In the new American Eagle campaign, Sydney Sweeney leans on an antique Mustang, stares straight down the barrel of the camera, and breathily delivers a list of her inherited traits: blonde hair, blue eyes. She says a word that sounds like “jeans,” and then says they “are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” She avoids mentioning the two biggest traits everyone is thinking about, but the camera doesn’t avoid them. Then she lands on the punchline:
“My jeans are blue.”
The screen flashes a wink. We see the text, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes”—with the word “genes” crossed out and replaced, cheekily, with “jeans.”
It’s a clever play on words, a harmless pun, the kind of joke a dad would make. Or was it?
“This is literal Nazi propaganda,” announced one viral post. “Did they mean to include a bunch of Nazi dog whistles in this?” asked another. Yet another referenced a notorious white supremacist slogan in their tweet: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children is a crazy tagline for selling denim.” The ad’s been called “regressive,” “racist,” and “tone-deaf.”
And it’s not just anonymous people online. MSNBC warned that the Sweeney campaign is a sign of an “unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness,” while the (also quite hot) rapper Doja Cat joined the pile-on with a TikTok parody in which she mocked the actor—who’s starred in Euphoria and The White Lotus—mimicking her lines in a drawling, redneck accent. The video was widely praised as a “razor-sharp response” that, according to certain outlets, had elevated a cringey marketing misstep into a national conversation about “representation, corporate responsibility, and the power of celebrity voices in modern discourse.”
The right, meanwhile, did what it so often does when the left says something innocuous is very racist: They made her a cause. “Woke advertising is dead. Sydney Sweeney killed it,” read one tweet. Ted Cruz (as in, the senator) declared on X: “Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well.” The literal White House communications director, Steven Cheung, added: “Cancel culture run amok. This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.”
