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Baffled Disneyland visitors at the “It’s a Small World” attraction were greeted by a protest doll holding a sign reading “Remember Hiroshima” over the weekend, sparking questions and speculation online as videos of the doll spread.
Videos began circulating on TikTok and Reddit Monday showing a woman carrying a female doll holding a sign reading “Remember Hiroshima” while walking around Disneyland. Another photo online showed the doll within the “It’s a Small World” exhibit, strategically positioned next to one of the tunnels that the boat ride traffics.
Speculation mounted as the videos spread and earned hundreds of thousands of views and social media users questioned the meaning of the political stunt, while others questioned how the doll made it through the park’s tight security.
Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen revealed he was behind the stunt Thursday, telling Fox News Digital in a phone interview that he’s in the midst of a campaign against the U.S. government’s stockpile of powerful weapons as part of his “Up in Arms” campaign against the Pentagon’s spending budget. Cohen said that while the campaign targets current policies under the Trump administration, the matter of Pentagon spending is “disgustingly bipartisan” and stretches long past the current administration.
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“The whole idea of the Small World exhibit is that it’s a small world after all,” Cohen told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. “You got all the children from the different countries around the world being together, loving each other. And we put a doll in there that says, ‘Remember Hiroshima.’ I mean, that’s what was supposed to happen after the bomb in Hiroshima. We were supposed to remember what we did there and say, ‘Never again.’ And we’ve, we’ve ignored that.”
The political protest was launched just ahead of the 80th anniversary of the 1945 Hiroshima bombings Thursday, when an atomic bomb killed more than 100,000 people in the Japanese city during World War II. Cohen specifically took issue with the ongoing war in Gaza, which he called the “moral issue of our time,” when speaking with Fox Digital, as well as the Pentagon’s nearly $900 billion budget.
“They’ve turned us all into murderers, and they’re taking our money, buying bombs with it, and giving it to Israel to slaughter people in Gaza,” he said of the war that has raged since the Biden administration. “And a whole lot of them are kids, just like that little girl that we placed in Disneyland.”
Cohen said his criticisms of the U.S.’ military budget and push to build stockpiles of weapons is “disgustingly bipartisan,” stretching back long before the Trump administration.
“Trump is the current president. He’s responsible, but I can tell you that all the presidents before him were responsible as well,” he said, referring to the U.S.’ nuclear weapons program across the decades.
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Trump repeatedly has championed his “peace through strength” vision for the U.S. military, citing that a powerful U.S. military will keep other nations from sparking wars.
“For at least two decades, political leaders from both parties have dragged our military into missions it was never meant to be,” Trump, for example, said during his speech to the graduating class at West Point Military Academy in May. “They sent our warriors on nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us, led by leaders that didn’t have a clue in distant lands, while abusing our soldiers with absurd ideological experiments here and at home.”
He added that those days are over via his peace through strength mission for the military, adding at the time, “My preference will always be to make peace and to seek partnership, even with countries where our differences may be profound.”
A Disneyland spokesperson told Fox Digital, when asked about the protest doll, that a cast member swiftly removed the doll from the ride attraction when it was first spotted, and reminded the guest of park rules. The activist who placed the doll within the attraction left without incident, according to Disney.
Ben & Jerry’s, which Cohen and co-founder Jerry Greenfield sold in 2000, has a long history of left-wing politics and social justice activism, including rolling out ice cream flavors such as “Pecan Resist” in 2018 to protest the first Trump administration, and “Change the Whirled” in 2021 that was crafted with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, who was the first sports player to popularize kneeling during the national anthem back in 2016.
Cohen, specifically, also has not shied away from participating in public protests, including in May when he was detained after interrupting a Senate hearing focused on aid to Gaza.
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Cohen said he is just beginning a four-year campaign protesting the U.S.’ military budget in an effort to get the funds “toward the things that people really want.”
“Americans are compassionate,” he said. “We don’t want to kill families just like ours in other countries, we just want a good life for ourselves and our kids. People want a decent place to live that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, good schools, affordable childcare, but they say there’s not enough money, and what they don’t say is that they’re spending it all on preparing to kill literally millions of people around the world.”
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