I was debating whether posting Ruimy's post or The Guardian's article. But Ruimy writes about it more matter-of-fact. I don't post celeb gossip on here, even though I'm into it, because I know you...
I was debating whether posting Ruimy's post or The Guardian's article. But Ruimy writes about it more matter-of-fact.
I don't post celeb gossip on here, even though I'm into it, because I know you guys don't care. But this has broken containment like a motherfucker. And we haven't had a starlet at the center of something like this... ever?
Sweeney's career was interesting since she got her start on a "woke" show (not Euphoria). So for the beginning her fanbase were tumblrites. But then she blew up on Euphoria primarily because of her nudity in it and she started gaining more male fans. Her film work didn't really reflect any of this. Anyone But You is a female oriented romantic comedy. While she shows off her body in the film, Glen Powell actually ends up being the most sexualized of the two. Immaculate a passion project from Sweeney which she produced was a pro-choice Horror film and a critique of religion.
This past year, however, Sweeney decided to take on a ton of brand deals. To give some background here, Sweeney's family went bankrupt in 2016. She cites the reason for the bankruptcy the family's move to LA so that Sweeney could pursue acting, she also blames her dreams on her parents eventual divorce. I give that background because I understand why she took all these brand deals.
But, the nature of these brand deals were insanely sexual. And this is the tone that her American Eagle ad took. It's such a jarring shift in culture. The past 10+ years of starlets that we've had did not cater to the guys like this. You'd have to go back to Megan Fox to find a comparable figure.
I don't know what her career looks like now. Being outed a registered Republican is interesting considering she denied being one in 2022 when her family hosted a party where guests wore MAGA hats.
Registering as a Republican in 2024 and then doing a cute wink wink nudge nudge dog whistling brand deal is a crazy choice. She’s going to need to hire a PR firm to not go down as Sydney Riefenstahl.
Registering as a Republican in 2024 and then doing a cute wink wink nudge nudge dog whistling brand deal is a crazy choice. She’s going to need to hire a PR firm to not go down as Sydney Riefenstahl.
I like to play PR agent every now and then (in another life that's what I do). I don't know what you do in this situation. Not acknowledging it is a potential strategy but she's already doing that...
I like to play PR agent every now and then (in another life that's what I do). I don't know what you do in this situation. Not acknowledging it is a potential strategy but she's already doing that and it snowballed into Trump giving her a shout out.
The only two options are: backtrack or lean into it. The issue with leaning into it is that now you're stuck only doing right wing productions from Angel Studios. And the issue with backtracking is that it seems disingenuous.
Is it though? Unless someone at American Eagle or Sweeney has said something to that effect I’m sure it’s got absolutely zero dog whistle to it. Unless by dog whistle you mean a pun about...
a cute wink wink nudge nudge dog whistling brand deal
Is it though? Unless someone at American Eagle or Sweeney has said something to that effect I’m sure it’s got absolutely zero dog whistle to it. Unless by dog whistle you mean a pun about jeans/genes.
Edit: I’ll copy over my revised comment from deep down in the comment tree
I’m sure it’s not a dog whistle. The explanation on the face of it (just a pun) is the Occam’s Razor of the matter. But I could be convinced otherwise in the face of overwhelming evidence.
The point of a dog whistle is that it isn't said specifically. So I don't think that's a good measure. Some folks can think it was unintentional. It's not really worth arguing over. Is being so...
The point of a dog whistle is that it isn't said specifically. So I don't think that's a good measure.
Some folks can think it was unintentional. It's not really worth arguing over. Is being so tone deaf the white supremacists praise your ad significantly better than intentionally dog whistling? I don't really think so. I'd fire both the racist and the absolutely clueless sets of marketing agents, personally.
It is a small stupid thing and also indicative of a country that has been slowly but surely increasingly advocating for eugenics for the past decade or more. (We never really stopped, mind you.)
I don't care enough about this to try and analyze every little action, but it's quite possible this could be a Hanlon's Razor situation. I've known so many instances where people have done...
I don't care enough about this to try and analyze every little action, but it's quite possible this could be a Hanlon's Razor situation. I've known so many instances where people have done something in extremely poor taste not realizing the obvious way it could be interpreted.
That said, for the last decade plus, it has seemed that pretty much everything from the right has been done with extreme malice, it's becoming hard to give actions the benefit of the doubt anymore.
It is. But it's also falling into an explicit white supremacist pattern. I don't generally do accidental white supremacy, and if I do, I apologize and back the fuck off the thing I did. I just...
It is. But it's also falling into an explicit white supremacist pattern. I don't generally do accidental white supremacy, and if I do, I apologize and back the fuck off the thing I did. I just don't see how it's accidental, but ultimately it doesn't matter.
The white supremacists like it. AE and Sweeny can decide if they want to say "we fucked up" or "you're misinterpreting us" vs just stay silent/continue with the ad campaign. I'm judging them based on the crickets.
I don’t think this is fair at all. White supremacists have been lusting over attractive white celebrities since the dawn of the internet. America’s National Public Radio did a whole thing about...
The white supremacists like it. AE and Sweeny can decide if they want to say "we fucked up" or "you're misinterpreting us" vs just stay silent/continue with the ad campaign. I'm judging them based on the crickets.
I don’t think this is fair at all. White supremacists have been lusting over attractive white celebrities since the dawn of the internet. America’s National Public Radio did a whole thing about how a bunch of white supremacists started calling Taylor Swift an “Aryan goddess” back in 2016 because she didn’t publicly endorse Hillary Clinton (or something).
In a world where you you get attention from white supremacists for being attractive, female, and white, I don’t think it’s fair to judge attractive white women for not explicitly denouncing white supremacism every time a bunch of internet assholes start making noise about how hot and white they are.
***
More broadly, I don’t agree that this falls into an explicit white supremacist pattern. (Again, she’s attractive and happens to be white. Just because white supremacists like that combination doesn’t make acknowledging it white supremacism). But I don’t think we’re going to agree on that one so I thought I’d touch on the judging them based on the silence thing.
I think it's notable that Taylor Swift has denounced white supremacists though I don't know the timeline nor how loud that message was. If she didn't do it fairly quickly, then yeah, that's a fuck...
I think it's notable that Taylor Swift has denounced white supremacists though I don't know the timeline nor how loud that message was. If she didn't do it fairly quickly, then yeah, that's a fuck up IMO. But it's not an accident that that was in 2016, and by people supporting Trump, and that Charlottesville was on the horizon. Maybe if it took her a while it was because no one quite believed the random internet assholes would be put in power, certainly not twice.
I'm not just talking about random internet assholes though. Honestly the biggest one is the president but there have been any number of subtle and less than subtle thumbs up from Senators, Billionaires and the regular ilk.
As for Sweeney...
She's attractive and white and allegedly conservative and starred in a whole ad about how good her family jeans/genes are. If it's not a dog whistle, it's a hell of a thing to double down on or stay silent on. (AE seems to have doubled down, I haven't seen comment from Sweeney) I cannot speak to her heart, I can only judge her silence.
If I accidentally made an ad easily confusable for white supremacy, I'd take it down for the loss of sales to non-white people alone. To me, that refusal says plenty. It doesn't really matter if the dog whistle was blown if the dogs all bark at this point.
I could not disagree more, for practical and personal reasons. Practically, I think any efforts to call people out should be focused on calling out the actual assholes, not the people being...
It doesn't really matter if the dog whistle was blown if the dogs all bark at this point.
I could not disagree more, for practical and personal reasons. Practically, I think any efforts to call people out should be focused on calling out the actual assholes, not the people being targeted by those assholes. Stormfront has a website. Politicians have made explicitly bigoted comments on national TV. The point is, this is a world in which overt white supremacy exists. It doesn’t seem helpful to me to accuse a clothing company of covert innuendo; we should be focusing on the actual, open assholes. Does it matter that before all of this, American Eagle had announced that all profits from the sydney sweeney jeans line were going to be donated to a nonprofit crisis help line? Does it matter that the CEO of American Eagle is a noted Jewish philanthropist? Maybe none of that matters. But I want to live in a world where we assume the best of people, not the worst. I want to live in a world where we blame the dogs, not their victims.
We can talk about both. The people I see talking about the former have consistently talked about the latter the entire time. I want that too. But I also believe in basing my decisions on people's...
It doesn’t seem helpful to me to accuse a clothing company of covert innuendo; we should be focusing on the actual, open assholes.
We can talk about both. The people I see talking about the former have consistently talked about the latter the entire time.
But I want to live in a world where we assume the best of people, not the worst.
I want that too. But I also believe in basing my decisions on people's actions. And I don't give grace to companies and celebrities that have multiple marketing/PR professionals between them and their choices. This was reviewed and approved on multiple levels by multiple people.
I want to live in a world where we blame the dogs, not their victims.
And I believe that's what I'm doing. I don't see how either AE or Sweeney are victims here. New information could change that, but I am doubtful.
I know this is a really personal topic for you that gets you heated quickly. I hope it's possible to take this in the spirit in which it's intended -- the position "I don't care if it was...
But I also believe in basing my decisions on people's actions. And I don't give grace to companies and celebrities that have multiple marketing/PR professionals between them and their choices. This was reviewed and approved on multiple levels by multiple people... I don't see how either AE or Sweeney are victims here. New information could change that, but I am doubtful.
I know this is a really personal topic for you that gets you heated quickly. I hope it's possible to take this in the spirit in which it's intended -- the position "I don't care if it was intentional, it's the effect that matters, I don't give grace to these people, they should know better" is kind of... mean.
I am not actually heated. I'm usually pretty open about it when I am. What I stated is very similar to the common phrase "intent vs impact" when talking about the harms of racism, from...
I am not actually heated. I'm usually pretty open about it when I am.
What I stated is very similar to the common phrase "intent vs impact" when talking about the harms of racism, from microaggression to macroaggression.
If I step on your shoe, and insist I didn't mean to, it doesn't make your foot hurt less. You might be more inclined to forgive me, but I didn't actually apologize, I just said I didn't mean to.
As for grace, very little of my grace is for corporations. I do not expect Sweeney to be a spokeswoman on race in America, but silence isn't an apology or distancing herself either. She could be the sweetest human or the meanest asshole, I don't know her. But the "celebrity" who is a brand, and has PR and the like, doesn't get forgiveness without even asking for it. I'm not wishing her harm. I wish she'd and they'd do better.
I don't agree that I'm being mean. I'm just not bending over backwards to make potential excuses for essentially two businesses. I re-evaluate my opinions based on new information, but "I'm not being nice enough" in an internet post to people/companies who have themselves demonstrated no care or concern for my well-being is not compelling. Firm dislike isn't mean.
In the end this results in them not getting my business, something AE didn't want anyway and I doubt Sweeney cares about, and my online disapproval.
FWIW, this was American Eagles response: I don't know if it's an "all press is good press" approach or a half-assed attempt to wait for the controversy to blow over without alienating their new...
She's attractive and white and allegedly conservative and starred in a whole ad about how good her family jeans/genes are. If it's not a dog whistle, it's a hell of a thing to double down on or stay silent on. (AE seems to have doubled down, I haven't seen comment from Sweeney) I cannot speak to her heart, I can only judge her silence.
In a statement posted on American Eagle’s Instagram account on Friday, the retailer said the ad campaign “is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”
I don't know if it's an "all press is good press" approach or a half-assed attempt to wait for the controversy to blow over without alienating their new freak customers, but they keep shooting themselves in the foot.
Also, not that it makes a huge difference, but I feel like its worth pointing out that the dogs didn't start barking until after critics called out the whistle. A lot of those people were shitting on Sydney Sweeney and calling her ugly a year ago.
Regardless, we've clearly reached the tipping point where pulling the ad looks like the best option, and it's kind of crazy that it hasn't happened yet. Same goes for Sweeney. I can see how her team would opt to keep a low profile at first, but a statement seems in order now that the right-wingers have poured gasoline all over the fire.
This is all speculation on my part, but I think the people at American Eagle were hoping for controversy, only they expected the backlash to be centered around beauty standards and body image. From the article:
In the run-up to the ad blitz, the company’s chief marketing officer told trade media outlets that it included “clever, even provocative language” and was “definitely going to push buttons.”
The nudge nudge wink wink was intended to be about her breasts, only no one clocked the other interpretation. Now with the help of the monkey's paw and/or Elizabeth Hurley, they got what they asked for, only instead of big naturals discourse they got a firestorm of Nazi style eugenics. I could see them making a similar mistake where LeBron James talks about how genetics influences things like athleticism and aging, not realizing the racial connotations that people might pick up on. I dunno, maybe this is the last few ouncesgrams milligrams of hope talking, but I'd like to think we still live in a world where crass innuendo about breasts is the focal point of advertising, and not, ya know, Hitler's dream girl.
The phrasing of that response is weird and the “Her Jeans. Her Story.” line seems weirdly out of place. Then you notice it’s 2 capitalized Hs followed by a 14 word sentence and I don’t think a...
The phrasing of that response is weird and the “Her Jeans. Her Story.” line seems weirdly out of place. Then you notice it’s 2 capitalized Hs followed by a 14 word sentence and I don’t think a person would be crazy to think that maybe they know exactly what they’re doing.
I think marketing and ad execs have understood how to be cute and stoke social media tension for a long time. I would not at all be surprised if the initial wave of “is this White supremacist?” TikTok’s to kick off the round of discourse wasn’t, in some way, seeded or at least signal boosted by AE to generate exposure. I think they’ve been doing this shit for a while.
FWIW, during the previous “great awokening” era I think they were also doing this. I’m pretty sure a lot of casting decisions Disney was making, like casting a Black girl to be Ariel, were also designed intentionally to stoke conflict. It’s a thing they know how to do and do intentionally and routinely to mine outrage and engagement. They know what buttons to push, they have bot farms to kick-start getting things going viral.
In full seriousness, it does seem a little crazy to imply that a blue jeans company is trying to make covert references to Hitler via numerology. I am trying to come up with a plausible...
Then you notice it’s 2 capitalized Hs followed by a 14 word sentence and I don’t think a person would be crazy to think that maybe they know exactly what they’re doing.
In full seriousness, it does seem a little crazy to imply that a blue jeans company is trying to make covert references to Hitler via numerology.
I am trying to come up with a plausible explanation as to how that would even happen. American Eagle goes to their marketing department and says "hey, slip a little Heil Hitler into this ad, but be super sneaky about it"? And then everyone involved is just like "sure, whatever" and nobody blows the whistle? Anna the marketing intern is just like "fuck it, I'm down with this?" Every single person in the markering/PR chain is a white nationalist?
And to what end? To secure the lucrative market of blue jeans wearing white nationalists who are so terminally online they'll recognize a 1488 reference that's backwards?
You really just need one person to write the copy and nobody in the chain to notice it. If the only metric being tracked is engagement it will blow up. And everything involved in SEO and social...
You really just need one person to write the copy and nobody in the chain to notice it. If the only metric being tracked is engagement it will blow up. And everything involved in SEO and social media marketing is an amoral engagement monster.
It's not just "H[sentence]. H[sentence]. [14 word sentence].", it's "H[+7 letters]. H[+7 letters]. [14 word sentence with a contraction and initialism that both feel tonally awkward]." Maybe I'm...
It's not just "H[sentence]. H[sentence]. [14 word sentence].", it's "H[+7 letters]. H[+7 letters]. [14 word sentence with a contraction and initialism that both feel tonally awkward]."
Maybe I'm just out of the loop on PR styles, but that "we'll" and "AE" are off to me, and I'd been rolling my eyes on this story before seeing it.
Setting aside all my questions about how this could possibly happen and be approved and all that, the argument is that they went to all the work to encode a secret heil Hitler message, but then...
Setting aside all my questions about how this could possibly happen and be approved and all that, the argument is that they went to all the work to encode a secret heil Hitler message, but then did it backwards?
Is that really our position? This sounds exactly like all the pizza gate and qanon nonsense, which I assume you'd deride...
It's not like the 14 and 88 are cogently linked, one is a full sentence that is equal opportunity white supremacist, the other is heil Hitler. I've spent enough time observing fascist spaces to...
It's not like the 14 and 88 are cogently linked, one is a full sentence that is equal opportunity white supremacist, the other is heil Hitler. I've spent enough time observing fascist spaces to see them inverted, separated, and otherwise played with.
In this context, from the perspective of a business, it's not a statement of alignment, it's fodder to endear themselves to the neonazis with any power, and (anti)virtue signalling to increase brand loyalty among paranoid layvolk, while making it thornier for critics to address a more open embrasure going forward, should that be necessary.
If the explicitly christofascist elements win out in the government, and stuff like eugenics gets more acceptable, there will be a period of loyalty testing corporations. This kind of message so early would likely earn them lessened scrutiny during such purges, and if the fascists lose, well, so what, all they did was make a bunch of informed antifascists sound crazy.
They may totally be innocent of white supremacist intent. But it isn't ridiculous, this kind of message is suspicious. Any PR person knows about 14/88. If a business is being accused of white supremacist messaging, their press release should be combed to prevent exactly "two sentences, each with eight letters, starting with Hs".
There are underground societies. I have been in the fringes of some of them. These kinds of bywords exist. They do not warrant paranoia, but the order of symbols is not the kind of thing that disabuses their value in establishing esoteric networks.
Your position is that PR people should spend hours doing numerology exercises on every piece of copy they ever write to make sure that no sentence has 14 words in it, no two consecutive sentences...
Your position is that PR people should spend hours doing numerology exercises on every piece of copy they ever write to make sure that no sentence has 14 words in it, no two consecutive sentences start with the letter h, and no words add up to some combination of 8+8 numbers?
Even if that was the only claim, that would be an insane amount of work for basically no benefit, but they'd also have to do things like Pythagorean numerology to make sure they're not potentially encoding secret messages that way too, and by the time they were done, the fact that they weren't encoding secret white supremacist messages by sheer random chance at some point would be suspicious in it of itself.
My position that when denying white supremacist allegations, the single most common neonazi dogwhistle should be avoided, yes. Edit: Let me put it this way. You're thinking about it like...
My position that when denying white supremacist allegations, the single most common neonazi dogwhistle should be avoided, yes.
Edit: Let me put it this way.
You're thinking about it like recognizing this is a matter of finding the evidence. This is not evidence. It is purely circumstantial. The evidence is the white supremacy in society and that neonazis are in a constant state of tension between believing something incredibly dumb, wholeheartedly, in a culture that implicitly supports their opinions, but publicly denounces them. As a result, almost every politically engaged white supremacist is obsessed with their own cunning, having "seen through the propaganda". So they put 14 and 88 all over their social media profiles, because they are insecure idiots fishing for validation from the like minded. They're constantly looking for evidence to confirm their absurd beliefs anyway, so the mental gymnastics of numerology are easily adopted. They are not offended by being called out, but they'd rather not be punished, so the signal must be deniable, and trivially so, again, illogical core beliefs.
This doesn't matter. It's one company trying to tell normal people "Do not worry, we are not evil" without telling the white supremacists, presumably a demographic likely to wear national symbolism (eagles especially) associated branding, "we disagree with you". But anyone in communications knows about that specific brand of numerology. This is not some spontaneous hallucination, spend some time around their own forums if you want proof.
In literally any context not specifically about allegations of racism, there's no point in scrubbing for this kind of signaling. But when a business is already being accused of eugenicist dogwhistles, anyone who doesn't is just incompetent or trolling if they aren't trying to say so.
I often find the race discourse overblown and find the term "race grifting" quite valid as there people who capitalize on antiracism for profit or personal brand-building. (Robin DiAngelo, author...
I often find the race discourse overblown and find the term "race grifting" quite valid as there people who capitalize on antiracism for profit or personal brand-building. (Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, prominently comes to my mind.)
But even I find this homophonic jeans/genes schtick to be such a loud dogwhistle given the context of how Sydney is fawned over by white supremacists. It's a clear motte-and-bailey where they're advancing a controversial statement of 'jeans' as (blonde hair, blue eyes) 'genes' but then they have a convenient position to fall back to when attacked: "we're talking about J-E-A-N-S jeans obviously, you're so silly and crazy for thinking about G-E-N-E-S genes, this is a jeans commercial."
I don't think AE actually supports white supremacy. But I think they are cynically wielding this nudge-nudge, wink-wink white supremacy as a PR tool to generate visibility for their brand and products, which I find appalling because it promotes it regardless of their intentions.
Anyway, I never buy AE anyway: it's low-quality, low-end suburban mall crap for mid tweens/teens I wouldn't be caught dead wearing in any truly fashion-conscious setting.
Honestly given that she’s a registered Republican she’s probably laughing at online complaints regardless of her racial beliefs and the intent behind the ad. I think there’s nearly zero chance she...
it's a hell of a thing to double down on or stay silent on
Honestly given that she’s a registered Republican she’s probably laughing at online complaints regardless of her racial beliefs and the intent behind the ad. I think there’s nearly zero chance she would have someone close to her that would make her realize it genuinely could have been perceived poorly in our political climate.
Then tbh her PR team needs fired. She may be uninterested in or unwilling to make a statement, or maybe she's not sure what to do so she's not deciding yet, but if she's unaware, that's their...
Then tbh her PR team needs fired. She may be uninterested in or unwilling to make a statement, or maybe she's not sure what to do so she's not deciding yet, but if she's unaware, that's their failure.
It's too many "well maybe what if could bes" for me. Sure, could be, but, I shouldn't be working harder than either her team or AE to exonerate them.
It’s not how I measure dog whistles. I’m just not fully read up on this and was leaving open the possibility that there was something explicit out there.
It’s not how I measure dog whistles. I’m just not fully read up on this and was leaving open the possibility that there was something explicit out there.
I’m sure it’s not a dog whistle. The explanation on the face (just a pun) of it is the Occam’s Razor of the matter. But I could be convinced otherwise in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Being accidentally racist is probably better than someone being purposefully racist. One is intentional and the other is not. That matters when interpreting someone’s intent.
Is being so tone deaf the white supremacists praise your ad significantly better than intentionally dog whistling?
Being accidentally racist is probably better than someone being purposefully racist. One is intentional and the other is not. That matters when interpreting someone’s intent.
I asked if it was "significantly better" and I don't think it is. You stated that you think it's probably better. It might be, but IMO, not significantly. Not without apologies and not when you...
I asked if it was "significantly better" and I don't think it is.
You stated that you think it's probably better. It might be, but IMO, not significantly. Not without apologies and not when you have PR professionals on your staff.
I don't think the intent matters as much as the impact and their response.
I can’t tell when a dog whistle has been blown. I just hear the dogs barking and make inferences ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s not like they’re denying it or getting out in front to condemn the noxious...
I can’t tell when a dog whistle has been blown. I just hear the dogs barking and make inferences ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s not like they’re denying it or getting out in front to condemn the noxious interpretations.
I'm in a gray area where I didn't buy into the culture war thing for this. I think that sort of schizo-paranoia that was common throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s wasn't doing anyone any...
I'm in a gray area where I didn't buy into the culture war thing for this. I think that sort of schizo-paranoia that was common throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s wasn't doing anyone any good. Nor do I buy into the "eugenics" thing going around. However, her being a Republican isn't really helping that read.
During the pandemic people outright said that we shouldn't wear masks because they believed COVID would only kill people with pre-existing conditions. The pro-natalism advocates featured all over...
Exemplary
During the pandemic people outright said that we shouldn't wear masks because they believed COVID would only kill people with pre-existing conditions. The pro-natalism advocates featured all over media align themselves with literal explicit racist white supremacists who want white women having white babies, while also explicitly advocating for passing their perfect genes along. Many in the "rationalist" crowd talk about eugenics and race science as if it's obviously a good thing. People still argue about whether disabled people should have children and advocate for curing autism. Christian groups still pay poor people to get sterilized.
That's not even getting into what the government is doing or talks about doing. Like an executive order that makes civil commitment for the homeless mentally ill easier. Or cutting the medical care the disabled need to stay alive - a broken wheelchair can literally lead to the death of someone who's paralyzed, so can cutting their in-home PT or warehousing them in understaffed, underfunded nursing homes.
I mean the president said "Immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country" and "we got a lot of bad genes in the country right now"
The US couldn't eradicate the eugenicist tendencies it's come back with a vengeance. I'm not saying that we're killing disabled people outright today. (Although taking disabled children from parents and killing them is one of the very early acts of the third Reich.) But in 2017 prisoners were given 30 days off their sentence for getting sterilized in Tennessee. Before that, despite a law, 150 people were sterilized without following that law in CA. And in 2020 fifty women were unwillingly sterilized in ICE custody
“Eugenics transcends traditional left/right political divides. For example, just as some people on the far right embrace eugenics as a way to restrict immigration and reproduction among racial minorities, some on the progressive left find engineering perfect babies enticing. Others even go further in thinking that they—the smart and beautiful members of the elite—have a responsibility to have as many children as possible to repopulate the earth with their genes, or at least to not let those who are perceived as less capable out-reproduce those who are thought to be more talented. It’s a troubling mindset, and one that is not novel. We’ve seen this before, and this project is about making connections between certain ways of eugenic thinking when it’s largely believed that eugenics is a thing of the past.”
It’s valid to dislike someone for supporting Trump and his party. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this ad. It’s not like she wrote and directed it.
It’s valid to dislike someone for supporting Trump and his party. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this ad. It’s not like she wrote and directed it.
At her level of fame I don't really buy the argument that it's not her ad. She has great brand appeal and recognition, that's why she's starring in it instead of some lookalike. At that level...
At her level of fame I don't really buy the argument that it's not her ad. She has great brand appeal and recognition, that's why she's starring in it instead of some lookalike. At that level you're aware that you need to be aware how you present yourself to the general public (and probably have people working with you on that). You make choices about money and your personal brand.
(Compared to movies, ads are much more simple to understand, so a big star choosing act in a troubled movie gets an easier pass than an ad because you won't always understand the creative vision behind it before it's done.)
That being said, I don't agree with the dog whistle that's been much talked about. Genes/jeans feels like a 90s Man Show joke about a hot woman, though you probably could argue that's the type of joke that one would target the maga crowd with. But since afaik she hasn't commented on the matter, you could infer that she doesn't mind the theoretical dog whistle OR she thinks it's crazy internet being crazy internet which doesn't deserve an answer.
I think her being a registered republican is much more telling, as well as (afaik) her silence on the matter.
The concept of "dog whistle" is useful because it gives anyone the ability to make any accusation they want torwards anyone they want at all times. Feeling something is a "dog whistle" is...
The point of a dog whistle is
The concept of "dog whistle" is useful because it gives anyone the ability to make any accusation they want torwards anyone they want at all times. Feeling something is a "dog whistle" is sufficient condition to prove that something is a "dog whistle". As is the case with conspiratorial thinking in general, "dog whistle" accusations are circular and essentially undefeatable because a lack of evidence seems to make them stronger. Anyone who negates the existence of a "dog whistle" for enough time and with enough persistence will eventaully receive an accusation that they are part of the conspiracy. At which point they are effectively removed from the debate.
This is a confusing one! I’ve been the person on other topics saying that the whole point of a dog whistle is plausible deniability, that they’re designed to make anyone raising the issue sound...
This is a confusing one! I’ve been the person on other topics saying that the whole point of a dog whistle is plausible deniability, that they’re designed to make anyone raising the issue sound crazy… but I’m really struggling to see the ad campaign itself as anything notable beyond a fairly uninspired “90s Man Show joke about a hot woman”, as someone very aptly put it further up.
Person whose whole brand is being conventionally attractive makes weak pun on genetics making her conventionally attractive just wouldn’t have struck me as something that either side would care about to this level. It feels like the backlash itself is (or was initially) manufactured to raise the profile of the campaign and squeeze some money out of the right wing hivemind.
But then the whole thing has brought to light that she registered publicly as a member of a fascist party, and did so recently enough that it was crystal clear who they are at the time. That’s not a dog whistle, it’s a very pertinent piece of information about a public figure.
So I guess the backlash was actually deserved? But the information confirming that’s the case only came out after and because of the backlash? Maybe the people originally angry about the ad campaign had more context clues than I do, which would make sense given that I knew very little about the people involved until the last day or two. But the whole thing still just feels weird to me.
This whole story is a great case study in how everything sucks in 2025. 9 months ago, Sydney Sweeney was photographed by paparazzi while she was in a bikini. The pictures highlighted her muscle...
Exemplary
This whole story is a great case study in how everything sucks in 2025.
9 months ago, Sydney Sweeney was photographed by paparazzi while she was in a bikini. The pictures highlighted her muscle gains for an upcoming role, but everything sucks and a bunch of losers ragged on her for not being conventionally attractive enough.
Sweeney takes part in an American Apparel advertising campaign where they embrace her conventional attractiveness by making a lame pun about genes/jeans, but everything sucks so people make a connection to eugenics. Why would that be the case? Because everything sucks and we've spent the past 8 months watching dozens of public figures on the right casually throw up Nazi salutes like it's not big deal.
Of course, right-wingers would never miss an opportunity to lean into the culture war so they feed into the discourse by embracing the idea that she has superior genes. Owning the libs is all you got when the country is extremely polarized and everything sucks. Now all of the sudden, Sydney Sweeney is no longer a butch bodied ugly girl, but actually a shining example of white supremacy. God, everything sucks.
Since everything sucks, someone leaked the fact that Sweeney is a registered Republican as if it were the smoking gun for some sort of nefarious intent, even though she has never publicly supported a politician or used her platform to advocate for conservative stances.
There's only one man who can be president when everything sucks, and that guy decided to take a break from destroying the country to weigh in on the controversy, further fueling the ridiculous discourse surrounding the whole thing.
By the way, has anyone actually seen the jeans in question? This might come as a surprise, but they kinda suck.
I think the assumption that the outrage cycles are organic might be naive. I think marketing agencies have botnets on hand that they can use to signal boost specific content to give it a chance of...
Sweeney takes part in an American Apparel advertising campaign where they embrace her conventional attractiveness by making a lame pun about genes/jeans, but everything sucks so people make a connection to eugenics. Why would that be the case? Because everything sucks and we've spent the past 8 months watching dozens of public figures on the right casually throw up Nazi salutes like it's not big deal.
I think the assumption that the outrage cycles are organic might be naive. I think marketing agencies have botnets on hand that they can use to signal boost specific content to give it a chance of going viral. If you spelunk around the internet you’ll eventually find someone who has a decent sized following who makes a lot of histrionic or dogshit takes. Nutpicking isn’t that hard to do. And having bots or people jump in to promote those controversial takes to people is also no that hard to do. All it takes is a good instinct for what kind of stuff will get people frothy, which is a core skillset for a successful marketing person.
Yeah, it's definitely plausible (if not likely), which would mean things suck even worse than previously thought. I don't think it matters that much though. What matters is that people did get...
Yeah, it's definitely plausible (if not likely), which would mean things suck even worse than previously thought. I don't think it matters that much though. What matters is that people did get frothy over it because our current political landscape. I just saw Homeland Security tweet a job listing for ICE that said, "Protect your culture!"
Whether the initial push was organic or inorganic, this thing has legs because people connected the dots to white supremacy and it resonated with them. Unrealistic beauty standards was sitting right there and eugenics became the conversation. That alone is a disturbing sign of the times.
All one has to do is a bit of searching to turn up loads of videos of botnets in action. Rooms so large you can't see all the walls at once containing twelve foot high racks of phones packed in...
I think the assumption that the outrage cycles are organic might be naive.
All one has to do is a bit of searching to turn up loads of videos of botnets in action. Rooms so large you can't see all the walls at once containing twelve foot high racks of phones packed in like sardines, quietly humming along making dozens of posts per minute per phone, all available to the highest bidder to push whatever content and agendas anyone has the money to pay them for.
Political groups have infinite money to pay them to incite outrage and bump their agendas, advertisers have deep pockets to pay them to spam their garbage products or services, hackers build their own to play with and rent out. Government agencies build their own for their various forms of spycraft. Streamers pay them for bursts of views and comments, platforms embed them so they can look busier than they are. Multiple bot-driving software packages are open source, already in the double digits with their software versions.
There are no groups at this point which are not paying for the botnets to do their bidding. It's beyond naive, it's bloody obvious what's happening to anyone who takes the time to look. What do they all target? Everything that's viral. It's a stampede of zombies piling on to anything and everything everywhere on all platforms - as long as whatever it is racks up the clicks and the eyeballs.
The overwhelming majority of posts on popular platforms are from bots in 2025, and it's going to keep climbing and becoming more sophisticated as time goes on. The only way you escape from them is by sticking to the quiet corners of the internet where that bot activity is wasted on low views.
I'd go so far as to say that this entire Sweeney controversy is bot-driven and wouldn't even be more than a momentary flash in the pan without them. It only exists because of the bots.
Stop taking anything on the internet seriously. Forever. If you don't, the joke is on you and you're paying for it with your mental health. That's the lesson.
It’s been basically 24/7 coverage on Fox News for 2 weeks now as well so not entirely bot driven. I think they’ve seized on it as a way to both distract from the Epstein news and to go back to the...
I'd go so far as to say that this entire Sweeney controversy is bot-driven and wouldn't even be more than a momentary flash in the pan without them. It only exists because of the bots.
It’s been basically 24/7 coverage on Fox News for 2 weeks now as well so not entirely bot driven. I think they’ve seized on it as a way to both distract from the Epstein news and to go back to the right wing’s more comfortable ground of complaining about woke instead of defending their dogshit policy agenda.
Amen. My barometer is "how much are my friends and family talking about this?" and for this topic, it's zilch. No one in my circles have mentioned Sydney Sweeney or American Eagle whatsoever. It's...
Amen. My barometer is "how much are my friends and family talking about this?" and for this topic, it's zilch. No one in my circles have mentioned Sydney Sweeney or American Eagle whatsoever. It's not a foolproof test, but uh, it's worked most other times.
Same here, almost nobody I talk to in real life out of a sample size of around fifty knew about this until I brought it up. One single person in my D&D group was aware of the ad and thought the...
Same here, almost nobody I talk to in real life out of a sample size of around fifty knew about this until I brought it up. One single person in my D&D group was aware of the ad and thought the joke was mildly funny - he also mentioned that Brad Pitt did a similar set of Jeans ads early in his career.
Brad Pitt Levi ad 1991 This is the only ad I could find of Brad Pitt doing a jeans commercial. This is the same year or year before Thelma and Louise so he's just barely breaking out as a movie...
This is the only ad I could find of Brad Pitt doing a jeans commercial. This is the same year or year before Thelma and Louise so he's just barely breaking out as a movie soon-to-be star, and I can't find a broader ad campaign. There are barely words and just a common Levi's slogan in this ad.
There's a fake Beyonce ad going around (not the real one) pretending she did a campaign with a similar pun and thus claiming this discourse is actually hypocrisy and racism.
So your friend may have been tricked or lied to. It's certainly possible there's something I couldn't find. But I didn't figure you wanted to be spreading misinfo.
I asked him again at this week's game and after some digging, turns out he was confusing Brad Pitt for this Brooke Shields/Calvin Klein ad from the 80s. Same lame genes joke, and she even poses to...
I asked him again at this week's game and after some digging, turns out he was confusing Brad Pitt for this Brooke Shields/Calvin Klein ad from the 80s. Same lame genes joke, and she even poses to reference a Swastika at the end of it... plus she was like 14 years old in the ad. Much worse overall than American Eagle was.
There was nothing remotely original in the American Eagle ad. It was just another ripoff like most things in advertising. Now that corporations know they can get free press and controversy out of making white supremacy references, I'd expect to see a lot more of it in other advertisements. They've been courting the 'woke' crowd for years, they'll break rank and troll them instead if they think they can get the same kind of stock bump that American Eagle did.
e.l.f. already hired Matt Rife to make an ad for some unknowable reason. I'm sure it is likely to continue. Wild thing to confused Brad for Brooke though lol
e.l.f. already hired Matt Rife to make an ad for some unknowable reason. I'm sure it is likely to continue.
I found a blog post earlier today about Sweeney that I thought was interesting: The Sydney Sweeney Psyop -- How Manufactured Outrage Weaponizes Attention I don't know anything about Sweeney, other...
I found a blog post earlier today about Sweeney that I thought was interesting:
I don't know anything about Sweeney, other than that she is an actress, or anything about this controversy, other than that she was in a clothing commercial and said something about having "good jeans" and that made people mad. I think the blog post raises some good points about the "attention war" though (which I guess is like the culture war, or part of it?), and just how fucked everything is. It's not a great blog post. It leans a little too heavily into the Democrat/American leftist "omg Trump is destroying our entire democracy" screeching for my tastes, but I like its underlying point that controversies like this are generally not worth our time fighting about.
While everyone argues about whether blue eyes constitute Nazi imagery, real fascists implement actual policies: detention centers where people drink from toilets, mass deportations to foreign countries, systematic capture of independent agencies. The cultural grievance theater serves oligarchic interests perfectly because it keeps democratic resistance focused on symbolic battles rather than material power.
My issue with this is the same people pointing this out are ALSO highlighting concentration camps, mass deportation, genocide, illegal actions by the government, etc. I don't know that I believe...
My issue with this is the same people pointing this out are ALSO highlighting concentration camps, mass deportation, genocide, illegal actions by the government, etc. I don't know that I believe that if no one mentioned this ad campaign that anything would be any different or that someone else's mind would have been changed or the CPB would have been saved. They're the same subset of people who mostly can think about multiple things at once.
Like my posts here don't make me any less aware of the trans students who are about to get royally fucked by the administration. There's always something worse than the thing I'm talking about. Should I never talk about anything?
The way I understood that quoted portion in the prior comment is not just about the people who are participating in the "democratic resistance" but also the 'opposition' to that resistance. The...
The way I understood that quoted portion in the prior comment is not just about the people who are participating in the "democratic resistance" but also the 'opposition' to that resistance. The opposition to resistance having to defend the "actual policies" being implemented is different than taking defense in the symbolic battles.
If the opposition chooses to meet someone on the symbolic battlefield rather than the 'actual' battlefield, then they're inclined to take the battle before them, the symbolic one. And that opposition can use ad hominem arguments to bolster the perception of their position by making it seem like the 'democratic resistance' is making a mountain out of a molehill on this symbolic battle to bolster perception that they're also doing it on the 'actual' battles.
Once again, I just don't see the point, by and large the "opposition" deflect legitimate criticism anyway and accept very little accountability. And on the lay person side we've seen people be...
Once again, I just don't see the point, by and large the "opposition" deflect legitimate criticism anyway and accept very little accountability. And on the lay person side we've seen people be unhappy with Trump policies deporting their literal wife/parent/child-in-law while still saying they support him.
I don't need congressional hearings about this, I think that would be a clear overreaction. I don't need Texas Democrats, for example, talking about AE jeans, I need them calling Abbot a liar from NY and IL. (And people are doing a homegrown "get #boycottTexasBeef trending protest there too, should they not be talking about that either?)
So like, idk how this fundamentally takes pressure off the opposition, they were mostly ignoring the pressure. This just reads like the "don't talk about trans people so much" even though that is premised on their initial lie, you know? They're going to lie and deflect anyway. There'll be a "eating the dogs and eating the cats" allegation regardless of the truth. So I don't see the need to behave as if I'm part of the messaging apparatus for a political party, nor to pre-emptively watch my mouth because it might make them deflect and lie.
I think the last time a company did this at such a scale was Mulvaney's Budweiser ads which actually backfired and decreased sales for them. This made American Eagle stock drop, but I wonder how...
I think the last time a company did this at such a scale was Mulvaney's Budweiser ads which actually backfired and decreased sales for them. This made American Eagle stock drop, but I wonder how their sales are doing. Marketing teams seem to just be doing this scene from Spirited.
Massively agree. Republicans are surely appreciating that the one of the biggest negative stories for a week has just been jeans controversy. We have people in this thread interpreting the letters...
Massively agree. Republicans are surely appreciating that the one of the biggest negative stories for a week has just been jeans controversy.
We have people in this thread interpreting the letters and numbers in the American Eagle's tweets and drawing links to Hitler and numerology in a completely serious manner. There are just so many clear cut issues you can go after them for, that this controversy feels so hollow.
I'll say that I don't really "get" most of the things that make mainstream culture buzz. But I don't really get the reaction the ad elicited here. I just watched it for the first time, and the...
I'll say that I don't really "get" most of the things that make mainstream culture buzz. But I don't really get the reaction the ad elicited here. I just watched it for the first time, and the only thing I read about it up until this thread was the following NYT guest newsletter:
So I finally go and watch it, and from all the hub bub expected... more? I don't really have much to add beyond this is another data point for how I don't grok mainstream sensibilities I suppose.
This discourse is not reflective of mainstream sensibilities. The only people who care about this ad are the terminally online (on both the right and left).
mainstream sensibilities
This discourse is not reflective of mainstream sensibilities. The only people who care about this ad are the terminally online (on both the right and left).
An interesting contention. As someone who admittedly doesn't follow Hollywood that closely, it feels like most of the named actors were already washed up, lacking talent and/or widely recognised...
There was a time when political affiliation didn’t carry as much weight in Hollywood, but that changed with Trump. Since then, most conservative actors have chosen to keep quiet, with only a handful — like Sylvester Stallone, Dennis Quaid, Scott Baio, Kevin Sorbo, Jon Voight, Zachary Levi and Rob Schneider — showing open support. Unsurprisingly, many of them have since found themselves pushed to the margins, working largely in B-movie or Christian genre territory
An interesting contention. As someone who admittedly doesn't follow Hollywood that closely, it feels like most of the named actors were already washed up, lacking talent and/or widely recognised as being obnoxious prior to Trump's 1st election.
Perhaps rather than being ostracized due to openly supporting Trump, they already were and hence felt they had little to lose by openly supporting him.
My quick take. I don't know this person (before this), so for me, she's not famous (yet). Someday, I may see a movie she's in, and I'll start paying attention to her. When that happens, the first...
My quick take.
I don't know this person (before this), so for me, she's not famous (yet). Someday, I may see a movie she's in, and I'll start paying attention to her. When that happens, the first thing my brain is going to dredge up is this.
"Oh yeah, that's the woman who did that ad that Trump liked."
...and it's going to take a lot of positive impressions to get me past that.
So what? I don't see anything wrong with the ad that is worth eliciting this amount of backlash. Why does that even reflect on the individual. I personally do not get this drama at all.
"Oh yeah, that's the woman who did that ad that Trump liked."
So what? I don't see anything wrong with the ad that is worth eliciting this amount of backlash.
Why does that even reflect on the individual. I personally do not get this drama at all.
I don't believe that Sweeney necessarily had anything to do with the ad campaign. Eugenics is becoming more popular. In the past eugenics supporters in the US and other countries were responsible...
I don't believe that Sweeney necessarily had anything to do with the ad campaign.
Eugenics is becoming more popular. In the past eugenics supporters in the US and other countries were responsible for forced sterilization of disabled people, prisoners, racial minority people. We in the US used to have laws against cross racial marriage because of false ideas about good and bad blood.
Using an ad to make a joke about good genes, is in bad taste at best. But that should be on the advertising firm.
I'm fresh off reading I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy (star of iCarly and Sam and Cat). Though the child actor problems are different, it is a story of the burden of supporting one's...
I'm fresh off reading I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy (star of iCarly and Sam and Cat). Though the child actor problems are different, it is a story of the burden of supporting one's family. The Hollywood picture she paints is one where female actors especially have little agency, which is consistent with other things I have seen/read.
Given what I read, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't significant pressures on Sweeney from family or her agents to lean into her sex appeal as the "only way" to preserve or advance her career. I wouldn't be surprised if she had noany say in the tag line they put over the video in the American Eagle ad. It seems very possible that creative decision was made after she shot the ad.
All that is to say, it's not clear to me that she's not being ground to dust between a left-leaning system that marginalizes women (at least) and a right-leaning system that marginalizes everyone who isn't a white man.
I think we should be talking less about Sydney Sweeney's choices and more about American Eagle's choices because they 100% approved this ad.
Edit: Amending this because I realized the one sentence has the opposite sense of what I meant. This edit follows the comments by @boxerdogsdance and @Greg
Going on the ad campaign alone this is a good angle to take, and I think it's an important reminder to consider people's actions in the wider context of the potentially exploitative industries...
Going on the ad campaign alone this is a good angle to take, and I think it's an important reminder to consider people's actions in the wider context of the potentially exploitative industries they're being pressured by.
But the discussion I'm seeing says she's a literal registered, card-carrying member of that "right-leaning system that marginalizes everyone who isn't a white man", and that burns away a lot of otherwise justified benefit of the doubt in this specific case.
I was briefed on this last night by my partner as this type of thing does not enter my worldview. We watched the commercial (I hate feeling like I gave advertisers a win by searching for an ad.)...
I was briefed on this last night by my partner as this type of thing does not enter my worldview. We watched the commercial (I hate feeling like I gave advertisers a win by searching for an ad.)
On American Eagle's part I think this was either awfully fumbled or designed to become ragebait. They also know there is a whole population of morons who will buy their products to "own the libs." I tend to think it is this latter case because I don't really understand how a campaign like this could be fumbled so badly. The core gimmick "___ has good genes" could work if it brought in some sense of diversity of what genes can enable. Now obviously it could have had ableist connotations, but I'm sure they could've found some hot special olympians or something.
In Syd's case, I'm really not sure i have a strong opinion? It's against my principles to attribute intent based on someone's innate attributes. Though one would hope she'd flag "hey I don't think this ad really meshes with my worldview." She didn't, but I'd wager people rarely think about how their "look" can be read as a political statement. I don't particularly care about her party affiliation; heck I've considered changing my registration just so I can vote in their primaries.
Then we have the president's tweets squawks, which were read to me as well. Nothing really surprising there. It's operations as usual, commenting on something I don't need the highest government official wading in to. It comes at a good time for him as a distraction measure from the Epstein documents.
And then the left's response... I agree that that the whole campaign is a bad look. More so that it doesn't sound like they are distancing themselves from the fascist groundswell of support. But this is just tiring. I understand that we can talk about multiple things, but the cost of doing so generates noise and prompts people tune out.
I can tell you for a fact that people are struggling to make ends meet and they couldn't care less about some starlett goosestepping down broadway in an AE polo. Because frankly, they need to get their kid from school to childcare in between getting from job 1 to job 2. They're thinking about if they have enough cash to fill up the car and get some necessities or if they should wait until next week's payday. Oh and hey, by the way, someone in the group chat is letting them know ICE is somewhere nearby and they might want to have someone else pick up their kid.
Because that is the voter we need back with us, the person being royally screwed by every decision made jointly between this admin, congress, and supreme court. None of this is relevant if the next two election cycles affirm our current state of affairs.
I was debating whether posting Ruimy's post or The Guardian's article. But Ruimy writes about it more matter-of-fact.
I don't post celeb gossip on here, even though I'm into it, because I know you guys don't care. But this has broken containment like a motherfucker. And we haven't had a starlet at the center of something like this... ever?
Sweeney's career was interesting since she got her start on a "woke" show (not Euphoria). So for the beginning her fanbase were tumblrites. But then she blew up on Euphoria primarily because of her nudity in it and she started gaining more male fans. Her film work didn't really reflect any of this. Anyone But You is a female oriented romantic comedy. While she shows off her body in the film, Glen Powell actually ends up being the most sexualized of the two. Immaculate a passion project from Sweeney which she produced was a pro-choice Horror film and a critique of religion.
This past year, however, Sweeney decided to take on a ton of brand deals. To give some background here, Sweeney's family went bankrupt in 2016. She cites the reason for the bankruptcy the family's move to LA so that Sweeney could pursue acting, she also blames her dreams on her parents eventual divorce. I give that background because I understand why she took all these brand deals.
But, the nature of these brand deals were insanely sexual. And this is the tone that her American Eagle ad took. It's such a jarring shift in culture. The past 10+ years of starlets that we've had did not cater to the guys like this. You'd have to go back to Megan Fox to find a comparable figure.
I don't know what her career looks like now. Being outed a registered Republican is interesting considering she denied being one in 2022 when her family hosted a party where guests wore MAGA hats.
Registering as a Republican in 2024 and then doing a cute wink wink nudge nudge dog whistling brand deal is a crazy choice. She’s going to need to hire a PR firm to not go down as Sydney Riefenstahl.
I like to play PR agent every now and then (in another life that's what I do). I don't know what you do in this situation. Not acknowledging it is a potential strategy but she's already doing that and it snowballed into Trump giving her a shout out.
The only two options are: backtrack or lean into it. The issue with leaning into it is that now you're stuck only doing right wing productions from Angel Studios. And the issue with backtracking is that it seems disingenuous.
Is it though? Unless someone at American Eagle or Sweeney has said something to that effect I’m sure it’s got absolutely zero dog whistle to it. Unless by dog whistle you mean a pun about jeans/genes.
Edit: I’ll copy over my revised comment from deep down in the comment tree
The point of a dog whistle is that it isn't said specifically. So I don't think that's a good measure.
Some folks can think it was unintentional. It's not really worth arguing over. Is being so tone deaf the white supremacists praise your ad significantly better than intentionally dog whistling? I don't really think so. I'd fire both the racist and the absolutely clueless sets of marketing agents, personally.
It is a small stupid thing and also indicative of a country that has been slowly but surely increasingly advocating for eugenics for the past decade or more. (We never really stopped, mind you.)
I don't care enough about this to try and analyze every little action, but it's quite possible this could be a Hanlon's Razor situation. I've known so many instances where people have done something in extremely poor taste not realizing the obvious way it could be interpreted.
That said, for the last decade plus, it has seemed that pretty much everything from the right has been done with extreme malice, it's becoming hard to give actions the benefit of the doubt anymore.
It is. But it's also falling into an explicit white supremacist pattern. I don't generally do accidental white supremacy, and if I do, I apologize and back the fuck off the thing I did. I just don't see how it's accidental, but ultimately it doesn't matter.
The white supremacists like it. AE and Sweeny can decide if they want to say "we fucked up" or "you're misinterpreting us" vs just stay silent/continue with the ad campaign. I'm judging them based on the crickets.
I don’t think this is fair at all. White supremacists have been lusting over attractive white celebrities since the dawn of the internet. America’s National Public Radio did a whole thing about how a bunch of white supremacists started calling Taylor Swift an “Aryan goddess” back in 2016 because she didn’t publicly endorse Hillary Clinton (or something).
In a world where you you get attention from white supremacists for being attractive, female, and white, I don’t think it’s fair to judge attractive white women for not explicitly denouncing white supremacism every time a bunch of internet assholes start making noise about how hot and white they are.
***
More broadly, I don’t agree that this falls into an explicit white supremacist pattern. (Again, she’s attractive and happens to be white. Just because white supremacists like that combination doesn’t make acknowledging it white supremacism). But I don’t think we’re going to agree on that one so I thought I’d touch on the judging them based on the silence thing.
I think it's notable that Taylor Swift has denounced white supremacists though I don't know the timeline nor how loud that message was. If she didn't do it fairly quickly, then yeah, that's a fuck up IMO. But it's not an accident that that was in 2016, and by people supporting Trump, and that Charlottesville was on the horizon. Maybe if it took her a while it was because no one quite believed the random internet assholes would be put in power, certainly not twice.
I'm not just talking about random internet assholes though. Honestly the biggest one is the president but there have been any number of subtle and less than subtle thumbs up from Senators, Billionaires and the regular ilk.
As for Sweeney...
She's attractive and white and allegedly conservative and starred in a whole ad about how good her family jeans/genes are. If it's not a dog whistle, it's a hell of a thing to double down on or stay silent on. (AE seems to have doubled down, I haven't seen comment from Sweeney) I cannot speak to her heart, I can only judge her silence.
If I accidentally made an ad easily confusable for white supremacy, I'd take it down for the loss of sales to non-white people alone. To me, that refusal says plenty. It doesn't really matter if the dog whistle was blown if the dogs all bark at this point.
I could not disagree more, for practical and personal reasons. Practically, I think any efforts to call people out should be focused on calling out the actual assholes, not the people being targeted by those assholes. Stormfront has a website. Politicians have made explicitly bigoted comments on national TV. The point is, this is a world in which overt white supremacy exists. It doesn’t seem helpful to me to accuse a clothing company of covert innuendo; we should be focusing on the actual, open assholes. Does it matter that before all of this, American Eagle had announced that all profits from the sydney sweeney jeans line were going to be donated to a nonprofit crisis help line? Does it matter that the CEO of American Eagle is a noted Jewish philanthropist? Maybe none of that matters. But I want to live in a world where we assume the best of people, not the worst. I want to live in a world where we blame the dogs, not their victims.
We can talk about both. The people I see talking about the former have consistently talked about the latter the entire time.
I want that too. But I also believe in basing my decisions on people's actions. And I don't give grace to companies and celebrities that have multiple marketing/PR professionals between them and their choices. This was reviewed and approved on multiple levels by multiple people.
And I believe that's what I'm doing. I don't see how either AE or Sweeney are victims here. New information could change that, but I am doubtful.
I know this is a really personal topic for you that gets you heated quickly. I hope it's possible to take this in the spirit in which it's intended -- the position "I don't care if it was intentional, it's the effect that matters, I don't give grace to these people, they should know better" is kind of... mean.
I am not actually heated. I'm usually pretty open about it when I am.
What I stated is very similar to the common phrase "intent vs impact" when talking about the harms of racism, from microaggression to macroaggression.
If I step on your shoe, and insist I didn't mean to, it doesn't make your foot hurt less. You might be more inclined to forgive me, but I didn't actually apologize, I just said I didn't mean to.
As for grace, very little of my grace is for corporations. I do not expect Sweeney to be a spokeswoman on race in America, but silence isn't an apology or distancing herself either. She could be the sweetest human or the meanest asshole, I don't know her. But the "celebrity" who is a brand, and has PR and the like, doesn't get forgiveness without even asking for it. I'm not wishing her harm. I wish she'd and they'd do better.
I don't agree that I'm being mean. I'm just not bending over backwards to make potential excuses for essentially two businesses. I re-evaluate my opinions based on new information, but "I'm not being nice enough" in an internet post to people/companies who have themselves demonstrated no care or concern for my well-being is not compelling. Firm dislike isn't mean.
In the end this results in them not getting my business, something AE didn't want anyway and I doubt Sweeney cares about, and my online disapproval.
FWIW, this was American Eagles response:
I don't know if it's an "all press is good press" approach or a half-assed attempt to wait for the controversy to blow over without alienating their new freak customers, but they keep shooting themselves in the foot.
Also, not that it makes a huge difference, but I feel like its worth pointing out that the dogs didn't start barking until after critics called out the whistle. A lot of those people were shitting on Sydney Sweeney and calling her ugly a year ago.
Regardless, we've clearly reached the tipping point where pulling the ad looks like the best option, and it's kind of crazy that it hasn't happened yet. Same goes for Sweeney. I can see how her team would opt to keep a low profile at first, but a statement seems in order now that the right-wingers have poured gasoline all over the fire.
This is all speculation on my part, but I think the people at American Eagle were hoping for controversy, only they expected the backlash to be centered around beauty standards and body image. From the article:
The nudge nudge wink wink was intended to be about her breasts, only no one clocked the other interpretation. Now with the help of the monkey's paw and/or Elizabeth Hurley, they got what they asked for, only instead of big naturals discourse they got a firestorm of Nazi style eugenics. I could see them making a similar mistake where LeBron James talks about how genetics influences things like athleticism and aging, not realizing the racial connotations that people might pick up on. I dunno, maybe this is the last few
ouncesgramsmilligrams of hope talking, but I'd like to think we still live in a world where crass innuendo about breasts is the focal point of advertising, and not, ya know, Hitler's dream girl.The phrasing of that response is weird and the “Her Jeans. Her Story.” line seems weirdly out of place. Then you notice it’s 2 capitalized Hs followed by a 14 word sentence and I don’t think a person would be crazy to think that maybe they know exactly what they’re doing.
I think marketing and ad execs have understood how to be cute and stoke social media tension for a long time. I would not at all be surprised if the initial wave of “is this White supremacist?” TikTok’s to kick off the round of discourse wasn’t, in some way, seeded or at least signal boosted by AE to generate exposure. I think they’ve been doing this shit for a while.
FWIW, during the previous “great awokening” era I think they were also doing this. I’m pretty sure a lot of casting decisions Disney was making, like casting a Black girl to be Ariel, were also designed intentionally to stoke conflict. It’s a thing they know how to do and do intentionally and routinely to mine outrage and engagement. They know what buttons to push, they have bot farms to kick-start getting things going viral.
In full seriousness, it does seem a little crazy to imply that a blue jeans company is trying to make covert references to Hitler via numerology.
I am trying to come up with a plausible explanation as to how that would even happen. American Eagle goes to their marketing department and says "hey, slip a little Heil Hitler into this ad, but be super sneaky about it"? And then everyone involved is just like "sure, whatever" and nobody blows the whistle? Anna the marketing intern is just like "fuck it, I'm down with this?" Every single person in the markering/PR chain is a white nationalist?
And to what end? To secure the lucrative market of blue jeans wearing white nationalists who are so terminally online they'll recognize a 1488 reference that's backwards?
You really just need one person to write the copy and nobody in the chain to notice it. If the only metric being tracked is engagement it will blow up. And everything involved in SEO and social media marketing is an amoral engagement monster.
It's not just "H[sentence]. H[sentence]. [14 word sentence].", it's "H[+7 letters]. H[+7 letters]. [14 word sentence with a contraction and initialism that both feel tonally awkward]."
Maybe I'm just out of the loop on PR styles, but that "we'll" and "AE" are off to me, and I'd been rolling my eyes on this story before seeing it.
Setting aside all my questions about how this could possibly happen and be approved and all that, the argument is that they went to all the work to encode a secret heil Hitler message, but then did it backwards?
Is that really our position? This sounds exactly like all the pizza gate and qanon nonsense, which I assume you'd deride...
It's not like the 14 and 88 are cogently linked, one is a full sentence that is equal opportunity white supremacist, the other is heil Hitler. I've spent enough time observing fascist spaces to see them inverted, separated, and otherwise played with.
In this context, from the perspective of a business, it's not a statement of alignment, it's fodder to endear themselves to the neonazis with any power, and (anti)virtue signalling to increase brand loyalty among paranoid layvolk, while making it thornier for critics to address a more open embrasure going forward, should that be necessary.
If the explicitly christofascist elements win out in the government, and stuff like eugenics gets more acceptable, there will be a period of loyalty testing corporations. This kind of message so early would likely earn them lessened scrutiny during such purges, and if the fascists lose, well, so what, all they did was make a bunch of informed antifascists sound crazy.
They may totally be innocent of white supremacist intent. But it isn't ridiculous, this kind of message is suspicious. Any PR person knows about 14/88. If a business is being accused of white supremacist messaging, their press release should be combed to prevent exactly "two sentences, each with eight letters, starting with Hs".
There are underground societies. I have been in the fringes of some of them. These kinds of bywords exist. They do not warrant paranoia, but the order of symbols is not the kind of thing that disabuses their value in establishing esoteric networks.
Your position is that PR people should spend hours doing numerology exercises on every piece of copy they ever write to make sure that no sentence has 14 words in it, no two consecutive sentences start with the letter h, and no words add up to some combination of 8+8 numbers?
Even if that was the only claim, that would be an insane amount of work for basically no benefit, but they'd also have to do things like Pythagorean numerology to make sure they're not potentially encoding secret messages that way too, and by the time they were done, the fact that they weren't encoding secret white supremacist messages by sheer random chance at some point would be suspicious in it of itself.
My position that when denying white supremacist allegations, the single most common neonazi dogwhistle should be avoided, yes.
Edit: Let me put it this way.
You're thinking about it like recognizing this is a matter of finding the evidence. This is not evidence. It is purely circumstantial. The evidence is the white supremacy in society and that neonazis are in a constant state of tension between believing something incredibly dumb, wholeheartedly, in a culture that implicitly supports their opinions, but publicly denounces them. As a result, almost every politically engaged white supremacist is obsessed with their own cunning, having "seen through the propaganda". So they put 14 and 88 all over their social media profiles, because they are insecure idiots fishing for validation from the like minded. They're constantly looking for evidence to confirm their absurd beliefs anyway, so the mental gymnastics of numerology are easily adopted. They are not offended by being called out, but they'd rather not be punished, so the signal must be deniable, and trivially so, again, illogical core beliefs.
This doesn't matter. It's one company trying to tell normal people "Do not worry, we are not evil" without telling the white supremacists, presumably a demographic likely to wear national symbolism (eagles especially) associated branding, "we disagree with you". But anyone in communications knows about that specific brand of numerology. This is not some spontaneous hallucination, spend some time around their own forums if you want proof.
In literally any context not specifically about allegations of racism, there's no point in scrubbing for this kind of signaling. But when a business is already being accused of eugenicist dogwhistles, anyone who doesn't is just incompetent or trolling if they aren't trying to say so.
The Gillette ad from the 2019 Super Bowl comes to mind.
The OG from that era is probably the Jenner Pepsi commercial
I often find the race discourse overblown and find the term "race grifting" quite valid as there people who capitalize on antiracism for profit or personal brand-building. (Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, prominently comes to my mind.)
But even I find this homophonic jeans/genes schtick to be such a loud dogwhistle given the context of how Sydney is fawned over by white supremacists. It's a clear motte-and-bailey where they're advancing a controversial statement of 'jeans' as (blonde hair, blue eyes) 'genes' but then they have a convenient position to fall back to when attacked: "we're talking about J-E-A-N-S jeans obviously, you're so silly and crazy for thinking about G-E-N-E-S genes, this is a jeans commercial."
I don't think AE actually supports white supremacy. But I think they are cynically wielding this nudge-nudge, wink-wink white supremacy as a PR tool to generate visibility for their brand and products, which I find appalling because it promotes it regardless of their intentions.
Anyway, I never buy AE anyway: it's low-quality, low-end suburban mall crap for mid tweens/teens I wouldn't be caught dead wearing in any truly fashion-conscious setting.
Honestly given that she’s a registered Republican she’s probably laughing at online complaints regardless of her racial beliefs and the intent behind the ad. I think there’s nearly zero chance she would have someone close to her that would make her realize it genuinely could have been perceived poorly in our political climate.
Then tbh her PR team needs fired. She may be uninterested in or unwilling to make a statement, or maybe she's not sure what to do so she's not deciding yet, but if she's unaware, that's their failure.
It's too many "well maybe what if could bes" for me. Sure, could be, but, I shouldn't be working harder than either her team or AE to exonerate them.
It’s not how I measure dog whistles. I’m just not fully read up on this and was leaving open the possibility that there was something explicit out there.
You said there's zero dog whistle in it if they don't say something explicit? Am I misunderstanding you?
No. The better way to write it would have been.
Gotcha, we don't agree, but like I said, I don't think it matters given their response.
I think it’s fair to be on high alert right now.
Being accidentally racist is probably better than someone being purposefully racist. One is intentional and the other is not. That matters when interpreting someone’s intent.
I asked if it was "significantly better" and I don't think it is.
You stated that you think it's probably better. It might be, but IMO, not significantly. Not without apologies and not when you have PR professionals on your staff.
I don't think the intent matters as much as the impact and their response.
I can’t tell when a dog whistle has been blown. I just hear the dogs barking and make inferences ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s not like they’re denying it or getting out in front to condemn the noxious interpretations.
I'm in a gray area where I didn't buy into the culture war thing for this. I think that sort of schizo-paranoia that was common throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s wasn't doing anyone any good. Nor do I buy into the "eugenics" thing going around. However, her being a Republican isn't really helping that read.
During the pandemic people outright said that we shouldn't wear masks because they believed COVID would only kill people with pre-existing conditions. The pro-natalism advocates featured all over media align themselves with literal explicit racist white supremacists who want white women having white babies, while also explicitly advocating for passing their perfect genes along. Many in the "rationalist" crowd talk about eugenics and race science as if it's obviously a good thing. People still argue about whether disabled people should have children and advocate for curing autism. Christian groups still pay poor people to get sterilized.
That's not even getting into what the government is doing or talks about doing. Like an executive order that makes civil commitment for the homeless mentally ill easier. Or cutting the medical care the disabled need to stay alive - a broken wheelchair can literally lead to the death of someone who's paralyzed, so can cutting their in-home PT or warehousing them in understaffed, underfunded nursing homes.
I mean the president said "Immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country" and "we got a lot of bad genes in the country right now"
The US couldn't eradicate the eugenicist tendencies it's come back with a vengeance. I'm not saying that we're killing disabled people outright today. (Although taking disabled children from parents and killing them is one of the very early acts of the third Reich.) But in 2017 prisoners were given 30 days off their sentence for getting sterilized in Tennessee. Before that, despite a law, 150 people were sterilized without following that law in CA. And in 2020 fifty women were unwillingly sterilized in ICE custody
In 2019, Race Science is on the Rise Again , and the Human Diversity Foundation has been trying to rehabilitate race science... an effort which was actively being funded by the founder of Adult Friend Finder of all things
Bioethicists argue that it's not gone away, just changed names.
This is not news. It's just unpleasant.
It’s valid to dislike someone for supporting Trump and his party. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this ad. It’s not like she wrote and directed it.
At her level of fame I don't really buy the argument that it's not her ad. She has great brand appeal and recognition, that's why she's starring in it instead of some lookalike. At that level you're aware that you need to be aware how you present yourself to the general public (and probably have people working with you on that). You make choices about money and your personal brand.
(Compared to movies, ads are much more simple to understand, so a big star choosing act in a troubled movie gets an easier pass than an ad because you won't always understand the creative vision behind it before it's done.)
That being said, I don't agree with the dog whistle that's been much talked about. Genes/jeans feels like a 90s Man Show joke about a hot woman, though you probably could argue that's the type of joke that one would target the maga crowd with. But since afaik she hasn't commented on the matter, you could infer that she doesn't mind the theoretical dog whistle OR she thinks it's crazy internet being crazy internet which doesn't deserve an answer.
I think her being a registered republican is much more telling, as well as (afaik) her silence on the matter.
The concept of "dog whistle" is useful because it gives anyone the ability to make any accusation they want torwards anyone they want at all times. Feeling something is a "dog whistle" is sufficient condition to prove that something is a "dog whistle". As is the case with conspiratorial thinking in general, "dog whistle" accusations are circular and essentially undefeatable because a lack of evidence seems to make them stronger. Anyone who negates the existence of a "dog whistle" for enough time and with enough persistence will eventaully receive an accusation that they are part of the conspiracy. At which point they are effectively removed from the debate.
Someone being registered as a Republican after J6 is enough for me not to do business with them, full stop.
I must wonder if she took the job knowing they'd tag the ad like that.
Thanks for the recap!
This is a confusing one! I’ve been the person on other topics saying that the whole point of a dog whistle is plausible deniability, that they’re designed to make anyone raising the issue sound crazy… but I’m really struggling to see the ad campaign itself as anything notable beyond a fairly uninspired “90s Man Show joke about a hot woman”, as someone very aptly put it further up.
Person whose whole brand is being conventionally attractive makes weak pun on genetics making her conventionally attractive just wouldn’t have struck me as something that either side would care about to this level. It feels like the backlash itself is (or was initially) manufactured to raise the profile of the campaign and squeeze some money out of the right wing hivemind.
But then the whole thing has brought to light that she registered publicly as a member of a fascist party, and did so recently enough that it was crystal clear who they are at the time. That’s not a dog whistle, it’s a very pertinent piece of information about a public figure.
So I guess the backlash was actually deserved? But the information confirming that’s the case only came out after and because of the backlash? Maybe the people originally angry about the ad campaign had more context clues than I do, which would make sense given that I knew very little about the people involved until the last day or two. But the whole thing still just feels weird to me.
This whole story is a great case study in how everything sucks in 2025.
9 months ago, Sydney Sweeney was photographed by paparazzi while she was in a bikini. The pictures highlighted her muscle gains for an upcoming role, but everything sucks and a bunch of losers ragged on her for not being conventionally attractive enough.
Sweeney takes part in an American Apparel advertising campaign where they embrace her conventional attractiveness by making a lame pun about genes/jeans, but everything sucks so people make a connection to eugenics. Why would that be the case? Because everything sucks and we've spent the past 8 months watching dozens of public figures on the right casually throw up Nazi salutes like it's not big deal.
Of course, right-wingers would never miss an opportunity to lean into the culture war so they feed into the discourse by embracing the idea that she has superior genes. Owning the libs is all you got when the country is extremely polarized and everything sucks. Now all of the sudden, Sydney Sweeney is no longer a butch bodied ugly girl, but actually a shining example of white supremacy. God, everything sucks.
Since everything sucks, someone leaked the fact that Sweeney is a registered Republican as if it were the smoking gun for some sort of nefarious intent, even though she has never publicly supported a politician or used her platform to advocate for conservative stances.
There's only one man who can be president when everything sucks, and that guy decided to take a break from destroying the country to weigh in on the controversy, further fueling the ridiculous discourse surrounding the whole thing.
By the way, has anyone actually seen the jeans in question? This might come as a surprise, but they kinda suck.
I think the assumption that the outrage cycles are organic might be naive. I think marketing agencies have botnets on hand that they can use to signal boost specific content to give it a chance of going viral. If you spelunk around the internet you’ll eventually find someone who has a decent sized following who makes a lot of histrionic or dogshit takes. Nutpicking isn’t that hard to do. And having bots or people jump in to promote those controversial takes to people is also no that hard to do. All it takes is a good instinct for what kind of stuff will get people frothy, which is a core skillset for a successful marketing person.
Yeah, it's definitely plausible (if not likely), which would mean things suck even worse than previously thought. I don't think it matters that much though. What matters is that people did get frothy over it because our current political landscape. I just saw Homeland Security tweet a job listing for ICE that said, "Protect your culture!"
Whether the initial push was organic or inorganic, this thing has legs because people connected the dots to white supremacy and it resonated with them. Unrealistic beauty standards was sitting right there and eugenics became the conversation. That alone is a disturbing sign of the times.
All one has to do is a bit of searching to turn up loads of videos of botnets in action. Rooms so large you can't see all the walls at once containing twelve foot high racks of phones packed in like sardines, quietly humming along making dozens of posts per minute per phone, all available to the highest bidder to push whatever content and agendas anyone has the money to pay them for.
Political groups have infinite money to pay them to incite outrage and bump their agendas, advertisers have deep pockets to pay them to spam their garbage products or services, hackers build their own to play with and rent out. Government agencies build their own for their various forms of spycraft. Streamers pay them for bursts of views and comments, platforms embed them so they can look busier than they are. Multiple bot-driving software packages are open source, already in the double digits with their software versions.
There are no groups at this point which are not paying for the botnets to do their bidding. It's beyond naive, it's bloody obvious what's happening to anyone who takes the time to look. What do they all target? Everything that's viral. It's a stampede of zombies piling on to anything and everything everywhere on all platforms - as long as whatever it is racks up the clicks and the eyeballs.
The overwhelming majority of posts on popular platforms are from bots in 2025, and it's going to keep climbing and becoming more sophisticated as time goes on. The only way you escape from them is by sticking to the quiet corners of the internet where that bot activity is wasted on low views.
I'd go so far as to say that this entire Sweeney controversy is bot-driven and wouldn't even be more than a momentary flash in the pan without them. It only exists because of the bots.
Stop taking anything on the internet seriously. Forever. If you don't, the joke is on you and you're paying for it with your mental health. That's the lesson.
It’s been basically 24/7 coverage on Fox News for 2 weeks now as well so not entirely bot driven. I think they’ve seized on it as a way to both distract from the Epstein news and to go back to the right wing’s more comfortable ground of complaining about woke instead of defending their dogshit policy agenda.
Good point. It's all about 'how can I use this for my own purposes' rather than about the actual issues anymore.
Amen. My barometer is "how much are my friends and family talking about this?" and for this topic, it's zilch. No one in my circles have mentioned Sydney Sweeney or American Eagle whatsoever. It's not a foolproof test, but uh, it's worked most other times.
Same here, almost nobody I talk to in real life out of a sample size of around fifty knew about this until I brought it up. One single person in my D&D group was aware of the ad and thought the joke was mildly funny - he also mentioned that Brad Pitt did a similar set of Jeans ads early in his career.
Brad Pitt Levi ad 1991
This is the only ad I could find of Brad Pitt doing a jeans commercial. This is the same year or year before Thelma and Louise so he's just barely breaking out as a movie soon-to-be star, and I can't find a broader ad campaign. There are barely words and just a common Levi's slogan in this ad.
There's a fake Beyonce ad going around (not the real one) pretending she did a campaign with a similar pun and thus claiming this discourse is actually hypocrisy and racism.
So your friend may have been tricked or lied to. It's certainly possible there's something I couldn't find. But I didn't figure you wanted to be spreading misinfo.
I asked him again at this week's game and after some digging, turns out he was confusing Brad Pitt for this Brooke Shields/Calvin Klein ad from the 80s. Same lame genes joke, and she even poses to reference a Swastika at the end of it... plus she was like 14 years old in the ad. Much worse overall than American Eagle was.
There was nothing remotely original in the American Eagle ad. It was just another ripoff like most things in advertising. Now that corporations know they can get free press and controversy out of making white supremacy references, I'd expect to see a lot more of it in other advertisements. They've been courting the 'woke' crowd for years, they'll break rank and troll them instead if they think they can get the same kind of stock bump that American Eagle did.
e.l.f. already hired Matt Rife to make an ad for some unknowable reason. I'm sure it is likely to continue.
Wild thing to confused Brad for Brooke though lol
I found a blog post earlier today about Sweeney that I thought was interesting:
The Sydney Sweeney Psyop -- How Manufactured Outrage Weaponizes Attention
I don't know anything about Sweeney, other than that she is an actress, or anything about this controversy, other than that she was in a clothing commercial and said something about having "good jeans" and that made people mad. I think the blog post raises some good points about the "attention war" though (which I guess is like the culture war, or part of it?), and just how fucked everything is. It's not a great blog post. It leans a little too heavily into the Democrat/American leftist "omg Trump is destroying our entire democracy" screeching for my tastes, but I like its underlying point that controversies like this are generally not worth our time fighting about.
If you liked that blog post, may I present:
Reading the news is the new smoking
This is spot-on:
My issue with this is the same people pointing this out are ALSO highlighting concentration camps, mass deportation, genocide, illegal actions by the government, etc. I don't know that I believe that if no one mentioned this ad campaign that anything would be any different or that someone else's mind would have been changed or the CPB would have been saved. They're the same subset of people who mostly can think about multiple things at once.
Like my posts here don't make me any less aware of the trans students who are about to get royally fucked by the administration. There's always something worse than the thing I'm talking about. Should I never talk about anything?
The way I understood that quoted portion in the prior comment is not just about the people who are participating in the "democratic resistance" but also the 'opposition' to that resistance. The opposition to resistance having to defend the "actual policies" being implemented is different than taking defense in the symbolic battles.
If the opposition chooses to meet someone on the symbolic battlefield rather than the 'actual' battlefield, then they're inclined to take the battle before them, the symbolic one. And that opposition can use ad hominem arguments to bolster the perception of their position by making it seem like the 'democratic resistance' is making a mountain out of a molehill on this symbolic battle to bolster perception that they're also doing it on the 'actual' battles.
Once again, I just don't see the point, by and large the "opposition" deflect legitimate criticism anyway and accept very little accountability. And on the lay person side we've seen people be unhappy with Trump policies deporting their literal wife/parent/child-in-law while still saying they support him.
I don't need congressional hearings about this, I think that would be a clear overreaction. I don't need Texas Democrats, for example, talking about AE jeans, I need them calling Abbot a liar from NY and IL. (And people are doing a homegrown "get #boycottTexasBeef trending protest there too, should they not be talking about that either?)
So like, idk how this fundamentally takes pressure off the opposition, they were mostly ignoring the pressure. This just reads like the "don't talk about trans people so much" even though that is premised on their initial lie, you know? They're going to lie and deflect anyway. There'll be a "eating the dogs and eating the cats" allegation regardless of the truth. So I don't see the need to behave as if I'm part of the messaging apparatus for a political party, nor to pre-emptively watch my mouth because it might make them deflect and lie.
I think the last time a company did this at such a scale was Mulvaney's Budweiser ads which actually backfired and decreased sales for them. This made American Eagle stock drop, but I wonder how their sales are doing. Marketing teams seem to just be doing this scene from Spirited.
Massively agree. Republicans are surely appreciating that the one of the biggest negative stories for a week has just been jeans controversy.
We have people in this thread interpreting the letters and numbers in the American Eagle's tweets and drawing links to Hitler and numerology in a completely serious manner. There are just so many clear cut issues you can go after them for, that this controversy feels so hollow.
I'll say that I don't really "get" most of the things that make mainstream culture buzz. But I don't really get the reaction the ad elicited here. I just watched it for the first time, and the only thing I read about it up until this thread was the following NYT guest newsletter:
NYT gift link - Do These Jeans Make My Ad Look Racist?
So I finally go and watch it, and from all the hub bub expected... more? I don't really have much to add beyond this is another data point for how I don't grok mainstream sensibilities I suppose.
This discourse is not reflective of mainstream sensibilities. The only people who care about this ad are the terminally online (on both the right and left).
An interesting contention. As someone who admittedly doesn't follow Hollywood that closely, it feels like most of the named actors were already washed up, lacking talent and/or widely recognised as being obnoxious prior to Trump's 1st election.
Perhaps rather than being ostracized due to openly supporting Trump, they already were and hence felt they had little to lose by openly supporting him.
We should probably tag this post as politics, unfortunately.
My quick take.
I don't know this person (before this), so for me, she's not famous (yet). Someday, I may see a movie she's in, and I'll start paying attention to her. When that happens, the first thing my brain is going to dredge up is this.
"Oh yeah, that's the woman who did that ad that Trump liked."
...and it's going to take a lot of positive impressions to get me past that.
So what? I don't see anything wrong with the ad that is worth eliciting this amount of backlash.
Why does that even reflect on the individual. I personally do not get this drama at all.
I don't believe that Sweeney necessarily had anything to do with the ad campaign.
Eugenics is becoming more popular. In the past eugenics supporters in the US and other countries were responsible for forced sterilization of disabled people, prisoners, racial minority people. We in the US used to have laws against cross racial marriage because of false ideas about good and bad blood.
Using an ad to make a joke about good genes, is in bad taste at best. But that should be on the advertising firm.
I'm fresh off reading I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy (star of iCarly and Sam and Cat). Though the child actor problems are different, it is a story of the burden of supporting one's family. The Hollywood picture she paints is one where female actors especially have little agency, which is consistent with other things I have seen/read.
Given what I read, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't significant pressures on Sweeney from family or her agents to lean into her sex appeal as the "only way" to preserve or advance her career. I wouldn't be surprised if she had
noany say in the tag line they put over the video in the American Eagle ad. It seems very possible that creative decision was made after she shot the ad.All that is to say, it's not clear to me that she's not being ground to dust between a left-leaning system that marginalizes women (at least) and a right-leaning system that marginalizes everyone who isn't a white man.
I think we should be talking less about Sydney Sweeney's choices and more about American Eagle's choices because they 100% approved this ad.
Edit: Amending this because I realized the one sentence has the opposite sense of what I meant. This edit follows the comments by @boxerdogsdance and @Greg
Going on the ad campaign alone this is a good angle to take, and I think it's an important reminder to consider people's actions in the wider context of the potentially exploitative industries they're being pressured by.
But the discussion I'm seeing says she's a literal registered, card-carrying member of that "right-leaning system that marginalizes everyone who isn't a white man", and that burns away a lot of otherwise justified benefit of the doubt in this specific case.
I agree
I was briefed on this last night by my partner as this type of thing does not enter my worldview. We watched the commercial (I hate feeling like I gave advertisers a win by searching for an ad.)
On American Eagle's part I think this was either awfully fumbled or designed to become ragebait. They also know there is a whole population of morons who will buy their products to "own the libs." I tend to think it is this latter case because I don't really understand how a campaign like this could be fumbled so badly. The core gimmick "___ has good genes" could work if it brought in some sense of diversity of what genes can enable. Now obviously it could have had ableist connotations, but I'm sure they could've found some hot special olympians or something.
In Syd's case, I'm really not sure i have a strong opinion? It's against my principles to attribute intent based on someone's innate attributes. Though one would hope she'd flag "hey I don't think this ad really meshes with my worldview." She didn't, but I'd wager people rarely think about how their "look" can be read as a political statement. I don't particularly care about her party affiliation; heck I've considered changing my registration just so I can vote in their primaries.
Then we have the president's
tweetssquawks, which were read to me as well. Nothing really surprising there. It's operations as usual, commenting on something I don't need the highest government official wading in to. It comes at a good time for him as a distraction measure from the Epstein documents.And then the left's response... I agree that that the whole campaign is a bad look. More so that it doesn't sound like they are distancing themselves from the fascist groundswell of support. But this is just tiring. I understand that we can talk about multiple things, but the cost of doing so generates noise and prompts people tune out.
I can tell you for a fact that people are struggling to make ends meet and they couldn't care less about some starlett goosestepping down broadway in an AE polo. Because frankly, they need to get their kid from school to childcare in between getting from job 1 to job 2. They're thinking about if they have enough cash to fill up the car and get some necessities or if they should wait until next week's payday. Oh and hey, by the way, someone in the group chat is letting them know ICE is somewhere nearby and they might want to have someone else pick up their kid.
Because that is the voter we need back with us, the person being royally screwed by every decision made jointly between this admin, congress, and supreme court. None of this is relevant if the next two election cycles affirm our current state of affairs.
Everyone states that is subject isn't worth talking about, but everyone talks about it. :-)