The Sydney Sweeney Jeans Ad "Backlash" Is Mostly Fake

How a handful of TikTok comments became a national controversy about eugenics, Democrats, and denim.

So apparently we're all fighting about Sydney Sweeney's jeans now. Or her genes? Both, actually — that's the whole thing.

This week, American Eagle dropped a new denim campaign featuring the actress sprawled across various surfaces while delivering this gem of ad copy: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” Then, with timing that would make a dad joke enthusiast proud, she adds: “My jeans are blue.”

Get it? Genes. Jeans. She's wearing jeans and also has genetics. Revolutionary stuff.

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Within approximately 37 seconds, the internet did what the internet does. But here's the thing—when you actually look at this "massive backlash," it starts to feel a bit... manufactured?

Sure, some TikTokers made videos calling it fascist propaganda. A Columbia University lecturer analyzed it for eugenic messaging. But when you dig into the actual numbers, when you look for the hordes of furious liberals supposedly melting down over a jeans ad... they're surprisingly hard to find.

What you can find, in abundance, is the backlash to the backlash. Vice President JD Vance gleefully telling podcast hosts that Democrats attacking Sydney Sweeney for being beautiful is “how you're going to win the midterm.” The White House communications director calling critics “warped” and “moronic.” Ted Cruz rushing to defend... a jeans commercial. Countless right-wing accounts sharing the same handful of critical TikToks as evidence of widespread liberal hysteria.

The “controversy” even spawned a completely fake apology that went viral — one that joked about American Eagle not realizing “how big her boobs would be.” People shared it as if it were real, further proof of woke insanity. But it was just some content creator having a laugh.

You don't need an actual controversy anymore. You just need the idea of one.

And American Eagle? They're probably thrilled. Their stock price jumped, everyone's talking about their brand, and they got exactly what they wanted: attention. They might have even hired a crisis PR firm, though whether that's to handle actual criticism or just to look like they're taking the “controversy” seriously is anyone's guess.

Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images

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How the outrage machine works

Over at The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel wrote one of the smartest takes I've read about this whole phenomenon. His piece on the Sydney Sweeney controversy doesn't just catalog the usual “here's what people are saying on both sides” nonsense. Instead, he dissects exactly how a jeans ad becomes a cultural battlefield, and why calling any of this “discourse” is completely wrong.

Warzel nails the predictable cycle: “Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves... Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis.”

Sound familiar? It should, because we just lived through exactly this script. What started as maybe a dozen critical TikToks became “proof” of liberal hysteria, which became fodder for political statements, which became its own news cycle.

But here's Warzel's key insight: none of these people are actually talking to each other. “Instead, every participant—be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments — are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else's statement.”

We're creating content for an algorithmic system that strips away all the original context while dumping in everything else happening in the world: political anxiety, celebrity gossip, culture war grievances, whatever random beef is trending that day. A legitimate concern about eugenic messaging gets processed alongside Doja Cat posts and Ted Cruz tweets until it all becomes the same thing: raw material for the engagement machine.

And that machine doesn't care about making sense of anything. As Warzel puts it: “This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.” The system works perfectly — just not for us.

Random people become political symbols

The most insidious part of this whole machine is how it turns random people into stand-ins for entire political movements.

Warzel points out that news outlets are literally quoting Instagram comments from people with 119 followers and treating them as representative of broader public opinion. Some person leaves a comment on American Eagle's Instagram — maybe they're genuinely concerned, maybe they're trolling, maybe they're just trying to get likes — and suddenly BuzzFeed is presenting them as the voice of progressive outrage.

This does two horrible things at once. First, it gives these random comments way more weight and attention than they were ever supposed to carry. That person with 119 followers probably wasn't trying to become the poster child for anti-eugenics activism, but now they're getting dogpiled by thousands of people who think they represent everything wrong with the left. Their offhand comment becomes ammunition in a war they never enlisted in.

Second, it creates a sense of what “people” are actually saying. When you see a headline about “critics slamming” the Sweeney ad, you picture organized groups or prominent voices. You don't picture some person scrolling Instagram at 2am who left a comment that three people liked.

But those throwaway social media posts become “evidence” that the left has lost its mind, or that fascism is creeping into jeans ads, or whatever narrative someone wants to push. The machine takes the most extreme or poorly worded takes from the least representative voices and presents them as what “everyone” on their respective sides is thinking.

And here's the really sick part: once these random comments get amplified, they create the very controversy they're supposedly documenting. People see the headlines about “backlash” and feel compelled to pick a side, to defend or attack, to add their own statement to the pile. The fake controversy becomes real through sheer force of repetition.

The one-sided accountability trap

Former congressman Joe Walsh just posted something on Bluesky that perfectly captures how this whole system works as a one-sided political trap. A Democratic campaign consultant supposedly texted him: “This Sydney Sweeney thing is the kind of thing that turns men away from our party. It's why men think our party is weak & insane.” Walsh's response? “Fuck yea it is. You are exactly right.”

Democrats are constantly forced into taking responsibility for anything anyone vaguely left-coded says or does, anywhere, ever. Random college students protesting? Democrats have to answer for it. Someone on TikTok makes a comment about jeans being fascist? Time for Democratic soul-searching about why the party has lost touch with normal Americans.

Republicans face no such burden. When actual Republican politicians appear alongside white nationalists or retweet QAnon accounts, it's treated as an individual choice that doesn't reflect on the broader party. When conservative influencers spread conspiracy theories and hate, Republican strategists aren't fielding concerned texts about how it's driving away suburban moms.

But let some random progressive on Instagram react to an ad campaign, and suddenly every Democrat needs to have a position on Sydney Sweeney’s genetics.

Democrats get held accountable for every unhinged take from someone who might vote blue, while Republicans get to distance themselves from even their own elected officials when convenient. The asymmetry makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to control their own messaging, because they're constantly being defined by people who don't speak for them and never asked to.

Walsh's post does exactly what it pretends to criticize: it takes the manufactured outrage, amplifies it, and uses it as a cudgel against Democrats. He's not describing a real problem. He's creating one.

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Look, I'm not saying there weren't legitimate concerns about the ad. When actual eugenicists are gaining mainstream platforms and the government is posting straight-up racist imagery on social media, yeah, people are going to be hypervigilant about a blonde woman talking about genetic inheritance. That's not crazy. That's pattern recognition.

But the speed at which those concerns got weaponized, distorted, and turned into ammunition for the culture war? That's the real problem. We've built a system where every reaction becomes proof of someone's worst assumptions about their political enemies. Where a jeans ad can somehow become evidence that Democrats hate attractive women and Republicans love Nazis, simultaneously.

The exhausting truth is that this will happen again next week. And the week after that. Some brand will do something vaguely provocative, a handful of people will react, and we'll all pretend it's the most important thing happening in America. Politicians will weigh in. Think pieces will be written. Everyone will feel angry and righteous and absolutely certain they're on the right side.