Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans Are Not a Nazi Dog Whistle… And This Is Why the Left Keeps Losing

By now, you’ve probably heard about the bizarre uproar surrounding Sydney Sweeney wearing jeans that some social media users claimed were secretly signaling support for eugenics and Nazi ideology. To us folks that still live on planet Earth, this sounds like satire.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t for many on the left.

Let’s be clear: A gorgeous Hollywood actress wearing a pair of low-rise jeans is resurrecting something, but it isn’t the Third Reich. The claim is so absurd, so drenched in hyperbole, that it would be a funny bit for an edgy comedian if it didn’t represent a broader, more toxic trend within certain online corners of political thought. These conspiracies, where everything is secretly fascist and everyone is one misstep away from being branded a monster, are why the left continues to alienate independents, moderates, and centrists, and thus losing elections they could be winning.

And this can easily be proven.

Donald Trump won in 2024 by a decent margin, but keep in mind that Joe Biden had most of those same votes just a few years earlier. Some polls indicate that as much as 45 percent of Americans identify as independent or third-party. These are the folks that decide elections. Staunch Republicans and Democrats are going to toe party lines regardless of candidates like Trump, Kamala Harris or Biden, despite the fact that neither of these folks should be in office. You could run a stale piece of bread on either ticket and party loyalists will vote for it. Just look at how many votes Biden got.

Point made.

At the core of the controversy was the slogan American Eagle Outfitters used for an advertisement for their blue jeans with Sweeney’s looks being part of a pun that centered on her classically beautiful appearance: That being a thin, blonde, blue-eyed woman, representing a western ideal of beauty. The slogan read: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. I almost feel ridiculous having to explain the play on words being used, but seeing how far we have fallen intellectually at this point in history, I feel I must.

The advertisement was trying to insinuate that Sydney Sweeney is hot because she has “great jeans,” a pun for “genes.” For the company running the ad, the message is this: You can be just as hot as her wearing their jeans. It’s a classic advertisement strategy: If you use this product, you can be as happy, popular, sexy, and have as much fun as these people in the advertisement using the product. Think of every beer commercial you have ever seen. It’s the same idea.

However, that’s not how everyone saw it… and here in lies the problem facing the left.

Leftists on social media didn’t think this was a classic advertisement strategy to sell jeans, but rather spun wild theories connecting the slogan to eugenics and Nazi propaganda of the “ideal human” with Sweeney being the model. Basically, if you don’t have good genes like Sweeney, your genes are defective and need to be eliminated. The rhetoric from the social-media left was saying that Sweeney is moonlighting as a Nazi sympathizer between film shoots and American Eagle Outfitters was secretly planting Nazi-like propaganda to send the message that the only people that should be here are the Nazi ideal of white people. These claims, which danced across social media reels, required such a suspension of logic, historical understanding, and common sense that they bordered on performance art. But these claims weren’t treated as such. They were amplified, shared, and in some circles, believed.

This kind of rhetoric doesn’t just discredit itself; it discredits the entire movement that tolerates it. It allows the right to paint the left as out-of-touch, hysterical, and completely disconnected from the real issues facing working-class Americans. When liberals start seeing fascism in fashion choices, regular voters, especially independents, moderates, and centrists, tune out. They don’t want to join a movement where one badly interpreted Instagram post turns into a tribunal.

Yet, this type of ridiculousness is the hill the left often decides to die on and they die on these hills way too often.

This is not about the left not having valid causes… they have plenty of valid causes. There are serious issues with climate change, healthcare, wealth inequality, and racial justice, just to name a few. These are real issues with life-or-death consequences. But instead of focusing on those, too much time is spent policing culture through a lens of paranoid semiotics, searching for hidden messages and dog whistles in slogans for a struggling clothing manufacturer. It’s exhausting, alienating, and completely ineffective at building coalitions that win elections.

Worse, it infantilizes the public. It assumes that people are too blind or stupid to recognize real extremism, so we must uncover it in their clothing for them. That’s not activism… that’s moral panic.

The backlash to Sweeney’s jeans should’ve been laughed out of the room. Instead, it revealed the growing tendency of the online left to cannibalize itself and chase ideological ghosts. Meanwhile, the right, despite its own authoritarian leanings and regressive policies that threaten a lot of our freedoms, continues to consolidate power by offering what looks like normalcy to average voters compared to the left. That normalcy is more often than not a lie, but it’s a better pitch than shouting that an actress’s jeans are proto-fascist.

If the left wants to win elections and build a broad-based coalition, it needs to stop looking for Hitler in denim. Not every cultural moment is a secret battle in the war against fascism. Sometimes, it’s just a celebrity in pants.

The left will continue to doom itself if it continues to do these things. They need to save the outrage for the things that actually matter if they want folks to care about the things that actually matter.