Right-wingers fabricated Dem outrage over Sydney Sweeney's 'good jeans' ad: report
Right-wing influencers online intentionally ginned up the outrage machine over Sydney Sweeney's new "American Eagle" jeans ad when the outrage wasn't there.
Following the release of a jeans commercial featuring "Sydney Sweeney's" good jeans, a few comments were posted from accounts with few followers and little notoriety. The New York Times reported that the right amplified those comments specifically to generate outrage over the "woke left."
“She has good jeans like she has good GENES! hahahaha like in a nazi way!!” stated a comedian in a July 25 post on X. A TikTok user followed with their own comparison to the Nazi eugenics program.
"Those, however, appeared to be outliers," revealed the Times in an investigation. "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 campaign gained momentum when the so-called Libs of TikTok account began reposting messages they claimed were from those on the left.
Tech lawyer Benjamin B. Kabak wrote on Bluesky that these were part of "unwinnable stupid games that rely on most people being idiots."
"This is how the outrage machine works," he added about the right's campaign to amplify outlying messages to give them an excuse to attack the left as "woke."
No elected Democrat said anything about the commercial or Sweeney. That didn't matter to the right, however.
Clay Travis, who the Times said "has discussed the ads almost every day for the past week," admitted the Democrats hadn't attacked Sweeney. However, "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."
Kabak described the absurdity of the thinking, noting that elected officials don't often spend their days condemning "every Twitter account with 14 followers commenting about an ad."
"Get real, Clay Travis. When you start condemning every fascist Nazi in the Republican, we can talk about your faux-outrage over no one," he said.