Sydney Sweeney knows what she’s doing

In a normal world, a sentence like “American Eagle’s new ad campaign, ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,’ seems like it might be a dog whistle for eugenicists” would simply not have to exist. With all of my heart, I wish for that world. I’m confident that we all have better things to do than listen to a TV star with end-stage vocal fry say “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color” while the camera ogles her body, which is draped in denim that’s somehow both slouchy and formfitting.

This is not a normal world.

It was already not a normal world back in 2016, when a generation of white supremacists who existed, thankfully, largely online, declared that Taylor Swift was a secret Nazi. This “pure Aryan goddess,” per The Daily Stormer, was biding her time as a beloved pop star until “Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda.” Fox News demanded to know when she would bless them with white babies. All were crushed when Swift turned out to be a girl’s girl, a proud cat lady and, worst of all, a Democrat. But after breaking out on the streaming hits “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus,” Sweeney offered a second chance to worship at the feet of a new white queen.

And by “feet,” I of course mean “breasts.” Sydney Sweeney’s breasts are so magnificent, so powerful, that they have broken people’s brains. These are not people who watch “Euphoria,” because to them, “Euphoria” is leftist propaganda about young people doing drugs and having transgender gal pals. For them, Sweeney is not an actor, but an avenging Aryan angel. For several years, they have read her breasts like tea leaves, seeing in them their own hopes and fears proudly rising up against a world gone mad.

Take Richard Hanania, the white-nationalist dork who tweeted a picture of Sweeney’s cleavage with the caption “Wokeness is dead” in March 2024, after she made her debut as a “Saturday Night Live” host. (All the jokes were about her breasts.) Building on Hanania’s tweet, Amy Hamm celebrated Sweeney’s “Double-D harbingers of the death of woke” in Canada’s National Post. Yet another outlet warned that maybe none of us were ready for the re-emergence of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack,” an archetype who had apparently been “shamed to the brink of existence” — in fact, the writer theorized, people under 25 might never have even seen such a woman before.

This razor-sharp analysis followed a handful of years of a microtrend: cosmetics and fashion brands making the commercially sound decision to be more inclusive — a recent example can be found in Ralph Lauren championing Black excellence with their new Oak Bluffs collection. Hanania and Hamm were among those who felt personally attacked by ads featuring plus-sized and nonwhite models. They insisted that it was folly of a woke mob “pressuring” all of us, as Hamm bleated, to “[pretend] everyone is beautiful.” For conservative culture warriors, the elevation of even one unconventional hottie was a slap in the face to tradition. To patriotism. To America itself. In Sweeney, they saw a protector whose glorious headlights illuminated a path out of stultifying political correctness.

Sweeney, unlike Swift, hasn’t rebuffed this worship. She hasn’t necessarily embraced it, either, despite centering herself in relevant controversy by sharing photos from her mother’s 60th birthday party featuring “guests in what appeared to be Blue Lives Matter garb and MAGA-themed red hats that read, ‘Make Sixty Great Again,’” according to Entertainment Weekly, and “reportedly launching a lingerie brand, with backing from [a] Bezos-linked investor,” per Vanity Fair. But in her other career as an omnipresent brand ambassador for a dizzying number of companies — Kérastase haircare, Bai beverages, HEYDUDE footwear, K-beauty brand Laneige and more — she’s made clear that she’s happy to sell what people want to buy. Sweeney’s most prominent partnerships are ones that underscore her blond, blue-eyed Americaness: Ford, Dickies workwear, Baskin-Robbins. Her appearance in a series of ads for the guy-centric soap brand Dr. Squatch resulted in such a chorus of awoogas that the company was inspired to create “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss,” a limited-edition soap that claimed to include a drop of Sweeney’s own bathwater in each bar.

In other words, Sweeney and everyone else involved in the “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” campaign know what it is and who it’s for: They know the genes/jeans homophone might go over the heads of their target young-adult audience, but that the fuss it kicks up will have a subliminal effect. They know that the wordplay will delight people who believe that wokeness has robbed them of their god-given right to big naturals. They certainly know that “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” would resonate at a time when immigrants are openly persecuted by a president who speaks regularly of bloodlines, “bad genes,” and “cleaning out” Gaza’s Palestinian population.

They might not know that in the United States, eugenics has always been a marketing campaign in search of the right audience. That would be understandable. Adolf Hitler’s dream of a master race was heavily influenced by the rhetoric and policy of the United States in the first three decades of the 20th century. In turn, the United States was more than happy to let Hitler take all the blame years later.

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The American eugenics movement, incubated by Ivy League researchers and underwritten by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute, sought to engineer a population of Nordic Americans by ensuring that Black people, people with disabilities, immigrants, Jews, “mongrel Virginians” and even just the suspiciously dark-haired would not reproduce. By way of culturally exclusionary questions (later developed into what we know as IQ tests), entire family lines were deemed morally degenerate or feebleminded; ultimately, at least 60,000 Americans were sterilized.

Edwin Black’s 2003 book “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” credits California eugenicists with “publish[ing] booklets idealizing sterilization and circulat[ing] them to German officials and scientists,” which gave the emerging Übermensch ideology of the Nazi party an imprimatur of medical science. After World War II ended, eugenics was classified as a crime against humanity, and America’s sterilization programs were tidily memory-holed. But like so much organized bias, it never died out: As recently as 2022, 31 states had laws that allowed for the involuntary sterilization of their citizens with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

(Emma McIntyre/WireImage/Getty Images) Sydney Sweeney attends the premiere of “Eden” during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival on September 07, 2024

But that’s old-style eugenics, the kind no one really wants to draw attention to because it’s shameful. The whizzy, tech-centered pronatalism that major news outlets can’t stop writing about, though? The disruption of the eugenic space by genetic engineering and venture capital? That’s the zeitgeist. Advocates of the new eugenics have rebranded as “protnatalists”: They organize conferences and summits, fret over birth rates on various podcasts, and are portrayed as oddball curiosities who just really want people — you know the ones — to have more babies. The daddy figure of new eugenics is Donald Trump, who regularly refers to his enemies as “low-IQ individuals” and has wished publicly for an immigrant population that comes from Nordic, as opposed to “sh*thole,” countries. He told conservative media personality Hugh Hewitt that he believes immigrants have murder “in their genes,” adding, “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” They aren’t ashamed to advocate for a master race because, from their point of view, it is sound social and economic policy.

I was inaccurate in saying that this isn’t the normal world. It is, and it has been. But because the American imagination defines eugenics only as something that belongs to a different place (Nazi Germany) and a long-ago past (World War II), it is understandably difficult to acknowledge the various ways it is shaping national conversations. Of course, people are going to call out the backlash to Sydney Sweeney’s good jeans as woke fantasy and post TikTok comments like “Calm down people, it’s denim not eugenics lol.” Of course, Ted Cruz — a man long overdue for a bid in Horny Jail — will pipe up with a banal insult about “the Crazy Left.”

There’s no space for a good-faith conversation about what this ad campaign was or was not meant to be. I can draw a straight line between the race-science ravings of the president and a celebrity-designed pair of jeans, but I can’t keep someone else from seeing that line as red yarn on a conspiracy board. I don’t disagree with The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, whose exasperated piece identifies this whole brouhaha as a shining example of distributed online chaos. “What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether — an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people upset at scale.”

He’s correct; this will never make sense. The context of American Eagle’s ad campaign is a mediated political ecosystem that is, by now, nonsensical by design. Its institutions, judicial bodies and business interests benefit from a flummoxed population urged not to trust what they see in front of them. The irony of “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” is that everyone, whatever their beliefs, can recognize what it actually is — an attempt to boost flagging sales numbers by way of both outrage and breasts. But we can go further and acknowledge that it’s also a reflection of another American classic: the ever-present desire to overwrite history.