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Notes -
The Sidney Sweeney commercial.
AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.
The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).
Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.
As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.
I saw some takes about this on Substack. Richard Hanania compares the people calling the ad eugenics propaganda to the Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in the 1960s who still thought the war was going on. Somebody else whose name escapes me commented that, if this had happened five years ago, everyone would be expected to weigh in on it and would be viewed with suspicion if they didn't, American Eagle would issue a statement apologising for the campaign and reiterating their commitment to racial equality (and making a large donation to the ACLU to prove it) and Sydney Sweeney would have been unable to get any roles for a year.
There does appear to have been a vibe shift. It's not that woke people were holding the whip five years ago, and now they're running scared. Woke people, even woke people in positions of considerable power and influence, are still able to express pretty out-there woke opinions to their heart's content, without any negative repercussions for their careers. The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along. No one is going to get fired from their job for saying "I don't think American Eagle are crypto-Nazis, and I think it's silly to say so"; five years ago I don't know if that would have been the case.
This is actually a major problem I have with Hanania. Wokes are not the Japanese holding out in 1960, they are (strategically not morally) much more like the US as MacArthur fled the Philippines. "I shall return" wasn't just a promise, it was a threat and prediction based on the reality of America's industrial might and determination. Woke has no such iconic statement and figure yet, but they do have the cultural equivalent of the 1940s American industry, that being the media, schools, civil services, NGOs, etc. This is why Hanania's "woke right" project has always been very stupid.
The DR has developed and made viral an anti-fragile critique of wokeness- the more Hollywood or Academia tries to turn the tide back to wokeness the more oxygen the DR gets. It can't return with strength without further strengthening the DR critique especially among young people. I think it's done for, not to say the culture war is over or anything but the BLM hysteria and the height of that woke fervor is not coming back, it's a dead end. What comes next for the progressive wing is the big question- they need something new.
People thought they defeated Political Correctness in the 90s too. Just give it a generation.
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