Right-wing commentators suggested there was widespread criticism of Ms. Sweeney over her new ad campaign. There wasn’t, at least at first.

A banner with an image of Sydney Sweeney and the words “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” hangs from a building flagpole.

Ken BensingerStuart A. Thompson

By Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson

Aug. 7, 2025

To hear Vice President JD Vance tell it, the Democratic Party has a serious Sydney Sweeney problem.

“Did you learn nothing from the November 2024 election?” Mr. Vance asked of the Democrats during a podcast interview last week. “The lesson they’ve apparently taken is, ‘We’re going to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful.’”

His comments joined a chorus of Republican and right-wing voices who argued that a new American Eagle ad campaign with Ms. Sweeney, one of Hollywood’s top young stars, had stoked left-wing outrage over its slogan: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” They claimed that progressives were up in arms over the intentional double-entendre with the word “genes,” suggesting it was winking at eugenics or white supremacy.

In reality, most progressives weren’t worked up much at all.

Criticism of the ad campaign had come almost entirely from a smattering of accounts with relatively few followers, according to an analysis of social media data by The New York Times. Conversation about the ad did not escalate online or in traditional media until days later, after right-leaning influencers, broadcasters and politicians began criticizing what they described as a wave of progressive outrage.

In fact, by the time right-wing users were in an uproar, only a few thousand posts on X mentioned Ms. Sweeney, according to data by Tweet Binder, a social media analytics company. Fewer than 10 percent of those expressed clear criticism of the actress or ad, according to the analysis by The Times, which used artificial intelligence to help flag posts for review. Overall, there were three times as many posts supportive of the campaign and Ms. Sweeney on X as there were posts critical of them in the days after the campaign began, the analysis by The Times showed.

Conversation about Sydney Sweeney and her ad campaign did not surge on X until days after the campaign debuted.

Mentions of “Sydney Sweeney” on X

Excludes reposts.Source: Tweet Binder by AudienseBy The New York Times

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 Ms. 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 the tens of millions of posts and videos uploaded to social media every day to make their case.

The political right has become particularly adept at this tactic, cognizant of the way that tapping into hot-button cultural issues can stoke popular anger not just against progressive ideas but against the Democratic Party itself. In the case of the American Eagle ads, the one-sided discourse also appears to have provoked an actual debate: Left-leaning criticism of the campaign rose considerably after the topic gained traction on the right.

“Republicans are going to just keep hammering this because they know that they can find 13 teenagers on TikTok to say something crazy and then turn it into a two-week-long news story,” said Ryan Broderick, the author of Garbage Day, a newsletter about internet culture.

American Eagle, which has been struggling financially in the face of inflation and sagging consumer spending, started the campaign with Ms. Sweeney on July 23. At the time, Jennifer Foyle, the company’s president, described the campaign as a “winning combo of ease, attitude and a little mischief.”

In one spot, Ms. Sweeney, who promotes a number of other brands as well, zips up a pair of jeans while saying, in a voice-over, that “genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.” She adds, “My jeans are blue.”

Initial reactions were largely apolitical, though some progressives criticized the ad’s sexual overtones while some on the right applauded a return to “traditional advertising” in what they viewed as a step away from more diverse representations. But on the fringes of sites including TikTok and X, some users began suggesting that the campaign had a more subtle and menacing message tied to eugenics: that blond, blue-eyed looks are somehow superior.

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“She has good jeans like she has good GENES! hahahaha like in a nazi way!!” stated a July 25 post on X that drew over five million views. The next day, a video on TikTok that also made a comparison to Nazism drew 3.5 million views.

Those, however, appeared to be outliers: Nearly three-quarters of posts that were critical of Ms. Sweeney or the ad had fewer than 500 views, data show. 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 27, 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. “Keep this up Democrats,” posted the account, which is run by a woman named Chaya Raichik and has 4.3 million followers on X. “This is going to be great for you guys.”

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Ms. Raichik 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 X, 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 including Charlie Kirk, Clay Travis and Michael Knowles jumped on the topic, devoting increasing amounts of airtime to what they described as evidence of a “brain broken” Democratic culture.

Elected Republicans soon followed.

Sweeney Surges

Broadcast media started covering Sydney Sweeney’s ad campaign with renewed fervor days after it had debuted. A notable share of the coverage came from Fox News properties.

Mentions of Sydney Sweeney on podcasts, radio and television

Includes repeat mentions, such as repeat broadcasts. Fox outlets include Fox News, Fox News Radio and its news podcasts.Source: Critical MentionBy The New York Times

“Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women,” Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, posted on July 29. After reports emerged that Ms. Sweeney had registered as a Republican in Florida last year, President Trump posted to Truth Social that Ms. Sweeney “has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there” and praised the campaign for not being “woke.”

Absent from the evolving conversation, however, were any elected Democrats condemning the American Eagle spots.

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“Has anyone on the left actually attacked the Sweeney ad?” asked a progressive podcaster, Brian Tyler Cohen, who has 600,000 followers on X and 4.6 million subscribers on YouTube, in a post last week as articles were circulating about the uproar.

Mr. Travis, who has discussed the ads almost every day for the past week on his sports and politics podcast, “OutKick,” as well as on his nationally syndicated radio show, acknowledged in an interview that elected Democrats had not criticized the ads. But he said the fact that they hadn’t forcefully rebutted the complaints about the ads proved that the party was complicit in what he said was a “woke” culture run amok.

“I haven’t seen a single Democrat call out the absurdity,” he said. “Their silence speaks volumes.”

At least one elected Democrat, Representative Eric Swalwell of California, did speak up to defend the ad. In a response to Mr. Cruz, Mr. Swalwell stated on X that “attacking the Sydney Sweeney ad is dumb.” Yet his post drew only 60,000 views, compared with 1.2 million for Mr. Cruz’s post on the ad.

Ms. Sweeney has not publicly commented on the campaign, and American Eagle has also stayed largely out of the fray, save for an Instagram post late last week that said the campaign “is and always was about the jeans.”

At least in the short term, all the attention hasn’t hurt the brand: American Eagle shares are up nearly 26 percent since the campaign began.

The New York Times collected more than 4,000 posts from X mentioning “Sydney Sweeney” or alternative spellings of her name from July 24 and July 25, 2025. Those posts were reviewed by an artificial intelligence tool to mark them as critical or supportive of the ad campaign and Ms. Sweeney, from a scale from 0 to 10. Flagged posts with a score of 5 or higher were then manually reviewed by The New York Times and used to calculate the share of posts that were critical or supportive.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49166873)

oh i see, it's basically the *right* that stokes anger.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49166874)

I'm not sure the whole population internalized it as much as we, the terminally online paleocon crew, did. But the fact remains that for those who did, we're not just going to 'forget' about are modern Female Admiral. We're not going to forget that a lot of men were put in prison who did nothing wrong. We're not going to forget all the lies. The thread with all the D own goals is a mile long.

Oh, yeah, no one was freaking out about Sydney Sweeney and racist dogwhistles. That's not you guys? Not the Democrats. You'd never wage a brutal campaign to destroy anyone who thought remotely different from you? You'd never cause someone to lose their career over wrongthink. Yeah that whole time period when you were misbehaving is completely memoryholed. You're the chill people who are totally not triggered by a hot blonde. I remember now. Nothing to see here. I'm glad NYT looked at the data and confirmed it was only a few small accounts. Not the type of people who would make atrocious unwatchable films full of ugly nondescript mud creatures and call us all racist for not liking it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49169069)

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna221630

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49166888)

"Sydney Sweeney's ad shows an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49167822)

"noninclusive at best, white supremacy at worst"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49169076)

Unfortunately, conservatives have to answer for what is on Fox News and liberals have to answer for what is on MSNBC.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49168851)

I think the democratic party might really be done for, like there has to be a breakaway movement from these morons

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5759913&forum_id=2/#49168898)