“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” an American Eagle ad announced, prompting a culture war on whether its newest advertising campaign centers on cheeky wordplay or something more sinister.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” actress Sweeney, decked in denim, said in one video version of the adreleased July 23. “My jeans are blue.”
On one side, people saw dog whistles in the script. “Jeans” is a homonym for “genes,” leading people to believe it had eugenicist tones.
“A blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white woman is talking about her good genes. Like, that is Nazi propaganda,” one TikTok users.
On the other side, people said it’s just a pun.
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Even the White House weighed in. In an episode of the “Ruthless” podcast, Vice President JD Vance said it appears the Democrats’ strategy is to “tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi.” We did not find examples of Democratic leaders weighing in on the ad.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung decried “cancel culture run amok” and that “this warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024.”
Did the backlash “run amok”? If so, how far did it get? How did it compare to the reach of the campaign’s defenders?
The conversation is easiest to assess on X, with searches possible by date and number of reposts.
We collected more than 60 X posts in English with more than 1,000 views and containing the words “Sydney Sweeney” and an opinion on the ads between July 23 and July 31. What we found shows the discussion on X was disproportionately skewed in support of the campaign, with amplification from Republican leaders and pundits, many of whom described the outcry as “woke.” X owner, Elon Musk, has been vocal about eliminating “woke” on the platform.
Collectively, 58 posts expressing support for the campaign or opposing the “Nazi” criticism gained more than 198,100 shares, 1.8 million likes and 87.1 million views.
In the same time frame, we saw four X posts meeting the criteria that criticized the campaign, with 12,400 shares, 287,000 likes and 11 million views in total. That means there’s nearly one post criticizing the ad for every 15 posts defending it.
Defenders of the American Eagle campaign included conservative influencers Benny Johnson and Megyn Kellyeach of whom have more than 3.5 million X followers. Among the four X users posting against the ad, one had a blue-check account and more than 127,000 followers, but is not as well-known.
Some X posts reposted videos from TikTok creators, many of whom considered the campaign to be fascist or Nazi propaganda. Fox News host Jesse Watters also included TikTok creators’ clips in a segment defending Sweeney and American Eagle.
Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, tallied 181 Fox News mentions of Sweeney over a four-day period, compared with 18 mentions of Jeffrey Epstein.
Our analysis found many of the campaign’s defenders either attacked its detractors for their physical appearance and politics or criticized them as overreacting. They took aim at singer Doja Cat, who posted a video with her saying the words Sweeney said but in a mocking Southern accent.
(Screenshots from X)
Some called the people against the campaign “racist” against Sweeney, who is white. They compared this campaign with others that featured nonwhite people, including Levi’s 2024 campaign with Beyoncé.
“Here’s Sydney Sweeney. Possibly the most American girl-next-door model of the past decade. The Left are calling her a ‘Nazi’ because… she exists and is white,” one X post read, gaining 2.3 million views.
Others also compared it with Bud Light’s 2023 campaign with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. They claimed American Eagle’s campaign is more successful, and shows “woke” is no more.
(Screenshots from X)
