The right-wing Sydney Sweeney swarm

Here’s How The Sydney Sweeney Psyop Spread

Earlier this month, American Eagle launched a new ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney. The commercials were all a play on Sweeney having “great genes,” while wearing “great jeans.” The ads, in a matter of days, became a cultural lightning rod, with liberals claiming they were Nazi dogwhistles and conservatives hailing them as proof that woke had been defeated. But it’s worth dissecting how this discourse cycle played out because it reveals how hollow the culture war has become.

To understand how this ad spread, you first need a basic sense of how X works now. The site is a lot smaller than it used to be — it’s also reportedly about 75% bots. And, at least in English, there are really only a few communities left still actively using the platform: conservative aggregators, business world influencers, celebrity stan accounts, and libs who won’t leave the site and still post like it’s 2018. And this story involves all of them to some degree.

On July 23rd, a Sydney Sweeney fan account on X called @sweeneydailyx shared a new ad from American Eagle’s campaign, which had launched just that morning. The ad was then shared by several big finance accounts, like @Geiger_Capital and @based16z. The joke being that people should immediately buy American Eagle stock because Sweeney is hot. None of these early posts mention wokeness actually. And as investor Gannon Breslin noted in a video on X, there were early rumblings that American Eagle might become a meme stock due to users pumping it for fun.

But there is a lot of overlap between the business/crypto pocket of X and the MAGA/far-right pocket of X, which is where the Sweeney ads ended up next. The @EndWokeness account, a super popular far-right aggregator with around 3.8 million followers, posted about it the next day on July 24th. They shared an American Eagle ad from to 2019 featuring a plus-sized black model next to the Sweeney ad, writing, “Woke is dead.” And about 45 minutes after @EndWokeness posted about it, British millionaire and self-described head of DOGE UK (not a thing) Zia Yusuf picked up the story. He wrote in an X post, “Based ad campaigns are back, and wokery is gasping for breath.”

Interestingly, the conversation around Sweeney’s campaign picks up even more steam thanks to two more posts on July 24th from the same @sweeneydailyx stan account. One post generates a lot of discourse from women who say that the ad is sexist. To the point where the author of @sweeneydailyx got mad about it, writing, “Remember when Jeremy Allen White did that campaign? Remember the men's underwear-baring campaigns? And no one complained; all the women were in love with them. But if Sydney Sweeney does it, she should be burned at the stake for ‘setting back feminism.’”

But it’s @sweeneydailyx’s second post on the 24th that really kicks things into overdrive. Though it took about a day for it circulate through users’ algorithmic feeds. The second video, which @sweeneydailyx captioned, “Sydney Sweeney x American Eagle, oh my god,” got a lot of attention from liberal and leftist accounts. Probably because it leans even further into the “great genes” joke. Popular liberal account @esjesjesj made a joke about it, writing, “Sydney Sweeney x American Eagle with sound off: 😍😍😍😍😍 Sydney Sweeney x American Eagle with sound on:” above a picture of Hitler from Epic Rap Battles Of History.

For most of that week, liberal X users argued — and made memes — about whether or not the ads were racist and/or sexist. While being egged on by MAGA influencers. And just to give you a sense of how much those posts from @sweeneydailyx set the narrative here, there were users still referencing them days later. User @thenoasletter wrote, “You cannot compare Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein ad to whatever the fuck Sydney Sweeney is doing with American Eagle because Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein ad is not vaguely white supremacist propaganda. He was just in his panties.”

Another important thing to note here is that the discourse about Sweeney started going viral over a weekend, which has become more common for trends on X. (The platform is pretty dead on weekdays now.) And on July 28th, the following Monday, Fox News started talking about the ads on air. Using it throughout the week, as Media Matters For America noted, as a way to distract viewers from the fallout of the Trump-Epstein scandal. Fox would devote almost an hour and a half of airtime to the story last week. The New York Post, that Monday, also aggregated the story, writing that a “crazed woke mob” was condemning the ad.

Once right-wing media had condensed the internet chatter into a culture war narrative, Republican politicians stepped in. Gov. Ted Cruz wrote on X, “Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well…” And Vice President JD Vance last Friday, went on the Ruthless podcast, and told the hosts, “My political advice to the Democrats is continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi. That appears to be their actual strategy.”

Last Friday, American Eagle shared a statement on Instagram, which read, “'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We'll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone." This did not actually help calm things down, though.

A couple of shitposters on X pointed out that American Eagle’s statement had two capitalized H’s and a line that is 14 words and 88 characters long. And X user @time222smoke looked up Sweeney’s voter registration and discovered she’s been registered as a Republican in Florida since 2024. Also, a bunch of white women posted photos of themselves on X doing Nazi salutes over the weekend, seemingly trying to lampoon the supposed crazed leftists who think everything is Nazi-coded. Two of those women have since gone private after leftists called them Nazis and conservative men called them pick-me’s. Just can’t win, I guess. The one woman who didn’t go private is Haile Mcanally, the chair of the Omaha Young Republicans.

And, finally, just this morning, President Donald Trump commented on all of this. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves.’ Go get ‘em Sydney!” Trump goes on to complain about Taylor Swift for being woke, but that doesn’t really matter here. (Also, the initial version of his post spelled Sweeney’s name wrong.)

If you’re exasperated by all of this, you aren’t alone. Liberal YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, seemingly confused about the discourse that has been raging for almost two weeks now, wrote on July 31st, “Legitimately curious... has anyone on the left actually attacked the Sweeney ad or are Republicans inventing an anti-Sweeney Democrat to be angry at and then devoting their lives to fighting a culture war against an imaginary enemy?” But it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. Nor does it matter if anyone is still actually using X. Republicans know that all you need to do is find — or provoke — random internet chatter from liberals, package it up for tabloid and cable news stories, and then have their politicians point and laugh at it. All that matters is that it feels real. And that you’re talking about what they want you to talk about.

(Adam Bumas contributed reporting for this story.)

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Is earnestness fashionable? You tell me

Gonna start with a quote and then tell you why:

“We’ve been talking with more people lately who are really struggling to find meaning at work. Who feel like they can go through the motions but aren’t really sure what it’s leading to or why they should care. They do care, but they feel like they’re being punished for caring, and that their work would be easier if they didn’t. They see friends and colleagues who have already embraced not caring, but they themselves are still raging against the dying of the light.”

OK? OK. Those words are from a free, biweekly newsletter that’s the best in the world at dissecting all things work and management.

If you’re raging against the dying of the light… like, follow, subscribe.

A Good Post

The Story About AI Centers Forcing Texans To Take Shorter Showers Is False And Being Spread By AI

This was spotted by author Malcolm Harris on X. Last week, MSN published a news story “sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.” It was headlined, “Texas Tell Residents To Cut Back on Water To Help AI,” and I guess it’s part of some weird fake-Onion thing that MSN does idk.

There is a water emergency happening in Gunter, Texas, and Gunter residents have been told to use water less. And there are AI data centers in Texas that are sucking up a lot of water. But Gunter residents were not specifically told to cut down on water consumption to help those AI centers.

Unfortunately, MSN’s fake story has gone viral as a screenshot all over platforms like Reddit, X, and Bluesky. It’s also impacting results from AI services like Grok.

Mastercard Vs. Video Games

The ongoing feud between payment processors and gaming platforms has taken an interesting turn. Last week, itch.io apologized for taking down thousands of games that companies like Mastercard and Stripe seemingly had a problem with and said they’re looking for an independent payment system to work with.

Mastercard has now come out to “clarify” all the stories circulating online that they’re responsible for Itch and fellow games platform Steam abandoning 18+ games.

“Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network,” Mastercard’s statement reads. “At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”

Interestingly enough, Valve, the owner of Steam, who typically doesn’t comment on matters like this, actually fired back at Mastercard via a Kotaku piece over the weekend. A Valve spokesperson said that Mastercard put pressure on payment processors who then put pressure on Valve. “Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” the spokesperson said. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution. Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”

TL;DR it seems like Mastercard doesn’t like the press it’s getting and is trying to distance themselves from this whole thing. If you’re wondering who to believe here though, this is not the first time Mastercard, specifically, has pulled something like this. In 2021, there was a brief standoff between OnlyFans and credit companies like Mastercard.

That Weird Labubu Woman On TikTok Made A Blackface Labubu

There’s a weird woman on TikTok that is obsessed with Labubu dolls. She goes by @lilzbullzofficial and she has previously claimed to own the most expensive Labubu there is, which is apparently 24 karat gold. Labubus, if you’re out of the loop, are Funko Pops for women.

Over the weekend, @lilzbullzofficial posted — and then very quickly deleted — a video of a custom Labubu she either made or commissioned that was meant to look like the YouTuber KSI. And as you can see above, boy, was it racist. @lilzbullzofficial, who is British and grew up in Spain, uploaded a follow-up video explaining that she didn’t “learn what blackface was in school.” Which is a dubious claim to say the least, but whatever.

She seems to have moved on from the controversy, however, and spent the weekend fighting with her followers who don’t believe that her golden Labubu is real gold. (I, personally, don’t think it’s actually gold.)

New Ocean Beach Guy

Some Stray Links

• “I responded to one of those spam texts from a “recruiter”—then took the job. It got weirder than I could have imagined.”

• “Everyone is listening to secular praise music. Yes, even you.”

• “Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes”

• “An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine”

P.S. here’s a little guy having a snack.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***