Sydney Sweeney and the Outrage Machine

Did you guys see that American Eagle is selling limited edition pairs of the Sydney Sweeney jeans that have been washed in her bathwater?

Wait.

Are they?

Wait, is that real?

Matt!

No.

I made that up.

Let's talk about it.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I don't care about Sidney Sweeney.

I don't care about Sidney Sweeney, and if you click this episode thinking I too don't care about Sidney Sweeney, then this is the Sidney Sweeney episode for you.

I usually pick episode topics based on what I care about and want to dive deeper into.

So, this episode is sort of reverse-engineered in that I don't care about Sidney Sweeney.

I have never cared about Sidney Sweeney.

So my job here today is to try to investigate why so many people are trying to get me to care about Sidney Sweeney.

Recently, the actor did a commercial for American Eagle Jeans that I did not know about because, like I might have mentioned, I don't care about Sidney Sweeney.

See, gay guys, we love to talk about celebrity women, but it's more like Lady Gaga or Jennifer Coolidge or Beyonce.

Gay men don't really get together and hang out and are like, let's talk about Sidney Sweeney.

She's not for us.

And that's okay.

That's okay.

Or at least it was until last month when the entire right-wing media apparatus coalesced around Sidney Sweeney's jeans commercial and how allegedly angry the woke left was about it.

But I'm the woke left, and I wasn't mad.

I didn't even know what the hell was going on.

It felt like a reverse Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light, except I wasn't shooting a gun at piles of American Eagle jeans to protest Sidney Sweeney.

I didn't even know about the ad, much less give a shit.

But Fox News mentioned Sidney Sweeney 181 times over a four-day period.

So I realized that I have to care about Sidney Sweeney because they're making me care.

Greg Gutfeld, you are a terrorist and you will pay for your crimes.

Today, I want to do culture war anthropology.

You know, when I started this podcast, I thought it was going to be a sort of culture war podcast.

Those were the days of right-wing meltdowns over desecrated MMs.

And at the time, it felt fun to observe the things that these people would get mad at.

But it doesn't feel fun anymore because I think most people, across the political spectrum, honestly, have at least a vague sense that there's a darkness underneath these increasingly ridiculous culture wars.

And today, I want to see if we can identify that darkness and why certain people would rather us talk about Sidney Sweeney until we turn blue in the face than face it.

I thought that was pretty well written, my little intro.

It was great.

I loved it.

To help us do all of that today, welcome back to the show, two of my best friends and two of the smartest culture and political critics I have ever known, Kat Tenbarge and Taylor Lorenz.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us.

I wanted to start with like an icebreaker question.

Before we get into anything, what about Sidney Sweeney do you think makes everyone act crazy?

Like, I can't remember the last time the public was so fixated on every inhale and exhale a celebrity takes.

Like, there's a very Britney Spears quality to it almost.

It's interesting because I agree with you that she is not like a gay man's celebrity, but with the lesbian gays, I do care about Sidney Sweeney.

Oh,

just in the sense that I did not watch Euphoria.

I've seen like two episodes of Euphoria, but I always found her very like attractive and very compelling in that sense and i also think that sydney sweetie has been part of the like algorithmic treadmill for a while

because the thing about like sydney sweeney and her like euphoria rise to prominence is that obviously the sex scenes in that show and the sex scenes in a lot of sam levinson productions which I could say a lot about Sam Levinson because I hate that man.

Kat texted me beforehand and she was like, I'm going to try not to rant about Sam Levinson.

And we are three minutes into the recording.

Here it comes.

Go for it.

Sam Levinson.

My biggest issue with him is that he takes women's work and then he creates these productions that are really fetishistic toward women.

And it's not inherently wrong to like make like a really sexy show.

But I think the problem I have with him is that he has repeatedly been accused of like plagiarism, essentially, from women creatives.

So, like, the aesthetic of Euphoria, Petra Collins alleged that, like, she came up with it, and then he stole it from her.

And that's the most popular best thing about Euphoria, from what I can tell.

But, anyways, Sidney Sweeney was in these really raunchy sex scenes.

And from the second that they debuted on television, they became some of the like most viral clips of sex scenes ever, ever.

Because, like, you go on Reddit, where like these are like, Reddit is a very male-dominated platform.

So anything to do with celebrity women on Reddit trends like sexually explicit.

And these just like immediately became the most engaged with clips ever.

And I think ever since then, you've seen Sidney Sweeney like so thoroughly embedded in like what social medias are trained to recognize that it has had like a huge effect on how popular she is and how much posts about her get traction.

Yeah, there is a there is a Megan Fox quality to it, too.

It reminds me of how insane men would be about Megan Fox like 15 years ago, but there's this added like political component to it now, which we're going to talk about.

Taylor, I want to get your hot take on why Sidney Sweeney makes everyone unable to act normally.

Every generation of celebrity, there is like one usually extremely conventionally attractive, like blonde woman that is made into sort of like the bombshell of the era.

And they sort of represent like the pinnacle of female beauty of that era.

Like we had Scarlett Johansson, we had like, there's just endless generations of beautiful women like this.

I think Sidney Sweeney is that modern woman and I think she leans into that role.

Yes.

And she didn't always.

So I want to do a little bit of Sidney Sweeney history slash background info for anyone who is truly, I always say, like, if you're under a rock and you don't know what I'm talking about, but like this one, you got to be like really like deep underground to not know what's going on with Sidney Sweeney.

and i'm happy for you and i'm about to take that away from you so sydney sweeney is a 27 year old actor who grew up in rural idaho sorry rural washington in the idaho panhandle on the washington idaho border classic mix-up in a conservative religious family in a house that her family has owned for five generations which By the way, fast forward, when it was revealed that Sidney Sweeney is a registered Republican in Florida, there was some like shock and awe around that, but I'm like, you know, I don't know.

Five generations in the same house in rural Idaho, conservative religion.

Not to say you can't break out of that, but you know, there have been more shocking political turns in my day.

Anyway, she got into acting as a teenager and moved to LA as a 13-year-old to pursue acting.

She briefly had a job at Universal Studios, and she also briefly attended UCLA before her acting career really started to take off.

I remember the first time I saw Sidney Sweeney, I think it was in Sharp Objects, where she played alongside Amy Adams in this small role as a mentally ill and disturbed teenager.

And then she was in the handmaid's tale, which a lot of people forget about.

I don't remember her being in that.

She was in the handmaid's tale as like a young girl who was like in this like public arranged marriage.

Oh yeah.

Oh my God.

I feel like this was before I paid attention to her.

Well, and she was also, it was years ago, but also side note, it's just kind of funny to me that like the handmaid's tale starred Elizabeth Moss, who's a Scientologist, and smaller role, but co-starred Sidney Sweeney, who's this Republican.

It's like they read the script for the handmaid's tale and they were like, let's do this.

Yeah.

Well, one thing about Sidney Sweeney is she's going to show up to work.

Yes, we know.

So Sidney Sweeney would really shoot shoot into the limelight as a star in Euphoria and The White Lotus.

Two shows, which I don't feel like are in the conservative zeitgeist at all, which is also funny to me.

You're right.

But I do think it's also notable that her character in White Lotus was based off the Red Scare girls.

And so they're supposed to be these like sort of reactionary young girls.

They had them watch or listen, subject themselves to Red Scare to train for that role.

But they're supposed to be this like disaffected kind of reactionary, like cool young people, even though Dasha's not young.

She thinks she's my age.

I totally forgot about that.

And you're right.

Her character on The White Lotus was this, I mean, Red Scare.

It started as it's a podcast.

If you don't know, Red Scare, that's one that I'm actually not going to subject you to any information about because it's truly like the worst brain rot you'll ever experience.

But it's, it's a, it's a podcast that started framing itself as like a post-identity politics left podcast run by these two women named Dasha and Anna.

And then it very quickly just became like a right-wing trad Catholic, trad wife, like

crock of shit, really.

I think that's a great description of it.

I wonder if Sidney Sweeney got radicalized when she had to listen to that.

Well, I think this girl was radicalized.

I think she was raised conservative.

Sidney Sweeney is really hot, which is something that she and her team have leaned into more and more as her career has progressed.

In 2024, she hosted SNL and famously did this Hooter sketch where the punchline revolved around her being hotter than all of the other servers at Hooters.

After the SNL hosting gig, conservatives ignited like a mini culture war around Sidney Sweeney's hotness.

There was an article published in the National Post by a woman, by the way, titled, Are Sidney Sweeney's Breasts Double D Harbingers of the Death of Woke?

Wokeness is no match for Sidney Sweeney's undeniable beauty.

And then there were a bunch of like conservative bloggers and stuff who were online being like, woke is dead.

Sidney Sweeney is hot and glorious and hosting SNL.

So

queer people and fat people don't exist anymore, I guess.

I don't know.

I remember talking to Moira Donegan, the host of In Bed with the Right, about this shift, because I was like, I thought conservatives were anti-sex.

I thought conservatives wanted women to be modest.

But now, if you're like a hot blonde bombshell, now that's conservative coded.

I mean, I remember even like years ago, Taylor, talking about this with you with like the whole hawk to a thing and like how sex was conservative now or something.

Moira Donegan explained this to me best.

Throughout the different eras of political administrations and culture, conservative men have had varying attitudes towards modesty and sexuality.

But what is consistent is that they dictate the norm.

It's not really about whether women want to be modest or whether women want to show skin.

It's about them having control over the situation.

I also think that there's like the whole like virgin horror dichotomy that conservatism pushes on women, where it's like you are either this like chaste, you know, being that never puts an ounce of makeup and you're just this trad, barefoot, pregnant, you know, woman, or you're the Sidney Sweeney bombshell slut, basically is like the subtext on all of it, where they sort of like put these women up as sex symbols, but they're only seen as sex symbols.

And their sort of like value in the eyes of these men is like declines with every year they get older and all of that, you know.

And so I feel like what they don't allow is women to be anything but those sort of two stereotypes.

I also feel like Sidney Sweeney, and I think we'll really get into this with the bathwater, but it's like she takes it about as far as it's acceptable without doing like porn.

Because like we talked about with the Euphoria clips, it's like that is masturbatory material, and it is very popular material, but she's not actually making porn, nor is she a porn star, nor is she a sex worker.

She's able to capitalize on those aesthetics.

The material of her like serves the same purpose, but she still falls within the boundaries of like traditional society.

And so, therefore, like the right still wants to claim her and they're not going to treat her like they would treat an actual sex worker.

So initially it seemed like Sidney was very uncomfortable with all of this being projected onto her by men.

She did an interview after the whole SNL mini culture war fiasco where she said, quote, it's this weird relationship that people have with me that I have no control or say over, which I, you know, regardless of how you feel about Sidney Sweener or her politics or anything else, like, yeah, it is weird.

And I honestly can't imagine what it's like to be in her position and have to grapple with that from the time that she was very young.

You know, she started acting as a child.

In the following year, though, she's really seemed to actively embrace this like strange psychosexual adoration from conservative men, or at least she's been willing to monetize it.

She keeps doing what I can only describe as like, every time I see one, I'm just like, what is this like fuck ass advertisement?

Because here's the thing, right?

Sidney Sweeney is one of the biggest actors of my generation.

And I've seen people say this online, like she should be the face of a major fashion house.

She should be the face of Prada.

She should be doing.

And instead, it's like Hill Billy Jack's burger soda.

It's like, she keeps doing these weird advertisements for brands that, like, I've never heard of and that are clearly aimed at men.

One thing I will say about the fashion stuff and like why I think that she's considered more commercial and I saw like fashion people discussing this is her body.

To fashion people, she doesn't have a high fashion body.

Basically, her boobs are too big.

She's not seen as sort of like premium.

She's seen as like accessible, like commercial, where it's like she can do the dunkin' ad.

I feel like that's also like a branding on behalf of her team, though.

They're like, we want her to be this highly commercial entity and we want to lean into the sex.

Like I don't like when people talk about celebrities as if they don't make any of their own decisions, but there is definitely, you know, a team working together to decide who is the product of Sidney Sweeney, who keeps giving her all of these

products to promote.

These, again, these like fuck ass products.

She also doesn't do like highbrow projects.

And I think that that feeds into it too.

Like, she's doing like mass market Netflix, like, rom-com.

And Scarlett Johansson went through this period too, right?

Where like she tried to sort of like reinvent herself and do these more like cerebral type films and be a real, you know, do more movies as opposed to TV and stuff.

And I don't think that Sydney's made that jump.

And you're right, Matt.

Like, some of that is definitely like positioning from, you know, her agents or whatever.

Somebody tweeted like she must be in like debt to like a mob boss or something.

Just like she will hawk anything.

It's really interesting because like a period of time where I actually both liked her and would have assumed that she was more liberal back in 2022 when she was really starting to take off and like ascend to this level of superstardom, she did an interview.

She expressed frustration at Nepo babies and how they don't have to work as hard as she had to work to like get to where she is.

And she talked about how she couldn't take six months off because she wouldn't be able to afford it.

And she talked about how like so much of the money she makes goes to her publicist, her agent, her manager, like all of these people.

And This was a huge controversy.

People have basically accused her of being like more privileged than she was letting on.

And like, how dare she complain?

And like, no one can take six months off from work.

However, there was an amazing article that Kelsey McKinney wrote for Defector, which was basically like, it's true, this generation of actors is not nearly as privileged as like the Jennifer Aniston generation of actors, where you could do a show like Friends and then coast off of that for the rest of your life.

Famously, Writers Guild, they don't get residuals the same way they used to.

So they have to keep working.

And she has to like, I think she truly does have to do a lot of advertisements but what is so interesting about that too is like i agree with you matt like there's a little bit of like personal choice versus like responding to the market and what people want from you and you see how she has been like driven to lean into that sexualization more and more and more it's just wild to me that she can experience all these things and still walk away and be like fiscally conservative and be a registered Republican.

Yeah.

Well, I remember that whole thing too, where she was like, I can't afford to stop working for six months.

And I do think that in the last few years since she said that, she's definitely ascended to a level where that's no longer the case.

She did last year buy a $13 million home in Florida, which was when she moved there also the same time that she registered to vote as a Republican.

Red flag, red flag.

So, I mean, I think it is very possible that she did attain a level of financial security that now, of course, she has to do all of this shit shit to keep up with.

But I want to play for you one of the ads she did recently.

It is for Hey Dude, which is a men's shoeline.

And I have never heard of Hey Dude in my life, but clearly, a lot of people are buying them because they could afford Sydney Sweeney's day rate.

You can take the dude out of the country.

You can't take a country out of the dude.

But she were here.

All of her ads are the same.

I had to watch that like six times before I knew what she was saying.

You can take the dude out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the dude.

I'm

happy for her.

I just want to say, like, I'm happy for her if she wants to advertise, hey, dude, shoot.

You don't even know what she's selling in these advertisements.

But, but I bring this up.

I'm particularly interested, and people have drawn attention to the voice that she seems to do, the intonation in her voice when she's doing these things.

There's no enunciation.

Well, she's talking in like a phone sex operator voice.

And I am not making fun of her voice.

I'm not, as people on this podcast, especially Kat and I, who have had our voices mocked and thumbs down extensively, I am not making fun of anyone's voice, but there does seem to be a performative cadence to how she's speaking.

She also kind of famously had this like micro controversy around her partnership with men's soap brand Dr.

Squatch,

another company I've never heard of, to sell a line of soaps allegedly made with her bathwater.

Yes, as Taylor was saying, she does this like phone sex operator voice in these commercials.

And with the bathwater, it really clicked for me that like she is borrowing from this culture of sex workers and porn performers and like e-girls.

Bathwater, very famously, like selling your bathwater became a thing when Belle Delphine did it over five years ago, I think now.

And it was a huge controversy and it was a huge pop culture moment because she was selling like gamer girl bathwater and people were buying it.

They were drinking it.

They were smelling it.

It was all like gross men.

And when Cindy Sweeney did this, it really like made me think that we are in this moment of pop culture.

And there are other celebrities doing this too right now, where it's like the things that sex workers have brought to the cultural forefront are now being kind of appropriated by this class of celebrity who can reap the benefits of how good that is for your brand, for monetizing, for whatever, without having to reap the like discriminatory consequences of being a sex worker.

Because Belle Delphine, when she sold the bathwater, her PayPal account got like shut down and all that money she made was actually seized from her and stolen from her because she is a sex worker.

So, I just think that it is particularly egregious that Sidney Sweeney is apparently like a Republican.

Republicans want to ban porn.

They want to jail all sex workers.

And so, like, she's profiting from this trend that was started by this woman, but she does not in any way like stand for the women who made this possible for her.

Oof, well said.

I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which is perhaps the most fitting and easiest brand partner this podcast has ever had.

Friendly reminder, if you are living in the United States, Jesus is not your guidance counselor, and your tax dollars should not be paying for a sermon in algebra.

And yet, here we are.

States are forcing religious posters in classrooms.

swapping out licensed mental health staff for unlicensed school chaplains, and shoveling public money that should be going towards public schools and making them better and giving teachers supplies and fixing the ruse

into private religious schools through these shady voucher schemes.

Let me know if you want me to make a separate episode on that because it really is a whole thing and it is quite literally end times shit, in my opinion.

Not in the way these people think though.

Anyway, the Freedom from Religion Foundation is doing some really important work to fight the influence of religion in government and the people who are pushing it.

They're suing, educating, and fighting to keep religion out of the government and out of your kids' classrooms.

You can join their fight, which is really all of our fight, by going to ffrf.us slash school or texting freedom to 511511, 511511.

That's ffrf.us slash school or text freedom to 511511.

Because you didn't survive purity culture just to have it show up in your kids' math class.

Shout out to the Freedom for Religion Foundation for all the important work that they do.

Go be a part of the fight.

And yes, tax fees may apply.

I love reading a legal disclaimer.

All right, now let's get back to the show.

Should we talk about American Eagle?

Let's do it.

Yes.

You can take the country out of the dude, but you can never, you can take the dude out of the country, but you can never take the country out of the dad.

I love it.

So, even through the bathwater scandal, I was able to go about my day while getting very, very few messages from people asking me to like talk about it on the podcast, like to do anything about, you know, Sidney Sweeney.

And I was perplexed by the bathwater soap scandal, but I did not want to make a podcast episode about it.

But then something happened recently that I mentioned up top that got me so many messages, so many requests to do this very episode that I could not ignore it.

So middle of July, Sidney Sweeney and American Eagle unveil a series of commercial advertisements that they did together.

And I want to just start by playing a few of them for you.

I'm not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans.

And I definitely won't say that they're the most comfortable jeans I've ever worn.

Or that they make your butt look amazing.

Why would I need to do that?

But if you said that you want to buy the jeans, I'm not going to stop you.

But just so we're clear, this is not me telling you to buy American Eagle jeans.

Sidney Sweeney has great jeans.

You see what I did there, right?

My body's composition is determined by my jeans.

Hey,

eyes up here.

Sidney Sweeney has great jeans.

Okay, am I crazy or is that giving like low budget?

If you're not watching the video version of this, it's just her walking around an empty room or like next to a car in an empty room, just like wearing jeans and like caressing herself while speaking in this phone sex operator voice that I know isn't natural to her.

I've seen her in other things and she does not talk like this.

She doesn't talk like that in her movie roles or her TV roles, rather.

She enunciates.

She does enunciate.

She can.

We haven't watched the main one yet.

And I know you want us, if you're tapped into this controversy already, you know, you know we're going to talk about the main ad, but that's, we're not there yet.

I just, I saw these ads and I didn't find them as offensive as I did just like overly like self-serious and like poorly acted and almost, almost a mockery of how easy it is to like performatively seduce heterosexual men.

Like, I feel like if she pushed the whole shtick of like, I'm just a girl.

Do you like my body?

Like it almost could be like an Anna Nicole Smith, like campy territory of of like the like my body.

But because it doesn't go full camp, to me, it falls like just shy of that.

You know what reminds me of this so much is Paris Hilton, who also put on an effect.

And do you remember the extremely famous 2005 Carls Jr.

commercial that Paris did?

Yes.

Where she's like, this is what gay guys talk about.

Eating a burger, like washing a car.

Like it is soft core porn, basically.

It's honestly, a lot of Sydney's ads remind me of sort of like the worst of the mid-2000s views of women and also just like this like hyper-sexualized like persona that Paris as well took on and has and talks about it now.

How like that entire persona was an affect and it was really just for marketing because men liked it and not because she speaks like that and she considers herself actually a tomboy and doesn't speak like that in normal life.

But I think, yes.

And then I also think a key key difference between what's happening here and what Paris was doing was like, Paris, I don't think you had to be that smart to know that there was like an angle here and that this was a show.

Like she was like, she was like dripping a burger on herself on top of a car.

Like it was absurd.

And to me, this is like just shy of absurd.

I think it is absurd.

Like I also think that now we look at that commercial as absurd.

And I do think Paris was so campy and over at the top and sort of there was like a joke there almost.

But I do think there's something about this like type of advertising that sydney sweeney is really leaning into and even just like the script and the format and the voice and the shots and everything that feels very kind of uh regressive it reminds me of hooters and it reminds me of like an era that conservatives are wanting to reclaim culturally, which was an era where women were more commonly understood as like decor, essentially.

Like women were more ornamental and women could be easily separated into categories of like prude or slut.

It's also fascinating to me that like Paris Hilton also is like a like a voting conservative, at least used to be, I believe voted for Trump.

And I find it interesting that these women like, they have a lot of nuance about the way that they were portrayed and how they portrayed themselves.

But at the end of the day, it's like, I think that so much of their ultimate loyalty is to wealth and to capital.

And so that is another reason why they so commonly support like the exact same types of power and authority that ultimately like subjugate them.

Should we watch the ad ad?

We have to.

I've watched this so many times in the last few weeks that it makes me want to die.

Okay, here we go.

Jeans are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.

my jeans are blue Sidney Sweeney has great jeans my gens are blue

gens are past John from parents off that voice is it is really grating

uncut jens

she starts like speaking and like every syllable gets so slow in that one in particular that I'm like girl like I'm afraid you're not gonna make it to the end of the sentence like you're gonna run out of juice

Well, it's ironically, it's similar to the white lotus voice that she was doing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where it's this like disaffected type drawl.

That ad obviously is also like a remake of another

very well-known ad.

Yes.

And that's actually where my mind went to first when I saw this.

I did not immediately think eugenics.

I immediately thought, why are we remaking the Brooks Shields ad?

Which was also very eugenics, by the way.

And also pedophilic.

Oh, 100%.

She was a child.

Yes, exactly.

So decades ago, a 15-year-old Brooks Shields featured in a series of very creepy Calvin Klein advertisements that had a similar kind of like bare bones.

It's just me in an empty room in my jeans vibe.

And in one of those commercials, Brooke Shields kind of struggled to put on her jeans, like performatively posing in all of these different ridiculous ways.

Again, as a 15-year-old, which is just bizarre to watch now.

While she did that, she...

kind of just recited an encyclopedic definition of genetics, genes, while putting on jeans.

And I think the key difference between hers and Sydney's is that Sidney's is like, my genes are good.

My genetics are good.

Whereas Brooks didn't quite say that.

She was just making the pun of jeans and jeans.

But even still, those commercials were widely derided because they were quite pedophilic.

I mean, in one of the Brooks Shields ads, she said, what gets between my Calvins and I?

Nothing.

And she was, you know, a high school freshman.

So my mind, when I first saw this ad, was like, why are we remaking the Brooks Shields ad?

Didn't that come out in the 80s?

Yeah, it was the 80s.

Oh, yeah, 1980.

I just think what's so interesting is like, we are seeing this resurgence of conservatism in a way that we haven't seen since the 80s.

And we're like almost replicating, like bar for bar, so much of the worst of that brand of republicanism and conservatism, whether it's rank homophobia, weird genetics ads, like, I mean, eugenics generally, hyper capitalism, like obsession with, you know, market economics and wealth and greed.

And obviously, none of us were like, I don't even know if you guys were born.

I was barely sentient in the 80s.

So like, I feel like none of us like lived through that.

But a lot of culture today feels like it's like hearkening back to that era.

So because I am so online and so like deeply tuned into like leftist online posting and like very niche like leftist online posting, I could only ever see the that ad through the lens of like, I did see that people were talking about it in the sense of eugenics.

So I never saw it and like got to form an opinion without already knowing that there was backlash to it.

But I think that it's like so impossible to separate it from the context of the political moment that we are living in right now, even if the ad just said like something about like having blue eyes.

And like she's like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, hot woman who leans into these like conservative cultural roles

so i do feel like even if it wasn't fully like intentionally like eugenics based i almost think it doesn't matter because it's like even if every single person behind the creative direction did not have that in mind i'm like it just fits so neatly into the moment we are living through right now I do think that it's impossible to separate from this moment of, again, the fifth year of an ongoing pandemic where we're seeing eugenics eugenics also in regards to Palestine, where like the free press published this disgusting piece that was like, actually, the people dying of famine were high risk anyway.

So we're just seeing, I mean, just eugenics all over.

And also then you're seeing the rise of Ozempec and all of these like, you know, plastic surgery procedures and stuff where it's like, there's fewer and fewer like excuses for not conforming to society's standards of beauty.

And you're also seeing like conservatives try to make those standards of beauty more and more rigid.

And so I just think it's impossible to like separate this ad from all of that because the reality is this type of ad would not be written or remade or even perform well like five years ago.

Yeah, 100%.

I mean, the entire ethos of MAGA, which promises to return America to a time when people who look like Sidney Sweeney had total control over society.

Yeah, I mean, it's not a good look to do a, you know, a thin white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes has good genetics.

I mean, the idea of good genetics implies bad genetics, which in and of itself is the premise of eugenics.

I mean, I will say, again, the first time I saw it, I was just kind of like, this is creepy and this is corny.

I didn't immediately think like eugenics.

I didn't immediately think about all of this stuff that we do, in fairness, talk a lot about in different ways and different contexts on this podcast.

I just saw it and I was kind of like, this is another Sidney Sweeney ad where it's like extremely sexual in an extremely like male gazey way, but with this added layer of like, but we're talking about genetics.

So that's kind of weird.

But for me, it became a matter of scale.

And the scale of this controversy, which in my opinion could have just been like discourse on a few TikToks and a Reddit forum, which is initially what happened.

It was just like a few people tweeted, a few people made TikToks being like, I don't know about this American eagle eye.

It's kind of bizarre.

That was all inflated to an unimaginable scale by specific people with very specific goals in mind.

So should we talk about the backlash to the backlash?

Yes.

Because, like I said, in response to this ad, there are some TikToks and tweets that start making the rounds where people with like tepid followings on Twitter or TikTok are criticizing the eugenicist undertones of the advertisement.

In my opinion, correctly.

But do I think there needs to be like national discourse around a gene's ad campaign?

In this current moment, when so many other things are happening that are like way more consequential, in my opinion, not really.

And I didn't like the ad.

But again, I didn't really catch wind of the whole thing until I saw prominent conservatives reacting to the online liberals saying that the wokeness has gone too far, that once again, Sydney Sweeney will be the death of woke.

I don't know about you guys, but I just, I started seeing so much more of this once conservatives were telling me that people were angry about it.

Well, because they did what they always do.

It's like the Chris Ruvo playbook, right?

Or the Lips of TikTok Plube.

It's like, take some little thing, take a few examples of leftist sentiment, wildly mischaracterize the very nuanced points, by the way, that they're making, and then use that to generate outrage.

And then they just sort of feed this outrage machine where it's like the left wants to cancel Sidney Sweeney for, you know, the

like for being beautiful.

It's like the worst sort of bad faith reading of everything.

And conservatives, especially Fox News, like this is what they live for.

This is all they do.

And once they seize, like, once they find one of these things, especially if it's celebrity related, they will drive it into the ground.

I do think the digital media and like clickbait journalism like plays a role in all of this too, because like they are framing backlash as like this like widespread thing.

And then they're taking tweets from people with like seven followers where it's not even clear if they're like on the left.

And then that's like being amplified in this article to potentially millions of people as some example of discourse when it's like, is that even real?

I was reading so many of these articles as I was piecing piecing together this outline of these like everything you missed about the Sidney Sweeney American Eagle drama.

And all of them, it was like Ben Shapiro is saying this and Laura Ingram is saying this and Greg Gutfeld is saying this and Candace Owens is saying this.

And they're all saying it's gone too far based on criticism from some users on X, formerly known as Twitter.

And then it'll link, maybe it'll link like a single tweet, you know, backlash to the original advertisement.

And it's always someone with like 1,200 followers.

I'm like,

that would be a lot.

I feel like if it's double digit followers, like I'm not convinced that some of these Fox News assignment editors like aren't making up some of these tweets.

I get a little conspiratorial later in my outline as we follow this saga.

So just wait.

The point about digital media is so true and it's something that I think about a lot whenever this happens because I feel like, first of all, this happens regularly.

This is a whole playbook.

And second of all, when I first started out in digital media and I had to write like five articles a day for some website that you've never heard of before because that's like also the BuzzFeed model, you would be assigned to find as many tweets as you possibly could about something that they're just simply the demand was not real.

It was not actually there.

So I have so much experience.

Like I would be sitting there on my fourth article of the day making like, I don't know, $20

a day.

And I would be like searching on Twitter, like needing to find tweets to like fit these quotas.

The difference between when like an outlet like BuzzFeed does that for the most part and an outlet like Fox News, they do it with a clear agenda.

They do it with like a conservative narrative in mind.

And then especially right now, they have the actual institutional backing to cause like consequences.

And when conservatives do this, they are often speaking to a status quo that they will then materially benefit from.

Whereas when like people on the left do this, and I'm thinking about like the articles that I would write about like people are offended by something that was honestly probably actually offensive.

Like when I would write an article like that, that article would have no power and it would not reflect the biases of people who had authority.

But I feel like part of the reason why American Eagle made this ad is because like, yeah, their stock jumped because the people who like influence the stock market are like more in tune with like a pro-eugenics advertising campaign.

So like it all works out really well.

It becomes a treadmill of itself on the right because it just reinforces the power that they already hold.

This exact model of faux outrage and faux controversy is responsible for like so much legislation and especially like basically the entire anti-trans movement.

Anti-trans 100% anti-LGBTQ as a whole.

Women's rights, porn, tech, the like weird kids online safety stuff, the TikTok ban, which was driven by fake, completely made up fake TikTok challenges.

I mean, think about how much legislation and transphobic sentiment and elections were won off of the myth of litter boxes in bathrooms, in school bathrooms that right-wing media outlets were alleging were for students who were identifying as cats.

Taylor, didn't you report on that?

I did.

And the litter boxes were, it was like extra, it was like litter bags basically for like, uh, if somebody had to go to the bathroom and they were locked in for a school shooting.

Just crazy and bleak.

But it reminds me of the TikTok stuff, too, because it's just like moral panic, fake outrage.

They know that it's made up, but it's, it's just manufactured outrage.

And you have these like YouTubers and podcasters and then Fox News, and then it trickles like up to the politicians who are basically like creating outrage about nothing or about, you know, fractional leftist discourse that's happened in a very specific place online.

I pulled a bunch of instances of this sort of being whipped up.

So, Brett Cooper, the very famous conservative YouTuber, made an hour-long video.

Feminists are crashing out over Sidney Sweeney's good genes.

Donald Trump Jr.

posted an AI-generated image of it was like from the Sidney Sweeney ad campaign, but with Trump's face on Sidney Sweeney.

And then Fox News starts covering this around the clock.

Like I I mentioned, in a four-day period, they talk about this 181 times.

New Sidney Sweeney ad accused of being racist.

And then another segment, Sidney Sweeney ad sparks liberal meltdown online.

It's just like triggered SJW bait type stuff from like 2018.

Like that's just what we're living in now in our entire media ecosystem.

Do you know who made an Instagram reel about this among all these other people?

Who?

A mainstay on the pod, Lizzie Savetsky.

Of course.

Lizzie Savetsky, who's gone from like liberal Zionist to just like MAGA culture warrior in like the lowest way.

But she made it a reel where she was like, I don't know, guys.

I suddenly have the urge to shop at American Eagle now.

And then she like had her husband film her going into American Eagle.

Like this kind of stuff also reminds me of how the same kinds of campaigns will start against like in the Amber Heard or like the Blake Lively case.

They will invent controversies out of thin air, launder them through traditional media by creating, this was literally the PR strategy that like Justin Baldoni used in part to get like hit pieces about Blake Lively that would be churned out of places like the Daily Mail.

And it would be based on like a handful of TikToks, a handful of tweets, no views, no engagement, but like his publicist would like send those tweets to like a reporter at one of these tabloids.

And then because of like the algorithmic treadmill effect, you have all these random content creators like, Why are you weighing in on this?

It's because at this point, if you weigh in on it, it's guaranteed engagement.

It is guaranteed placement.

It is recommended to people.

And so it's like with something like the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign, it's like, we're all so sick of it, but influencers will then carry that into like stage four, which is just like everyone's now trying to cash in on the outrage to the outrage to the ad.

And oh my God.

And every time this stuff happens, and I didn't really talk about this on my outline, but like, I was talking about it with you guys the other day in our, in our, we have a group chat.

We have a group chat called Yappy Hour, Y-A-P-B-Y.

whoa don't dox our uh

we have a group chat but like if you go on youtube during any of these cycles it's just like every youtube creator and their mother has made a video that's like sidney sweeney it gets worse

i feel like i've seen a million thumbnails where it's just like someone's face and then it gets worse

it's over mine i realized now from doing my own youtube channel that if you put the words it's over on any thumbnail it increases the click-through like significantly.

Should I put it's over next to Sidney Sweeney's face on this one?

You should, and it will help performance.

If you guys see it's over in the thumbnail, keep your mouth shut.

But it is this like content machine.

I got the same thing on YouTube.

Every Twitch streamer's got to react to it, and that's going to be clipped.

And like, it just becomes this like commoditized outrage bait, basically, that everyone's got to hop on to because it's the algorithm rewards that.

If you have listened to this podcast a lot, you probably know that I make this show myself.

I conceive of the ideas myself.

I do all the research and outlining myself.

I edit myself.

I do all the production myself.

And I love doing that, mostly because I'm a control freak.

And the idea of giving up any amount of creative freedom gives me anxiety.

The downside, though, is that all of that takes a lot of time.

And sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day to do other things that one has to do to live and for me one of those things is cooking.

So I like to pass off the responsibility not to a chef but to factor.

Factor is a meal delivery service with chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy.

There are so many different exciting and varied meal options and the best part is they are all ready to heat and eat in two minutes.

I've always said that I go for the protein plus menu which, if you work out a lot or generally just want a lot of protein in your diet, they have so many great options there that are way better than just meal prepping unseasoned chicken for two weeks at a time.

And I know some gym rats are going to be in the comments like, hey, I make chicken better than that.

I'm sure you do.

I just don't have the time or patience to.

I love preemptively defending myself from criticism like inside of an ad.

I love the internet.

If you want to try Factor Now, you can get 50% off your first box at factormeals.com slash fruity50 off and use the code fruity50 off.

That's factormeals.com slash fruity50 off with the code fruity50 off.

Now, let's get back to the episode.

So content creators are doing this, then podcasters start doing this, then

the mainstream media tags along, and then we have politicians and people inside the white house exploiting this non-controversy uh to further their own ends so stephen chung who is the white house communications director under trump posted on twitter 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.

Ted Cruz, what did Ted Cruz say about Sidney Sweeney?

He posted amidst this.

Of course he did.

Hold on.

I I got to Google this one.

At Ted Cruz.

Wow.

Now the left has come out against beautiful women.

I'm sure that will pull well.

And then it is revealed amidst all of this that, like I said, Sidney Sweeney is a registered Republican since 2024 in the state of Florida.

And upon this news, Donald Trump tweets out.

Truth.

He truthed it.

Oh, yeah, he truthed it.

Sorry.

One of you want to read this.

Sidney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the hottest ad out there it's for American Eagle and the jeans are flying off the shelves flying off the shelves go get them Sydney and then that starts another round of coverage from Fox News Jesse Waters does a segment about President Trump defends Sidney Sweeney from woke mob and then the White House Twitter, which is by the way, so fucking unhinged.

What is going on?

So evil.

The most evil Twitter account.

One day that the people running the White House Twitter account are going to be tried at The Hague.

They post a picture of Donald Trump kind of like calling to a bunch of people and they captioned it, quote, have you seen the Sidney Sweeney ad?

This just went on for so many damn days where all anybody in right-wing media, the politicians, you would have thought Sidney Sweeney's American Eagle ad was like the number one issue in this country and not.

wealth inequality and not the funding of genocide and not abortion and not economic catastrophe from terror.

Like you would have thought it was Sidney Sweeney's advertisement.

Which is, by the way, what they want, right?

They don't want you talking about all of those other horrible things that are happening or the fact that ICE is snatching people off the street.

Like it is this like 24-7 manufactured outrage culture war bullshit to distract from reality.

And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't acknowledge it and talk about it.

And I do think like there are messed up stuff around it, but like no one's mad about the fact that she's beautiful.

Like, and I think that's what bothers me the most.

It's like this intentional mischaracterization of like a few people that had like some pretty nuanced thoughts.

By the worst people alive who are doing the worst things imaginable as a result of that sort of like co-opting of outrage.

I also think it's interesting and sad that like these culture wars so frequently revolve around like a celebrity woman.

And it's interesting to me that like the only way you can like quote unquote win, and I don't think Sidney Sweeney is necessarily like winning, but she avoided a lot of ire from like some of the most misogynistic people on the internet simply by like conforming and essentially doing everything they wanted.

And that sucks.

And it sucked to me when it came out.

Like, I was sad to hear that she was a registered Republican.

I wasn't surprised.

I was disappointed.

And I was just like not pleased that they would have the ability to then run with this and like uphold her as like the perfect woman who does everything they want up to and including theoretically voting for Donald Trump.

I will say, watching all of the conservative backlash to the backlash, it really clarified to me why I didn't think a whole lot about the ad to begin with, which is that while I agree that the advertisement is gesturing towards, you know, celebrating Eurocentric beauty ideals and whiteness, it's like we're kind of past the point of conservatives feeling like they have to dog whistle.

Because I was watching these segments on Fox News and in response to, you know, a few critical TikToks and tweets from leftists, every conservative in media and government got on the biggest platform that they had access to and proudly declared that they're tired of seeing fat people and black people and queer people on screen.

And they're tired of feeling like they can't, as Megan Kelly said, celebrate whiteness.

We're sick and f ⁇ ing tired of the nonsense where you are not allowed to ever celebrate someone who is white and blonde and blue-eyed.

We are over this woke agenda.

We're over the Lizzos.

We're over the Dylan Mulvaney's.

If this was a 300-pound non-binary person, they would be applauding her.

This ad is the final declaration that we're done doing that shit.

They don't need to utilize racist dog whistles because they know that they can use a racist fog horn and they won't face any consequences for it.

That's why when I saw the ad, I was like, yeah, this is kind of bad, but also like, just turn on Fox News.

Like, no one's relying on dog whistles anymore.

They just say that they hate people of color and they hate queer people.

And I think that one of the things they relish so much about a moment like this is that to them, and perhaps rightfully so, it represents how like outside the boundaries of Fox News, like you're walking through Times Square, you see this ad.

They love the ability to have any incursion of their belief system into the ultimate mainstream where it becomes unavoidable.

And I think that is something that like drives a lot of their attention and their obsession around this.

And also worth noting, like at the end of the day, they're claiming like they're defending Sidney Sweeney.

They love her, they're praising her, but this is the same group of people who just like a year prior were smearing and bullying this woman for a bikini picture where she didn't look flawless.

So it's like they will also turn on her and punish her and discard her as soon as she isn't this like beautiful, glamorous bombshell.

And like any woman who the Conservative Party like momentarily embraces is on a very strict expiration date.

Like they're, they're not going to love her forever.

They're just using her to try to worm their way deeper deeper and deeper into the mainstream.

They also don't even really love her because they don't even go to see her movies.

Right.

The movie that she just came out with just bombed at the box office this past weekend.

She's just a prop for them and she will be discarded as all of these other previous women have been discarded.

And, you know, she's going to turn 30 soon.

They're going to start saying she's over the hill.

They're going to actually demonize her for, you know, embracing her sexuality because, of course, we only know that only young women are allowed to do that.

Even 27, they're probably thinking she's like pushing it.

There were all these gross AI pictures of her like marrying Baron Trump.

So they're already envisioning her as like her next role is to be like a conservative politician's wife.

And if she doesn't do that, it's over.

I want to tell you my conspiracy theory.

Okay.

So on August 4th, Sidney Sweeney attended a screening for her upcoming movie, Americana.

Actually, it was upcoming when I wrote this outline, but it did just come out and it bombed because these people don't actually support it.

But as she she was walking into the theater swarmed by paparazzi

one

person yelled at her stop the ad that is being racist she was heckled let me show you

who's saying that we don't know who's saying it

and it was never revealed who's saying it and my wild conspiracy theory welcome to the conspiracy conspiracy theory pod.

It was Kat.

Can you imagine if I was like, no, Matt, actually, that was me.

My conspiracy theory is that this was planted.

By who?

Her team?

Well, so the video was originally shared by TMZ.

And I'm not saying, I'm not accusing TMZ of planting this person there.

I just think that there is a very real possibility based on the way that we know that these media cycles go and that we know how much money there is to be made off of the continuation of them.

It is my theory, unsubstantiated, that someone was like, here, random person, or maybe a random person who works for this company or whatever, stand there and yell at her.

This doesn't even, first of all, this doesn't even feel like a real heckle.

If you were genuinely invested in like the belief that this is a racist, eugenicist advertisement and this was like a hill that you were dying on and really advocating advocating about.

She says, stop the ad that is being racist.

It doesn't even feel like a real heckle.

What does that even mean?

Right, right.

It's not impassioned.

Okay, I'm with you, Matt, but I'll tell you what I think it is.

I've covered so many protests.

At this point, I think hundreds of protests.

Certainly, I covered, I think, something like 80 protests in 2017 alone, back when it was Trump 1.0.

Like we had them multiple times a week and I was covering politics.

Every single one of those protests, and even today you see them, these conservative people, they're just like clickbait, basically.

They're there to pretend to be woke liberals to get on the media to parody woke liberals so that they can generate viral content.

And this is a very well-known strategy.

So when I see a video like that, I think it's probably one of those types of people where it's like, that person is a conservative that's trying to keep it all going.

I'm with you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's a deep state.

Sure enough, this one video that TMZ posted of her getting heckled, heckled, it is posted by Libs of TikTok.

Kaya Reichik wrote, Sidney Sweeney was heckled and called racist for her American Eagle ad.

A beautiful white woman appearing in an ad is racist according to leftists, unreal.

Richard Hananaya, who is the right-wing blogger, he posted the video of her being heckled and wrote that all Democrats need to forcefully denounce the heckler.

They love a condemn.

They all want everyone to condemn everything all the time.

You condemn Hamas?

The other thing that this always brings me back to is like peak SJW Tumblr culture, which so much of the modern right is just an elongated response to.

And it's so crazy because like what he's saying there when he's like, you need to condemn this person, he is mocking and parodying when an actual like conservative politician will say something abhorrently racist or misogynistic or ableist or whatever.

And people will rightfully call out the party and and tell them they need to like condemn these viewpoints.

They're mocking it.

We're like, is a rapist or something?

Yes, yes.

It is so annoying because it's like ultimately the people who were leading the SJW charges of the mid-2010s, like me age 16 on like my parents' desktop computer, I didn't have any structural power.

You have the White House.

You are like instrumental in all of these larger issues.

And so it is just so pathetic that to this day, they are still clearly so mad and so captivated by like whatever progressive momentum there was on the internet like 10 years ago.

And I think the fact that we don't know who that person is is interesting because until we know who that person is, I'm 100% assuming it's some conservative or some person that was a random person that was like paid off by a conservative.

I'm saying Sky News Australia, the conservative cable news outlet, they did a segment on this.

World's Gone Mad.

Sidney Sweeney heckled at movie premiere following Gene's ad.

I'm like, there's so many people making money off of this.

Who's to say?

It was one person.

It was one person.

How easily can one person be planted?

I'm just saying.

Okay, that's enough conspiracy theorizing on the Abit Fruity podcast.

I don't like to wade into those waters.

I'm about to go use that facial recognition stuff and figure out who this lady is.

She's going to be like the top comment on this video.

Like, hey, guys, so sorry that was actually me

Ugh Did your camera just die?

Yes, now I know that sound

Can you give me two minutes?

Yeah,

so the New York Times put out a really interesting piece that actually Taylor brought to my attention originally which kind of quantified everything we've been talking about about this outrage cycle.

And by the way, just I want to mention here, I talk a lot of shit on the New York Times and it is a piece of shit institution, but I want to clarify that there are, you know, individual.

Basically.

There are individual reporters and journalists within the institution who do put out good work from time to time.

And this was one of those times.

I'm going to link this piece in the episode description, but I clipped together some quotes that kind of synthesize what they're trying to say.

The boiling social media frenzy over the American Eagle campaign has been driven, at least in part, by the public's seemingly insatiable interest in Miss Sweeney.

But it also shows how, on today's internet, a controversy can sometimes be described as widespread when it isn't.

Instead, people pushing an agenda can cherry-pick from tens of millions of posts or videos uploaded to social media every day to make their case.

Nearly three-quarters of posts that were critical of Miss Sweeney or the ad had fewer than 500 views, data shows.

Many pro-Trump users amplified the critical posts in reposts and reshares, driving even more attention to posts that would normally reach only a few thousand users.

The tide began to shift on July 27th, days after the ad came out, when large right-wing accounts such as Libs of TikTok began reposting critiques of the American Eagle campaign, mocking them as examples of triggered liberals.

Libs of TikTok and another right-wing account shared a video from a left-wing TikTok user who had 70,000 followers on the platform.

Their reposts were seen more than 4.4 million times on Twitter, far eclipsing the reach of the original post.

Then came the podcasters.

Perhaps prompted by the viral success of posts that defended the American Eagle campaign while attacking left-wing viewpoints, popular podcast hosts Charlie Kirk, Clay Travis, and Michael Knowles jumped in on the topic, devoting increasing amounts of airtime to what they described as evidence of a broken-brain Democratic culture.

Elected Republicans soon followed.

And then it goes on, but I just think this is a really interesting study that they ran, identifying how these reverse funnels always work, where a few posts from relatively unknown people online about a topic that the vast majority of people wouldn't organically care much about are picked up by these right-wing influencers and then the mainstream media pundits and the politicians and whipped up into some broad indictment of the left, even before the vast majority of the left has even heard about it.

Totally agree.

I'm glad the New York Times did some journalism.

When this article came out, it got a decent amount of traction on Blue Sky, where everyone hates the New York Times.

And like, there was a lot of people like dunking on it in the sense that they were like, this has been the pattern for a long time, which is true.

But I'm still glad that they wrote about it.

And I thought they wrote about it really well.

Because if you're going to like.

learn something from how conservatives accelerate their rhetoric, you have got to drill down over and over and over again.

Every time they try to do this, like it cannot be overstated how much of a ruse it is, how much of it is media manipulation.

Like, it just can't be said enough.

And also, like, we who like cover the internet and live on the internet and breathe the internet, like, we know how these culture wars are created.

If you're listening to this podcast, there is a good chance that you understand how this process goes every single time since Gamergate.

But, like, a lot of people who read the New York Times don't understand that.

People like my parents don't understand how this stuff happens.

And they, you know, see this stuff start cropping up across the media of like Democrats take a stand against beautiful women and they just think it's like something that is actually happening.

So my outline kind of wraps up with like, what is the bigger picture here, which we kind of touched on earlier, but I want to rant a little bit about what I think the bigger picture is here.

And I wrote this out.

While the right-wing media is engaging you in a culture war about Sidney Sweeney, Donald Trump is scorching the earth to make sure that nobody accesses the details of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.

While the right-wing media is engaging you in a culture war about Sidney Sweeney, your free speech and tax dollars are going out the window to support a genocide, which is broadly unpopular across the political spectrum in the United States.

While the right-wing media is engaging you in a culture war about Sidney Sweeney, the MAGA administration is keeping you uneducated, is keeping you poor, is keeping you sick, because materially improving your life would be in direct opposition to helping the billionaires they are bought out by.

And so there's a real darkness here for me, because while it's fun to argue about celebrities, or at least I don't know, it used to be, there's a reason why all of MAGA's media proxies from Fox News to Brett Cooper are giving this so much airtime, despite not a single Democratic politician, by the way, or prominent member of the left talking about this at all.

And it's because culture wars are all the right has to keep you in the fold.

They won't even pretend to do anything about wealth inequality or social services or anything that would make your life actually better.

So they just jangle these, you know, Sydney Sweeney-shaped keys in front of your face and keep you angry enough at the woke left that you'll never wonder why you don't have free health care.

Amen.

But I also don't want people to do the thing that...

I see online too, where it's like somebody tries to have a nuanced thought or perspective, especially on something to do with women or celebrity culture.

And then they reply like, oh, well, this is a distraction from what Donald Trump is really doing.

Like, because it's like, in, yes, it is a distraction, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth like dissecting and having a nuanced thought on, or as you said, like writing about in the New York Times and revealing this strategy.

If it's covered, it should be covered that way.

I think the distraction is the debate.

Like, you know, is it a problem that she's hot or whatever?

Like, that's the distraction.

But like having a thoughtful, nuanced take, or honestly, this podcast, like, this is not part of the distraction machine.

Like, this is like doing essential work, like, you know, dissecting the discourse, like pulling apart kind of why these campaigns happen and what they hope to achieve.

And I do think that that coverage is valuable.

Yes.

Just to be clear, when Brett Cooper makes an hour-long YouTube video about Sidney Sweeney, it is a distraction.

But when we make an hour-long YouTube video about Sydney Sweeney,

we are doing such important work.

I could be self-aware, I promise.

The last thing that I had here on my outline was: do you guys know RT?

The Russian outlet?

Yes.

It was paying Tim Poole.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Can you explain what RT is?

RT is Russia Today, or it used to stand for Russia Today.

It's basically state media from Russia, and they run a lot of propaganda campaigns.

It was the Department of Justice revealed a few months ago that they were secretly paying a bunch of right-wing influencers, including Tim Poole and Benny Johnson, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

That's millions of dollars a year to make content that fed into whatever they were trying to push.

RT, which I think is now just RT.

Yeah, they rebranded.

It did used to stand for Russia Today, but I think they want to have, you know, more U.S.

involvement.

So being called Russia Today would stands for read this.

They posted slop content about this Sidney Sweeney great genes controversy and they wrote, liberals freak out over Sidney Sweeney's great genes.

And, you know, it's just like interviewing triggered libs on the street about Sidney Sweeney.

But I'm like, why do you think Russia today,

the Russian state-owned propaganda network, is posting about this like fake Sidney Sweeney controversy?

In fact, RT regularly weighs in on U.S.-based fake culture wars, including the current one, where people are apparently mad on the right that there are male cheerleaders in the nfl which is just like a wild thing to be mad about in 2025 george w bush was a male cheerleader so was ronald reagan no way yeah no way so many icons we really are getting the 80s back yeah yeah exactly exactly

of what concern are these like american culture wars to russia and russian state-owned media like does nobody find it weird and i think that's an example that most people can be like yeah they have no business posting about sydney sweeney's jeans advertisement.

Why do they care about this?

And I would encourage everyone, especially maybe if you were

a conservative sent this podcast by a liberal family member or something, like think about how American media can do that as well and influencers can do that as well.

You know, everyone has the ability to exploit fake culture wars for nefarious purposes to get you to look away from like the fact that our president is a pedophile.

And they can use these culture war topics to reinforce the bigotries that help Trump get elected.

They can reinforce homophobia, they can reinforce misogyny, they can reinforce cultural conservatism, they can kill two birds with one stone, essentially.

And after everything is said and done, American Eagles' stock is down.

So, what have we learned today?

Hope it was worth it.

Their foot traffic is down too.

You don't go woke.

What is it?

You don't, if you don't go woke, you go broke.

Wait, if go

be woke and make money.

Go anti-woke, go broke.

That's the one silver lining out of all of this is that like this will stick with normal people as like something that was kind of like

longer than it will stick with conservatives as like a good way to get engagement.

Like ultimately, this type of ad campaign only works very briefly and very temporarily.

And ultimately, it will hurt you more than it will help you.

I also think it's just was so short-sighted of them to market this ad so heavily towards men when they're trying to sell women's jeans lizzy sotsky bought a pair the one and only sale made in new york how do i wrap this up well i guess i'll say i did not care about sydney sweeney before this and i do not care about sydney sweeney now though i wish her well i can't wait to see what deranged alibaba product she's going to be hawking next

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode.

If you made it this far, wow, I appreciate you so much.

Thank you for allowing me into your home, your car, your your ear.

Taylor and Kat, thank you so much for joining us today, as always.

Thanks for having us.

Ooh, that was kind of like a robotic.

Thank you, Matt,

for having us.

No, you sound like Sydney Sweeney doing the ad.

That's the point.

Wait, should I do my sign-off in the voice?

As always, thank you for listening.

And until next time, Stefrode.

Is that good?

It was perfect.

Steph Rudy.

I can picture her saying it.

You can take the boy out of the fruit, but you can't take the fruit out of the boy.

That sounds sexual.

Okay, I'm done.

I'm done.

I'm cutting it.