Liberals Are the Hysterical Ones?

Last week, America was consumed by The Sydney Sweeney Story, which seemed to quiet down over the weekend until President Trump weighed in. But the thing is, The Sydney Sweeney Story is not The Story. The Story is what this whole affair reveals about us—and it's much more concerning than the copy for a denim ad.

If you have somehow managed to miss this debacle, congratulations on a life well lived, but here is where your luck runs out: two weeks ago, the apparel brand American Eagle posted a video on its YouTube featuring the actor Sydney Sweeney, who tells us: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” After a long pan up her American Eagle Canadian tuxedo-clad body, she says into the camera: “My jeans are blue.” The tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Genes” appears onscreen.

Get it? Genes sounds like “jeans,” and she has both great genes (in terms of being conventionally attractive) and great jeans (in terms of wearing American Eagle denim).

And then balloons and confetti fell from the sky because it was the one thousandth occasion this year in which I found out about something for the first time because somebody on the television told me I was outraged over it.

In the immediate aftermath of the ad’s release, there was some low-key internet pushback suggesting that it appeared to dog-whistle some white-supremacist eugenic theory: to posit Sweeney’s blonde and blue-eyed genes as “great,” goes the argument, is to imply that other genes are “not great,” as Nazis have traditionally been fond of saying. The Internet had done its job by reacting in real time, and cable news and talk radio had done its job by smirking about it. It had been a tempest in a Twitter feed, maximum fuel for Fox News as they continue not to cover Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a minimum-security prison. And, I imagine, it was exactly what American Eagle was aiming to accomplish. Business as usual.

Then, on Monday, our big wet President decided to insert himself into the situation. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social, “Go get ‘em, Sydney!” American Eagle stock shot up nearly 25 percent, and though now it's pretty much back where it was before he weighed in, the Sweeney story has a new supply of oxygen. Lucky us.

Neither Sydney Sweeney nor American Eagle nor the fact that the President of the United States has time to think about ads (nor even that he thinks about them in terms of their relative HOTNESS) is the story. They are just new terms to plug into the Mad Libs that is our current national discourse. Just new meat to feed The Story.

The Story is that liberals are insane, prone to take offense at every tiny thing, and eager to silence and cancel every voice with which they do not approve. That is The Story today, was The Story yesterday, and it will be The Story tomorrow.

Hold on one sec, I’m going to put on a record by the Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks, who once told a live audience they were ashamed to be from the same state as then-President George W. Bush in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. As a result, they had their albums publicly burned, their music pulled from country music radio, and their lives repeatedly and credibly threatened.

Okay, I’m back.

“The left are angry and loony” is The Story, and anything can be shaped to fit and support it. You start with “the left are angry and loony” as your conclusion, you search social media or Reddit for three to six supporting examples, you publish your post or outline your talk-radio segment, and Jesse Watters has things to make faces at for the whole week. This is the game as it is always played, and it is ALWAYS played: Here goes the loony left again.

The trouble is that this is a very lazy game, and an even lazier way to report the news, because it need not reflect actual reality. Anyone can start with any conclusion, find three to six supporting examples on social media or Reddit, and hit publish. Just last weekend, Cynthia Erivo (you know her from Wicked) played the title role in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. If I wanted to write a story about the conservative outrage over that casting choice, I wouldn’t even have to go digging for the supporting material, enough of it has already popped up in my feeds. Would that tell us any truth worth knowing, or would it tell us what three to six cranks on social media or Reddit had the time to post?

Fuck it, if I wanted to write about how landscape architects from Cedar Rapids are outraged about Tuesdays, or how left-handed Mormons have abandoned ranch dressing, I could do that. The Internet is big enough to contain all opinions. Cable news airtime is finite, and there is only enough time to tell the news that fits the pre-ordained conclusion. That doesn’t mean the conclusion is true.

This device is so lazy and intellectually empty, there are only two forms of media that still regularly employ it: conservative news networks and soap opera magazines. Here are a few recent headlines from the latter:

It's the same game, played the same way, with the same existential purpose: to keep The Story alive. To keep the people tuned in, and emotionally invested. Maybe even, you know, outraged.

Just the other day on Fox News, over the chyron SYDNEY SWEENEY’S SCREWBALL SAGA, a psychotherapist named Jonathan Alpert said: “For years, brands have bent over backwards to appease a small but loud activist class, producing ads that felt forced, joyless, and polarizing. Instead of speaking to consumers, they pandered to an ideology that policed language, celebrated grievance, and punished anything deemed insufficiently progressive.”

Maybe I missed all of that. From my couch, it looked like brands were diversifying the faces and voices in their ads and generally making an attempt to attract wider consumer bases. Seems pretty American to me.

But I did notice this: later in his Truth Social post—which he pulled down and reposted at least twice to fix various spelling and grammar errors but still had superfluous commas all over the damn place—Trump crowed over the apparent failure of a recent Jaguar ad. “On the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid, and seriously WOKE advertisement, THAT IS A TOTAL DISASTER! The CEO just resigned in disgrace, and the company is in absolute turmoil. Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad.”

Let's look at that disgraceful ad.

I don't know, man. A future where we're all living in a New Order video is pretty much the best-case scenario as far as I'm concerned. But he did not stop there. “Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from Bud Lite, which went Woke and essentially destroyed, in a short campaign, the Company. The market cap destruction has been unprecedented, with BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SO FOOLISHLY LOST.”

It is worth pointing out that the Instagram video to which our Very Dignified President refers was less than one-minute long, and was posted to the feed of its star Dylan Mulvaney. It is worth pointing out that it is Fox News who amplified it by putting it on television, fanning the flames of that Bud Light controversy to the point where a newly-aggrieved public were punishing the brand with a boycott and Kid Rock was buying enough cases to make a pyramid and shoot at it. It is worth pointing out that, as with the Sydney Sweeney story, the strongest reactions came from the right's most powerful voices. It is also worth pointing out that it is from Fox News that I even learned who Dylan Mulvaney is in the first place.

Let's be honest: it is worth asking whether an ad that presents a blonde, blue-eyed person as an example of “good genes,” at a time in America when Nazis seem to be, let's say, less quiet about being Nazis, is a good idea. I worked in advertising in the anything-goes 1990s, and I saw things get flagged for less. But we must also be honest about this: nobody asking this question is demanding that the American Eagle ads be pulled or the brand be boycotted or Sweeney's future jobs be given to someone else, while popular talk-show hosts are losing their shows, network television news divisions are bending the knee to the current administration, and a perfectly good American beer is struggling to regain market share.

No, Sydney Sweeney doing an ad for American Eagle is not The Story. The Story is who's doing the policing, who's celebrating which grievance, who's punishing whom, and who will be at the center of it by the end of this week. And the question is: how many more times can we go on this ride?