Sydney Sweeney and the Liberal Q

BlueAnon is getting next level

If you told me a year ago I’d be writing another article about Sydney Sweeney I’d have looked you in the eyes and said: anything for clicks. Erm, I mean, I’d say: how the hell could someone as innocuous as Sydney Sweeney be so central to more than one cultural moment this decade worth discussing on the kind of blog that calls Philip Larkin an asshole? Well, last time we were discussing the fascination the right has with proving they’re into women. I had a friend like that in high school. Now him and his boyfriend own a little bakery together or something. You can read that piece here:

This time around we’re writing about the reaction to Sweeney’s ascendancy from the left (namely liberals who call themselves “leftists”) who saw such brain-dead right-wing headlines as “Wokeness is no match for Sydney Sweeney’s undeniable beauty” and then somehow actually agreed with them, because now Sydney Sweeney is in some stupid American Eagle ads and based on the reactions people have been having to them you’d think they named the campaign “Mein Jeans.” The issue at the heart of the controversy is that the campaign is called “Sydney Sweeney Has Good Jeans.” Geddit? Jeans? Genes? Har har. Anyways apparently this is the dawning of the Fourth Reich and “shows an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness.” Unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness? What did we have before this? Have you seen the average Kendrick Lamar fan?

The most “insidious” ad of the lot was one where Sweeney just reads the dictionary definition of genes and then says “my jeans are blue!” People lost their shit over this. What the fuck is this? Are we all Lysenkoists now and just outright denying the field of genetics? The mentioning of genes does not automatically equate to eugenics. And saying someone “has great genes” is just a normal colloquialism, it’s just something that people say about attractive people. If you’ve never heard it before you’re probably just fugly—which isn’t a stretch for the people I’m describing really, I mean, have you ever scrolled through the DSA’s socials and seen what the people in the group photos they post look like? It’s fucking brutal, dude.

Anyways, much like conservatives started to develop a belief that advertising was trying to turn their kids gay and trans, liberals are now developing a belief that advertising is trying to turn their kids on to race science. Both of these propositions are ridiculous. What both the immaterial cultural left and the cultural right have failed to understand (somehow) is that corporate advertising isn’t actually about turning kids queer or overturning Buck v. Bell. What corporate advertising is actually about is making money. Now that the idpol-oriented cultural left is on the back foot they have to adopt the same ridiculous stance that the cultural right did when THEY were on the back foot for the last decade, which is screaming hysterically about advertisements being part of some secret agenda and filled with political dogwhistles, all while missing the fact that their overreactions are good for the advertisers. Whether the Sweeney jeans ads were made to dogwhistle or not is sort of irrelevant—the point is that these kinds of reactions to the perceived dogwhistles will mean that we will be entering into is an era of ceaseless intentional ones. You have to understand: these days it’s very difficult to get someone to pay attention to an advertising campaign, so it’s often helpful to have second-order advertising, meta-advertising that gets people to pay attention to the ads that in turn get people to pay attention to the brand. I would have never even seen or heard of the ads had people not gotten mad about them, and this is identical to the right-wing brouhahas of yesteryear over Keurig and Gilette and whatever. I can’t tell you for certain whether American Eagle intended to make people angry about eugenics, but I am pretty certain they intended to do this:

But American Eagle doesn’t “mean” it, they just saw that people were overreacting and wanted to keep it going. The thing is, American Eagle’s CEO is an actual Nazi, he’s just not the kind who typically likes Hitler and Aryan race theory; that is to say that, rather than thinking that Jews invented “Bolshevism,” he’s the kind of Nazi who believes that Jews invented falafel. He’s a Zionist who materially supports the IDF. Yes, some Jewish Zionists actually do bizarrely seem to like Hitler, but it is unlikely that Jay Schottenstein would let his company earnestly heil Hitler. And how the hell would an Ashkenazi Jewish guy really be that on board with eugenics? Most of my Ashkenazi friends have scoliosis, IBS, are nearly blind, and have no less than three allergies that could kill them on the spot. Come on!

I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret I’m sure a lot of my readers have already clued in on: I intentionally try to make people mad in my blogs, I’m a troll. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t actually mean the things I say, I do, but the team here at Discordia specifically plans our posts around when we’re going to get people mad next, because when people get mad at us they’re likely to comment or to share to vent their anger. These posts are doubtlessly entertaining to write and entertaining to read, but they also boost us in the algorithm on a site where there’s so much noise that it’s hard to get traction otherwise. But the people who hate us can’t help but help us, and this has encouraged us to keep doing it—they are specifically giving us reason to do the thing they hate again, and again, and again.

People thinking that the American Eagle ads were “racist” got them a lot of attention, just like the now-diminishing returns on “woke” ads once did. Trump wound up endorsing the ads, because he watches Fox News too much, and then American Eagle’s stock price soared as a result. So the advertisers leaned into it. By giving them that attention, these people have encouraged not only American Eagle but an entire fleet of corporations to begin “dogwhistling” more and more egregiously just to get a rise out of them. This is about to get very annoying.