-viewing public in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government has banned the movie due to a scene with that Chinese-made line on a map.

    China takes its illegal claim very seriously and strives to impose its visual representation on maps everywhere, including those appearing in Hollywood movies.

    While it’s unclear why the soon-to-be-released film ‘Barbie’ about the iconic doll and her boyfriend Ken would get embroiled in international politics, it has. 

    This south China Sea has been a flashpoint between Vietnam and China for years. The artificial line is shown on Chinese maps to mark their claims over the area despite Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan claiming parts of the same vast expanse of sea.

    Chinese warships and fishing vessels routinely operate in these waters to establish de-facto presence, often provoking clashes with neighboring countries.

    The Daily Wire (DW) reported:

    “We do not grant license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Department of Cinema, a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films, was quoted as saying in the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper.

    The movie’s trailer shows Barbie leaving her perfect doll world and to explore the “real world” after becoming disillusioned with her life.

    So why did a big Hollywood studio decide to include this ridiculous claim in their otherwise non-political movies?

    All I can think of is – in order to please the communists in Beijing. China is obviously a far bigger market than Vietnam. And who knows if Chinese investors were involved in the movie’s production.

    DW notes:

    “Barbie” isn’t the first film banned for including the nine-dash line. The Vietnamese government also blocked the DreamWorks animated film “Abominable” (2019) and the action-adventure film “Unchartered” (2022) for the same reason. Netflix removed the Australian spy drama “Pine Gap” in 2021 for their inclusion of the line.

    Hollywood blockbusters including the Marvel films “Eternals” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” have also been in China after directors or actors involved in the films made comments critical of China.

    Another big controversy exploded in 2019 over the Tom Cruise movie ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’ Initially the movie appeared to remove the flags of Taiwan and Japan from Maverick’s flight jacket. The flags were part of historical patches representing prior U.S. naval deployments to the region.

    As NBC News reported:

    In 2019, the trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick” showed Cruise’s character, U.S. Navy pilot Pete Mitchell, in the same bomber jacket he wore in the original film. But two of its flag patches — representing Japan and the Republic of China, the official name for Taiwan — appeared to have been replaced by other emblems.

    The move was criticized at the time as an act of self-censorship to please China’s censors. Beijing sees Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy of 24 million people, as an inalienable part of its territory and lashes out at any reference to it as a sovereign nation.  

    In this case Hollywood, or Cruise, had a change of heart and reversed their apparent kowtowing to China. CHinese investors also pulled out of the movie.

    NBC News continued:

    On the film’s release last month after a two-year pandemic delay, both flags had been restored. At an advance screening in Taipei, the audience broke out in cheers and applause at the sight of the Taiwanese flag on the big screen, local news outlet SETN reported.

    Sometimes in Hollywood the good guys do win. Sadly, not in the case of Barbie.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

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