Outrage is nothing new. Humans have a long history of anger.
Cain slew Abel out of a fury caused when God preferred Abel’s sacrifice to his own.
Political outrage is not new either. Our nation’s second president, John Adams, pursued the Alien and Sedition act in large measure to prevent newspaper editors from calling him “fat”.
Today’s Leftists are mad about everything and nothing.
When actress Sydney Sweeney donned American Eagle jeans and began hawking them as part of their “Sydney’s got great jeans” campaign, many on the Left acted as though she’d committed an atrocity of the highest order.
Truth is, she violated their sensibilities simply by existing.
Sweeney’s crime? She’s young, pretty, white, and thin. They attacked her even though three of those traits required no effort and involved no conscious decision on her part. It’s her natural abundance of beauty that caused liberal brains to melt in irrational exasperation. Add to that the inherent “lack of diversity” of her skin color and you have the ingredients for manufactured rage.
Proving there is no issue that Progressives can’t equate with Nazism, their responses to the ad were unsurprising.
That paragon of calm deliberation and civil discourse, social media, was ablaze with antipathy. Woke TikTokers, Instagram posters and other online trolls went berserk accusing American Eagle of promoting “eugenics,” “white supremacy” and calling the new advertising “Nazi propaganda”.
MSNBC producer Hannah Holland wrote in an op-ed, “The backlash has been swift and fierce, and some of it, at least, if you ask me, is fair. The internet has been quick to condemn the advertisement as non-inclusive at best and as overtly promoting “white supremacy” and “Nazi propaganda” at worst.”
ESPN personality, David Dennis Jr. said he was “mortified” by the American Eagle’s campaign.
Being mortified wasn’t enough for Dennis who posted the following on BlueSky. “I didn’t think anything of the Sydney Sweeney ads, but then ACTUAL SCHOLARS ON MESSAGING, EUGENICS AND FASCISM explained what was going on then yes I understood and became pretty mortified because hey sometimes IT’S GOOD TO LISTEN TO EXPERTS.”
The only thing true in his post is when he wrote, “I didn’t think”.
The good news is the audience reach of MSNBC and BlueSky is something less than what a 12-passenger van will hold.
Thinking and outrage are as unrelated as economics and politics.
When the claim of Nazism is the default argument against the policies or actions of your political and cultural opponents you’ve reached the nadir of public debate. This trite, inaccurate, and hateful trope is used precisely because the Left has no real argument.
All their opponents must be of the ugliest socio-political affiliation in history so that the Left need not present any rational argument in response. Hate first, we’ll think of a reason later.
Ad companies using beautiful young people to sell merchandise is neither new, nor offensive.
Sweeney’s ad is instead more proof that the era of Woke has come to an end. During the tyrannical Woke reign, advertising became a fevered circus, a three-ring spectacle populated with plus-size models, mid-riff baring octogenarians, bearded women and men in mascara trying to sell sports bras.
The idea was to remake people and their concepts of beauty to include what so many see in the mirror. To force their ideas of “inclusivity” and “diversity” by stuffing them into a pair of spandex shorts two sizes too small. Their self-hate caused them to demand we acknowledge that anything can be “beautiful”.
It didn’t work. We know that what we find attractive may be peculiar to us, but that objective standards thereof aren’t injurious to anyone.
Any man who sees Chris Hemsworth flexing his biceps as Thor doesn’t get sore demanding he grows a paunch and go bald. Most women don’t wish for Sydney Sweeney to contract rickets or develop a mustache. Most people see two beautiful people that put in the work to maintain their fantastic figures as something aspirational.
Liberals see the same thing and are instantly jealous. As jealousy is petty, they cook up a contrived reason to oppose them and then let their hate hang out like a beer belly over a speedo. Their outrage is forced, and unrelated to reality.
They detest being who they are and thus seek to remake mankind in their image, an ugly one at that.
The Sweeney swoon is just the latest proof that DEI, Wokeness, and Progressivism are on the decline.
Stephen Piccirillo © 2025
