While Ms. Sweeney might be an unlikely avatar for our increasingly illiberal and insane times, an avatar of the left’s hate and endless outrage, she certainly is. Indeed, the absurdity of the whole situation only helps illustrate the point.
Last week, Sydney Sweeney made news once again when detractors objected to her choice of clothing and hairstyle during an appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” to promote her new movie, The Housemaid. For the crime of donning what CNN described as a “form-fitting maroon dress that finished just above her ankles and with a lacquered blonde bob that curved under her face,” she was accused of playing politics of the kind progressives loathe, “likened by many critics to a right-wing news anchor…as observers made spirited comparisons to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Ivanka Trump and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly” with one person insisting Ms. Sweeney and her team were “doing this sh*t on purpose.” To prove this simply had to be the case and progressives simply couldn’t have gone insane over nothing, CNN once again brought in the experts to analyze Ms. Sweeney, as though she were an alien that had recently arrived from the Planet Nazi. Not surprisingly, both Marie Claire and The New York Times agreed with her critics that “form-fitting skirt suits, sky-high stilettos, bouncy blow-dries and full coverage makeup” are essential to achieving a look that is “hyper-feminine” and that hyperfeminine is MAGA because it is seen at Mar-a-Lago “to an almost cartoonish degree” with fashion being a means to “reinforce that proposition.” Who knew? Regardless, this was enough for CNN to declare that “Sydney Sweeney’s clothes are getting on people’s nerves” and perhaps even worse, they don’t seem to find this strange at all, not when the “reactions to Sweeney’s look perhaps makes more sense when you consider the journey her public image has had lately.” In that regard, “controversy has never been far” throughout her entire career, but what sort of controversy, you ask? Has she actually done anything even remotely objectionable, either personally, professionally, or even politically? Has she been involved in any scandals? Arrested? Has she abused or attacked anyone? Cheated on her taxes? Stolen? Committed fraud or cheated anyone? Otherwise, has she even made a single actual political statement, endorsed a candidate, or been directly involved in any political endeavor of any kind? Based on the outrage that accompanies her almost anywhere these days, you might be surprised to learn that the answer is no. She has not done anything of the sort, but back in 2022, “photos of Sweeney at a family birthday party where guests wearing MAGA-style caps went viral, raising eyebrows and soliciting questions about her own political leanings” and in August this year, “reports surfaced that Sweeney had been a registered Republican in the state of Florida since June 2024.” The horror!
Of course, even CNN is able to correctly identify the real moment Ms. Sweeney became a prime target for the progressive outrage machine, noting “it was her American Eagle ad that has garnered the most criticism for its perceived eugenicist rhetoric” but if anything, this characterization downplays the accusations and the accompanying expert commentary. Ms. Sweeney didn’t merely garner criticism. She was personally slandered and promptly branded a white supremacist, Nazi, who was intentionally promoting this ideology for simply playing on “jeans,” as in what one wears, and “genes,” as in the DNA that determines certain aspects of our physical appearance and mental make up – as others have done before her since Brooke Shields almost fifty years ago. If this is controversial, anything and everything is. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring,” she said mildly enough in the original spot. “Often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color…my jeans are blue,” she declared followed by a voiceover stating, ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.’” This was the total content of the advertisement, but for that, MSNBC and others went even further than slandering her personally, claiming that not only was she advancing eugenics, she was engaged in an “ugly and startling” reflection of society somehow, namely because Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office and they will never get over that fact. According to Hannah Holland, for example, the “advertisement, the choice of Sweeney as the sole face in it and the internet’s reaction reflect an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness, conservatism and capitalist exploitation. Sweeney is both a symptom and a participant.” While Ms. Holland, rather generously, “cannot blame Sweeney for financially benefiting from a system that is going to exploit her either way, her willingness to participate in such an obviously damaging — and, depending on who you ask, even dangerous — advertising campaign as the latest American Eagle collection is disappointing.” “Popular American culture,” you see, “is indisputably, becoming more puritanical and more conservative. It isn’t just that far-right ideology is proliferating on the fringe; our entire cultural ethos has moved further right, allowing for this sort of content. Young women are being radicalized through so-called clean skin care and healthy eating, internet slang once used exclusively by women-hating incels is mainstream, and people are unabashedly self-identifying as fascist on public platforms.” Before wondering why a puritanical society would promote a scantily clad babe barely wearing jeans or how promoting better eating habits relates to anything at all, Ms. Holland concluded, “An advertisement that so many are condemning as a ‘eugenics dog whistle’ fits into this movement. Sweeney and American Eagle deserve much scrutiny over this, but so does our own crumbling and fractured American culture that made this all possible in the first place,” she wrote, condemning all of society in the process.
From there, the media engaged the real card carrying-experts to analyze the situation further and not surprisingly, conclude that the advertisement was both racist to the core and couldn’t simply be a matter of critics misinterpreting it for whatever reason. Instead, it could only be intentional, simply h ad to yet another means to hurt black people somehow because of whiteness, or something. Once again, CNN dutifully entered the breach. “This is intentional. This is pointed, and you’re calling out to the consumers that you hope to attract here,” explained Cheryl Overton, a long-time brand strategist and communications executive. “If American Eagle is really out there trying to target Americans to the right or to the far right, so be it. If that’s who the product is designed for now, that is their right as a company to do that. But you have to know that folks are educated, folks are nuanced, and folks are willing to call brands out.” Educated? Nuanced? For reading racism into an advertisement and carrying on about the rise of fascism? “Our leadership team passed around some articles about it, and we were discussing whether we thought the American Eagle team when it first came out, did they understand? Were they trying to do something edgy and sexy that came across racist and didn’t recognize that?” wondered Kimberly Jefferson, senior vice president of client relations at PANBlast, a public relations firm. “A quick look at their leadership team: They’re a very white organization. So did they just miss it? Or is this intentionally playing to at best, a conservative, at worst, a racist ideal system that is pervasively growing in America? We went back and forth on that. How intentional was this?” “It seemed clear to me that they were aligning themselves with a white nationalist, MAGA-friendly identity,” answered Shalini Shankar, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University who studies youth and advertising. “I think that this is them trying to rebrand themselves for the present moment, and language is very deliberately used here. People don’t invoke genetics casually. It’s just, it’s very, very easy to sell denim without ever referencing it.” Meanwhile, those, like myself and others, who insisted it was just an advertisement and should not have generated anywhere near this amount of outrage were part of a “louder and nastier wave of disdain that people would dare suggest the ad was intentionally about race — or that everyone was being stupid for talking about jeans anyway.” “There’s been a lot of conservative finger-wagging, like, ‘This is just a jeans ad,’” noted Emma McClendon, a fashion historian and assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University, “who literally teaches a class on denim.” “But I think that that just plays also on stereotypes of fashion being frivolous, and this just being jeans. The reality is that there’s nothing more intimate to our identity than how we outfit our bodies.”
At the same time, others took MSNBC’s cue and continued the idea that this was a moment to condemn society as a whole. Perhaps, the most ridiculous among these takes was The Atlantic. In their view, conservatives began latching on to Ms. Sweeney long before the advertisements because she gives men (and presumably lesbians?) permission to “love boobs.” As they put it in a newsletter during the peak of the so-called controversy, “her image has been co-opted by the right, accurately or not, in part because of where she’s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars). Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs.” In support of this notion, the newsletter linked to an article from March 6, 2024, posted by The Spectator, “Sydney Sweeney and the return of real body positivity” where Bridget Phetasy, not exactly a household name in conservative commenting circles or an influencer of any kind that I am aware, plus a woman no less which sort of undercuts the entire idea that hordes of misogynists are salivating to free the nipple on large-breasted women only, claimed that “Our fascination with the female figure never went away.” Truly, shocking, shocking, far right-wing stuff. Back then, Ms. Phetasy was reacting to Ms. Sweeney’s recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, noting “Yay! Boobs are back! Sydney Sweeney made engagement farming easy with her cleavage-revealing curtain call this past weekend as the host of Saturday Night Live. If you spend any time online at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Wrapped in a revealing little black dress, Sydney thanks the cast, the crew, Lorne Michaels and giggles and bounces in familiar ways I haven’t seen in decades. For anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime – as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.” While we might debate whether Ms. Phetasy’s column was strictly true, false, or some combination of the two, The Atlantic was somehow convinced this was a right wing issue where conservatives and conservatives alone have been clamoring to someone, anyone for the freedom to love boobs, but Ms. Sweeney, to her credit, refused to apologize or retract the advertisement, or deny that she was bringing back cleavage for conservative purposes, which of course, only angered progressives further.
Without irony or self-awareness, CNN dutifully noted this aspect of the dynamic in their article over the weekend, claiming “Sweeney didn’t initially address the uproar caused by the campaign, causing people to draw their own conclusions on how the actor felt about the ad,” as though it was somehow incumbent upon everyone else to indulge their wild outrages over a simple advertisement and ignoring the reality that it’s exceedingly strange to continue to be this upset months later over what amounts to nothing at all. As recently as November, Ms. Sweeney was still being pressed to apologize, such as during an interview with GQ. When asked, “We’re sort of talking around this American Eagle ad right now, and maybe we should just talk about it. Were you surprised by the reaction?” She answered simply enough, “I did a jean ad. I mean, the reaction definitely was a surprise, but I love jeans. All I wear are jeans. I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt every day of my life.” When prompted to comment on President Trump, or should I say condemn him because that’s what the interviewer really wanted, “The president and the vice president spoke about the jeans ad. What was that like?” She declared, “It was surreal.” When confronted about it again, this time referencing the ever present political climate, which is always terrible when progressives are not in power, “Is there something that you want to say about the ad itself? The criticism of the content was basically that, maybe specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority.” She chose to shut down the conversation entirely, declaring “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.” Afterwards, there was yet another eruption from the left that she refused to comply with their outlandish demands, their fever dreams that they and they alone control the entire conversation on everything and anything. “She was given the opportunity to push back and she didn’t. Therefore, she’s in on it,” a post on Instagram went viral and was liked by SZA, actress Christina Ricci, and Aimee Lou Wood. “Sydney Sweeney’s GQ interview is a reminder that ‘not having a stance’ on white supremacy is 100% having a stance on white supremacy,” claimed Downton Abbey actor, Dan Stevens. Celebrity photographer and activist Misan Harriman, posted, “Presuming that you are not a white supremacist, at least say how horrified you were by how this campaign was amplified and celebrated by unrepentant racists who believe in eugenics,” adding “At least recognise the harm your jeans campaign has caused black folk,” suggesting tens of thousands of black people were crying in the street, bleeding on the inside from this brutal attack, and Ms. Sweeney refused to lift them up.
Since then, she has said only the obvious to anyone not living and breathing outrage because Donald Trump is President. “I was honestly surprised by the reaction. I did it because I love the jeans and love the brand. I don’t support the views some people chose to connect to the campaign. Many have assigned motives and labels to me that just aren’t true.” “Anyone who knows me knows that I’m always trying to bring people together. I’m against hate and divisiveness,” she continued, rather mildly and apparently too mild for progressive tastes when they are thirsting for figurative blood. “In the past my stance has been to never respond to negative or positive press but recently I have come to realize that my silence regarding this issue has only widened the divide, not closed it. So I hope this new year brings more focus on what connects us instead of what divides us,” she added, but that obviously wasn’t enough because nothing will ever be enough. As irrational as it sounds for a movement that believes they are steeped in logic and science, they hate her purely because of a silly, recycled advertisement and her refusal to bend the knee afterwards. There is nothing more to it than that, but if this is enough of a sin to cause a nearly half year vendetta with journalists pressing for apologies over nothing months later and CNN covering her wardrobe choices for hidden symbols of the Third Reich, what hope does anyone who actually advances an actual conservative ideology or participates in the political process have? The answer is, obviously, none. We saw this with Charlie Kirk, and the dancing on his grave. By this point, it should be obvious to anyone who isn’t part of the progressive machine: You either conform or obey, or you become a target for even the slightest of things, even for not saying anything at all and simply doing your job. While Ms. Sweeney might be an unlikely avatar for our increasingly illiberal times, an avatar of the left’s hate and endless outrage, she certainly is. Indeed, the absurdity of the whole situation only helps illustrate the point.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 