It’s time to panic: The Nazis are coming! Eugenics are back! Whiteness is everywhere! It’s the 1940s all over again and somehow the puritans and capitalism are to blame.
Or maybe it’s just an ad for jeans.
Woke America is convinced it’s the former.
Here’s the story: American Eagle released a new ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed “it girl.” It’s like countless other ad campaigns. Sex sells. There’s cleavage. It’s sultry voiced and Sweeney’s butt takes center stage.
There’s really only one thing that makes this ad campaign unique: wordplay between jeans and genes.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color,” Sweeney says in one of the ads. “My jeans are blue.”
Blue genes jeans! Hitler would be so proud.
Dullards like me just see a bad pun. But to the woke-trained eye it’s obviously a call to white supremacy – to them there’s literally no other conclusion to draw than this being a nod to the eugenics movement a century ago and the sterilization of Jewish and Black people.
“The pun ‘good jeans’ activates troubling historical associations for this country,” Kean University Professor Robin Landa told Good Morning America. “The American eugenics movement, in its prime between like 1900 and 1940, weaponized the idea of good genes just to justify white supremacy.”
It must be a slow summer at Kean University, with professors so thirsty for relevance.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there.
“The new American Eagle ad with Sydney Sweeney? That’s Eugenics. Nazi propaganda. And its (sic) BLATENT. Like, you dont even need media literacy. It’s that on the nose obvious. And yet, people are still in denial,” novelist Elle M. Drew wrote on Threads.
Whether Nazism is on the rise is up for debate, but it’s clear sightings of alleged Nazism are rising. I’m starting to think people don’t actually remember who the Nazis were and what they did. Drew, whose credentials include writing books about “fat girls getting railed by the paranormal,” is hardly a subject matter expert, though I didn’t think you needed to be one to understand that bad puns about genes jeans are not even remotely equal to systematically annihilating six million Jews.
Woke America has clearly given this a lot of thought and at the same time almost no thought all at. Perhaps the most elaborate example of this overthought/underthought phenomenon comes from Velshi producer Hannah Holland.
“Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness,” blared Holland’s headline in MSNBC.com. The headline is woke babble and I’m not sure anyone really knows what it means.
For the sake of readers who are unfamiliar with the term “whiteness,” here’s a definition from the President of California State University, Sacramento, Dr. Luke Wood, who argued for the elimination of whiteness on an Internet talk show The Fallen State TV.
“Whiteness is an ideology,” Wood told host Jesse Lee Petersen, who makes it clear later that this is separate from white people (though he never explains how). “It’s a culture. It’s a value system. And what we need to do is eliminate that value system.”
Whatever that means.
Back to Holland and the American Eagle ads. Whiteness is apparently some kind of woke conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Holland never really explains the connection between whiteness and the ads and how whiteness is now unbridled.
Holland writes that “Popular American culture is, indisputably, becoming more puritanical and more conservative.” Indisputable as Holland might think it is, she never really develops this argument. But a contextual reading of the column suggests she doesn’t know what either puritanical or conservative means.
At the risk of mainsplaining, I’d just like to point out that puritans would not have talked about how great their butts looked in jeans (first and foremost because they wouldn’t have worn jeans) and they certainly wouldn’t have shown cleavage.
Holland would struggle to find many conservatives, myself included, who agree that American culture is becoming more conservative. I assume she means that one white model in tight jeans is a regression from, say, the disastrous Bud Light ads a few years back that featured a transgender influencer in a bubble bath, but that would suggest conservative means anything within the Overton Window.
No woke rant is complete without Marxism, so Holland also rages against “capitalist exploitation” and quotes Sweeney at length previously discussing her need to work for pay. Sweeney makes the case that Hollywood stars don’t get paid like they used to, especially after industry expenses, forcing her to “take deals because I have to.” Sweeney sounds like literally everyone with a job, but Marxists only hear exploitation.
“I cannot blame Sweeney for financially benefiting from a system that is going to exploit her either way,” Holland writes. “Still, 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.”
So what’s the takeaway from the controversy? Any mention of good genes is racist and proof of a Nazi revival. Working for money is bad, but also understandable, but also indicative of a system of exploitation. And academics are conspiracy theorists, worrying about abstract, ill-defined concepts like whiteness.
The ads are hardly evidence of conservative dominance in society. Instead, they are merely proof that pretty models are good at selling clothes.
The fact that Woke America’s response to the ads are gaining little traction beyond far left, elite circles is proof that our culture is not interested in adopting ideas and arguments that make little sense and call most of society bigots.
Matt Fleming is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Follow him on X @FlemingWords