The American left has always had a knack for turning the innocuous into the outrageous, but the recent uproar over American Eagle’s jeans campaign starring Sydney Sweeney may be a new low. The whole thing was so stupid you almost have to believe it was a prank gone wrong. But, the sad fact is that there are people in this country who desperately want to see bigotry lurking behind everything.
From the moment Sydney Sweeney appeared in American Eagle’s new campaign, half-draped in a buttoned-down denim jacket, the stage was set. What was the crime? A little cheeky wordplay on “genes” and “jeans,” delivered by a young, blonde, blue-eyed actress.
“Genes are inherited from parents to children,” Sweeney says in one clip, while in another, she smiles playfully as the camera zooms in: “My body’s composition is determined by my genes.” That’s all it took. Cue a firestorm of accusations on social media: coded appeals to whiteness, subtle dog whistles, even “Nazi propaganda,” for crying out loud.
Welcome to 2025, where a simple ad about pants somehow ignites a nationwide uproar over supposed Nazi propaganda. It’s bad enough that liberals constantly label Republicans as Nazis, but this latest outrage continues to make it clear that calling someone a Nazi has become nothing more than a knee-jerk reflex for them—an empty insult rather than a serious accusation.
While most of the country laughed it off, there’s clearly a concerted effort to cancel Sydney Sweeney, because now there’s a big stink being made about the fact that someone has uncovered her voter registration status. It appears that she’s a registered Republican.
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Let’s take a collective breath and ask the fundamental question: Why should anyone care which party Sydney Sweeney affiliates with? Seriously. Since when did we decide that every public figure’s private political choices are fair game for national news, viral posts, and fever-pitched demands for cancellation? The answer, of course, is that the left has become obsessed with gatekeeping the public sphere from anyone—celebrity or not—who dares to step outside carefully prescribed ideological boundaries. It's not enough for Sweeney to act or promote a brand; she must now pass the purity test of the activist class, lest she be declared unfit for polite society.
The progression from calling a commercial “Nazi propaganda” to exposing Sweeney’s voter registration tells us everything that’s wrong with the climate we’ve created.
Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the days when we didn’t know the politics of Hollywood actors, and there wasn’t a cabal of leftists itching to be outraged by everything? Even the White House had to weigh in after leftists pounced on her again, with Trump’s communications director rightly calling it “cancel culture run amok.” This isn’t the first time Sweeney has drawn the ire of the left—liberals also smeared her back in 2022 when her family threw a harmless birthday party featuring playful “Make Sixty Great Again” hats and “Blue Lives Matter” shirts. They’re clearly looking for any excuse to go after her.
At some point, the American left stopped caring about actual bigotry and started hunting for it where it doesn’t exist because they have nothing to offer. The real story here isn’t about jeans, genes, or even Sydney Sweeney—it’s about a movement so consumed by outrage that they’re addicted to it.
