This week, American Eagle, the clothing brand best known for being the step below Abercrombie & Fitch for 2000s-era high school students, made a big splash with an advertisement featuring Sydney Sweeney, of Euphoria and Once Upon a Time in America, talking about her good genes/jeans.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” she said in one of the ads. In response, a few people on social media pointed out that it felt a tad eugenics-y. I’m not certain we even know who those people were, but we know that it must have happened, because it caused a variety of other people to go off about a supposed “leftist meltdown” over the ads.
“Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women,” Ted Cruz said on X. “I'm sure that will poll well.”
On Bluesky, current centrist and former Tea Party freak Joe Walsh wrote, “A message I just got from a buddy of mine, who’s a long time Democratic Party campaign consultant: ‘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.’ My response to him? ‘Fuck yea it is. You are exactly right.’”
“I love how the leftist meltdown over the Sydney Sweeney ad has only resulted in a beautiful white blonde girl with blue eyes getting 1000x the exposure for her ‘good genes,’” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote Tuesday, because someone has to stick up for the “beautiful white blonde girls” out there.
Now, it’s more than clear that what we have here is another case of the Right trying to turn criticism of the ad from a few people into “THE LEFT IS LOSING THEIR VERY MINDS! THEY HATE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN!”
Also this week, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, a man who was briefly in charge of dismantling our entire government, got involved in an explicitly racist and misogynistic conversation, which culminated in his sharing a post about how women were “built” to be traded and “captured” by men.
This all started when Morgonn McMichael, a baby Phyllis Schlafly from Turning Point USA, asked, “Why do liberal white women hate white people so much?” Musk responded, “They’ve been programmed to do so by their teachers and the media.”
Sorry to repeat myself, but …
It really is quite bold of these folks to assume that what anyone “hates” is “white people” in general and not them in particular. I, for one, have many white friends.
Thousands of people responded to McMichael’s post and to Musk’s comment — practically all of them in vehement support of this truly batshit idea. Dissenting voices were few and far between. Imagine being that repugnant, as a person, and actually believing that people have be brainwashed to not like you.
And yet, it gets worse. Somehow. Because someone decided to get real sciencey about it, in a post that Musk decided to actually share.
Insightful. Women are built to be traded to another tribe (or captured) and slide seamlessly into their new culture. That keeps them safe, even though they are physically weak.
20 years after they are captured, they are the matriarchs who enforce that culture. That is why women conform to the dominant culture, and thereby amplify that culture. IMO, that is why Western women, raised in anti-white culture, are now amplifying anti-white culture, even though they are white. They think that keeps them safe, and they are correct, but only in the sort [sic] term. In the long term, they will be forced to remember they are white. Better they are reminded of that by white men, because the alternative is not so gentle.
This also got thousands of likes and hundreds of mostly positive responses from people who were very excited to agree with the idea that women are born to be property and are best off being controlled by white men.
This was the top reply.
“For a heck of a long time kidnapping was seen as a legitimate relationship strategy. From the historical accounts that I read some of those turned out to be very successful partnerships (and others led to husbands meeting early and violent ends).”
I think we can be relatively certain that this person has not read a single “historical account” of this, or of anything else.
But just so we’re clear, liberals are “crazy” for suggesting that anything might be a reference to the kind of creepy, outdated “race science” regularly espoused by the majority of X users, while the richest man in the world and his legions of followers are chatting about how “it’s just science” that liberal women hate white people because women are biologically programmed to be treated like property and we’re just going along with the dominant forces that brainwashed us into not liking racists.
Not only that, but that fairly moderate criticism from people who are not elected officials of any kind is what will keep people from voting for Democrats, but conservatives actually claiming that white people are genetically superior or that women are “built” to be kidnapped is not something that will reflect poorly on Republicans. Hell, you can have actual Republicans running for office on the GD Auschwitz slogan and not one person will step up to chastise them for making people not want to vote for Republicans.
Charlie Kirk can promote Steve Sailer, a white supremacist who dabbles in the fine art of scientific racism and who just published a book about “noticing” that Jewish people control the world. (In case you were not aware, “noticing” is an anti-Semitic dog whistle — one which Kirk freely uses in the post below.)
Oh! And you can also have conservatives responding to the Sydney Sweeney ad by expressing relief and gratitude that they have been liberated from years of brutal oppression in the form of ads that do not feature pretty, thin white blonde girls with large breasts (although I’m really going to need to point out that, despite making up only 59 percent of the country, white people account for 72 percent of those featured in advertisements). They can openly rejoice about the fact that the ads feature Sweeney and not Lizzo.
Though, to be fair, there are still those who are complaining that Sweeney is an ancient and haggard 27 years old instead of 15 like Brooke Shields was when she was in a Calvin Klein ad that bordered on child pornography.
The fact that the narrative this week is “Crazy liberals totally melt down over perfectly inoffensive ad! This is why people won’t vote for Democrats!” while all of this is going on is absurd.
The reason you see so many people saying “Oh! I have to vote Republican because the Left is just too woke and crazy!” isn’t because the Left is just too woke and crazy. It’s because they know exactly who they are aligning themselves with. They want to be on team “White people are genetically superior/Women are biologically predispositioned to be submissive to men/We are oppressed by Lizzo appearing in advertisements!” without it being a reflection on them and who they are as people. They want to be able to say “Well, you basically forced us to do this!” and far, far too many people who try to present themselves as trying to help the Left or help Democrats are more than happy to go along with it.
Anyone who would use this as an excuse to vote for Republicans at a time when mainstream Republicans are all over the internet saying, explicitly, what people suggested the American Eagle ad might be saying implicitly was never going to vote for Democrats anyway. It’s time to accept that, and to stop policing the Left for supposed overwokeness — because we’re just never going to be perfect enough for the kind of people who have a higher tolerance for out and out Nazi shit than they do for people maybe reading too much into an advertisement for jeans.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
The Sydney Sweeney ad is a little creepy, but the "good jeans" tagline falls flat because the jeans are not good at all. They're shapeless and cheap-looking and will look terrible on anyone except Sydney Sweeney.
I'm sick and tired of this "women are physically weak" bullshit. I've been sick and tired of it for 60 years.
Show me a man who can survive 14 pregnancies and childbirths while simultaneously keeping her house clean without any electrical devices, the laundry washed by hand, the chickens fed and the cows milked, the vegetable garden dug, weeded and harvested, and who also cooked 3 meals a day from scratch for her family PLUS several boarders while having to draw water from a well and heat every drop of it on a wood- or coal-burning stove, and also do do all this work while she's pregnant or has just buried 3 children during a diphtheria epidemic, and in return I'll show you my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my great-great grandmother, and so on back into the mists of time.
Not that my grandfather, great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather were slackers, they just did different work, which normally ended at sundown.
"A man can work from sun to sun
But a woman's work is never done."
Maybe I should send Elon a copy of Antonia Fraser's book "The Weaker Vessel" in which she writes about all the English women who ran their husband's or father's or son's farms and estates and businesses while their men were off fighting the English Civil War, and in general doing a better job than their menfolk had done, which pissed off the men if they returned home. Perhaps he should read "Gone With The Wind" as well.
There is a good quote in "The Weaker Vessel" that I like to re-use. Sir Hugh Cholmley wrote "My dear wife endured much hardship, and yet with little show of trouble; and though by nature, according to her sex, timorous, yet in greatest danger would not be daunted, but shewed a courage even above her sex.” We're all like that, Sir Hugh, and maybe you should think about why that is?
Perhaps Elon should talk to my great-great-grandmother who in 1862 was left alone on a small farm in Indiana with 4 children under 12 and a baby on the way, when my great-great-grandfather decided, at age 47, to enlist in the Union Army. She didn't even get a letter from him for 3 years. Somehow she survived. There are many different kinds of "strength" and woman have all of them when needs must. All Elon is good at is 1) hiring creative people to make lots of money for himself, while paying his employees lower than industry standard wages, and 2) impregnating women.