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As far as I can see, both meanings are in use, and indeed, are often subject to a motte-and-bailey that the current convo seems to illustrate. It's used both to mean "the abnormally illiberal political-correctness movement that began somewhere in the 90s", and "the grab-bag of left-wing opinions that the people in the illiberal movement subscribe to", which is to say, "any and all meaningfully left-wing opinions".
It seems to me that a discussion about whether or not wokeness has been "defeated" only really makes sense in the context of the latter - of the recent and unprecedented threat which fundamentally cannot coexist with American democracy as it had been practiced for the preceding 250 years. If we try to parse the statement using "wokeness" to mean "leftism", it honestly sounds deranged. Leftism-is-general is, again, not going to be "defeated" overnight - hundreds of millions of Blues are not going to suddenly change their minds about their most fundamentally-held social and moral beliefs. The Culture War is just not the kind of conflict where one Tribe can "defeat" the other on the scale of a few decades, unless it were to turn into some sort of actual boots-on-the-ground armed conflict, which has, at the very least, clearly not happened yet.
But compare HBD. I'm always banging the drum that "blacks are, on average, biologically lower-IQ and more aggressive than whites", if taken as a true scientific fact, still doesn't inherently justify moral claims like "blacks should be second-class citizens" or "it's okay for whites to make fun of blacks with minstrel shows" - in short, still doesn't justify white supremacy as an ideology. But in practice, if you see someone trying to signal-boost HBD, it's unlikely that they're just spreading awareness of interesting scientific trivia which they regard as having no political ramifications whatsoever. A progressive who accuses a HBD-promoter of trying to put white supremacy back into the Overton window is, on average, not being irrationally paranoid, even if there may be a few false positives.
The leftist position on the American Eagle ad is that this is very similar. Making value-judgements on genes has been declared taboo to keep the evils of eugenicism at bay, and although it's conceivable for someone to try to put them back into the Overton window for benign reasons, there is going to be a heavy suspicion that they don't think the full package is that bad either. (Heck, the HBD hypothetical would be a stronger case, because "racial IQ differences exist" really is, at a base level, a neutral factual claim about the world. In the "good genes" case, the problematic element isn't a factual claim, but a taboo value judgement.)
This just seems like yet another tiresome instance of "dog-whistle politics". "You can't talk about this true fact because some people could use it to justify bad behaviour" is a fully general counter-argument which applies to literally any factual statement.
I find dog-whistle politics particularly frustrating because they always, ultimately, seem to boil down to "you didn't actually say anything bad, but I don't like you, so I'm going to interpret everything you said in the most uncharitable possible light and infer things you didn't mean from perfectly innocuous statements, then treat you as if you explicitly said the most uncharitable misreading of your statement possible". I've read multiple people who independently argued that wokeness/social justice politics/whatever seems to attract a lot of people with cluster B personality disorders, and the shoe certainly fits here: "dog-whistle politics" is practically identical to how women with borderline personality disorder win arguments. (That is, without threatening to kill themselves.)
I will reiterate: the factual claim "many desirable human traits are heavily, if not solely, determined by one's genetic makeup" does not in any way imply the normative claim "therefore, governments should proactively intervene in the lives of their citizenry to improve their average genetic fitness". The belief that American Eagle were trying to promote the latter belief (via a fucking jeans and) is silly and absurd, one step removed from the surprisingly widespread belief that the CEO of Procter and Gamble is an avowed Satanist who openly admitted his faith on national television. The people advancing this belief deserve to be ridiculed. The belief that American Eagle are advancing the "many desirable human traits are heavily, if not solely, determined by one's genetic makeup" idea as a "dog-whistle" for literal eugenics is only marginally less silly, and deserve to be ridiculed. If you believe this about American Eagle, then you deserve to be ridiculed.
As an aside, "HBD is true, but the only people who want to talk about are white supremacists, so you should be automatically suspicious of anyone who brings it up", in addition to being one step removed from Bulverism, is just factually wrong. Most HBD enjoyers are acutely aware that Ashkenazim and people from the Far East are above average in intelligence. LKY built Singapore on HBD principles: he was aware from the outset that Malay professional outcomes would never equal Chinese, and took intentional, practical steps to mitigate the resentment that would inevitably ensue. In your opinion, is LKY a white supremacist?
And even if people want to talk about HBD for reasons of political policy, there are plenty of HBD-influenced policies which no reasonable person would characterise as white supremacist in nature. If indeed there is a significant IQ gap between blacks and whites, it follows that we can never expect black representation in STEM to equalise with white in our lifetimes, and so all public monies advancing that goal might as well be flushed down the toilet for all the good they'll do. It is hardly a coincidence that many HBD enjoyers are advocates for universal basic income.
And I will reiterate: your 'factual' claim is no such thing because you are smuggling in a subjective value judgement as if it were a fact. There are no such thing as objectively "desirable" traits, or objectively "good" genes. It is a factual claim that the color of one's eyes is determined by one's genetic makeup; it is not a factual claim that blue eyes are nicer than brown eyes. It's just a fairly common aesthetic preference some people have. Once you have taken for granted that some human phenotypes are "good" and others "bad", and that this means there are "good" genes and "bad" genes, you are already some considerable ways down the slippery slope that makes Brave New World-type eugenics look like a remotely acceptable idea.
I do not claim that anybody at American Eagle was using "good genes" as a dogwhistle in the hiding-one's-power-level sense where they would actually support eugenicist policies, and are trying to work people up to the idea. But the "good genes" meme hints at a broader worldview which is antithetical to pro-diversity progressivism, and whose most extreme form leads to eugenicist policies. Pro-diversity progressivism opposes that worldview altogether, not just its direst consequence, and trying to give that worldview extra cultural capital can thus, IMO, fairly be regarded as an attack on the rival progressive memeplex. (Of course, I will add that in my view this is all a tempest in a teapot, because it is a fact that many normies still uncritically accept the implied value system in the "good genes" phrase, it is what it is, hopefully they'll come around once we get the Singularity, I'm not convinced they will any time before, and one goofy ad certainly isn't going to move the needle either way.)
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