Today, August 1, 2025, marks day-nine of the left wigging out and losing its mind over a series of TV ads for jeans. Settle down people, it’s just a joke.
Each ad depicts a beautiful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hollywood starlet named Sydney Sweeney, dressed in American Eagle brand denim — specifically the company’s new line dubbed "The Sydney Jean."
The ads close with the line, "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," an obvious double entendre — it’s apparent from looking at her that she also has great genes.
But what was intended as a humorous, playful, play-on-words has exploded into an alleged support for eugenics, a Nazi-themed call for the master Aryan race, populated solely by blonde-haired, blue-eyed Caucasians.
In a video posted to X, a young woman at a mall is asked, "Hey, wanna go into American Eagle?”
She replies, "Oh! I can’t go in there because I’m black."
In another, a woman claimed that the ads brought back memories of childhood trauma as a "brown girl."
"It is so difficult to grow up as a person of color, specifically a woman, and view yourself as beautiful in any sense of the word," she said.
Marc Lamont Hill, a professor at City University of New York, went completely off the rails. He claimed that the ads suggest that non-whites are "less human, less beautiful, less real."
Legacy media also contributed to the frenzy.
An MSNBC headline claimed that "Sydney Sweeney's ad shows an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness."
ABC’s "Good Morning America” announced that “the play-on-words is being compared to Nazi propaganda with racial undertones."
Florida Jolt writer and columnist Tracy Caruso saw the ads for what they were: a long-needed return to normalcy in advertising — a return to an era where models were attractive and didn’t represent some woke, offbeat segment of society.
"But here’s what so many are missing amid the noise," she said: "This backlash is less about race and more about a profound exhaustion with the woke advertising culture that has dominated recent years — ads full of overweight, unattractive, nonbinary, or transgender models meant to 'represent diversity' but failing to inspire desire or aspiration."
Caruso concluded that "People are tired of being told what they should like and who they should accept as beautiful."
Bingo! Caruso’s spot-on. And the negative reaction to the American Eagle ad campaign indicates something else: America, especially left wing America, has lost its sense of humor, a process that began at least a decade ago.
Hillary Clinton claimed victimhood when she lost her presidential election to Donald Trump in 2016, and blamed the loss, in part, on a jokester named Douglass Mackey.
He posted a graphic on Twitter telling Clinton voters that they could avoid long lines at the polls and vote by texting "Hillary" to a number he provided. It was obviously a joke, but jokes don’t exist in the age of victimhood.
As a result Mackey was indicted, and after a three-week trial found guilty of election interference in 2023. He was sentenced to seven months in prison.
There may be hope for us yet, though.
Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Judicial Circuit reversed Mackey’s conviction due to insufficient evidence that he’d engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with the election. The vote was unanimous, 3-0.
Humorist Sal Litvak released a book last November, "Let My People Laugh," containing some of the best examples of Jewish humor of the 20th century.
It’s a reminder of a time, not that long ago, when Americans could laugh at themselves. We could laugh at Catholic jokes, Jewish jokes, and Baptist jokes.
We could laugh at city slicker jokes and country bumpkin jokes, doctor jokes and lawyer jokes, cop jokes and fireman jokes, fat jokes and skinny jokes, mom jokes, dad jokes, kid jokes and blonde jokes. We could laugh at ourselves without being offended.
But humor has been replaced with victimhood: make a joke about me or my identity, and I’m a victim.
If companies start following American Eagle’s lead and run more clever, playful ads; if more courts can distinguish comedy from crime; if more humorists publish books that remind us of what made America laugh in days gone by, then maybe, just maybe, we can laugh at life again.
If we fail, we’ll all end up like today’s left wing: miserable and tearing one another apart.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and is a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He's also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and a Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.