Panic World - BONUS: Sydney Sweeney and rage bait

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Ryan and Grant discuss that American Eagle ad and why everyone is arguing about Sydney Sweeney's "good jeans." Want to hear the rest of their conversation, and enjoy other cool stuff like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's your favorite Sydney Swinney movie? I don't think I've ever seen one. You didn't see Immaculate? No. Euphoria? No. All right. So you're fully neutral as we enter into this conversation.

You have no, you have no association to make you biased. That's good journalism. I don't think so. I don't think I've ever, let's see. Well, you're looking let up. I will say, I am Grant Irving. This is Panna Road. I saw White Lotus. She was very good playing a character that was later revealed to be based off of

Dasha and or Anna from Red Scare, according to Mike White. Ironic. I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. Joining me, the host of the show, who loves to review bomb every Sydney-Sweeney movie, even though he never sees her. Ryan Broderick. Hello, thank you for having me on my show. Do you own American Eagle stuff?

Are you a consumer of their goods? I was not. I dated a girl in college who, like... American Eagle and while she would shop I would sit on the couch and watch Jack's Mannequin videos on the big TV screen that they had there during the uh the dark blue era of that band I was a big something corporate fan so I enjoyed the move to Jack's Manikin um it was nice that they had a couch yeah they had a couch did a boyfriend couch yeah and uh I was a I was a big coals guy because they were the only place in my mall that had skinny jeans in the 2000s

that cost under $50, which was very hard. Skinny jeans were very hard to find up until around 2012, 2013. Okay. So neutral on Sweeney, pretty neutral on American Eagle. Can you describe the ad that is upended the internet? Yeah. It's a play on Sydney Sweeney having great jeans with a G. And Sydney Sweeney has great jeans with a J. They're American Eagle jeans. And it's all about how she is pretty and wears jeans. And one of the ads, though, goes a little further into her being blonde with blue eyes, which is where all the trouble begins in this story. So on July 23rd, a Sydney-Sweeney fan account on X called Sweeney Daily X shared a new ad from the campaign.

So how did this, how did this spread? This was a mostly eccentric freak out. Yes. If you're not on X anymore, it's a much smaller place than it used to be. There are still, though, a lot of fandom accounts run by mentally unwell teenagers and the like. And there's basically one for every kind of big celebrity. These are very big, you know, in K-pop circles and stuff. The reason why they are still on X is because Blue Sky can't really handle how they post.

They're very into posting video. They are typically. running countries with low internet connections. So they're kind of stuck on X for a very specific kind of communication. And there are a bunch of Sidney Swini ones. Sydney Swini X is like a fairly decently sized one. Let's see. Sydney Sweeney X has 160,000 followers on the platform.

And it just posts about the actor Sidney Swinney. And it shared her American Eagle ad earlier this month. And it got a good amount of engagement. Got like 400 shares, give or take. How did the ad start to spread controversy? It didn't at first. So we, Adam, our researcher and I dug into this yesterday. And the ad basically just like got shared around X for a while, one of the ads in this campaign.

The Sydney Sweeney has great genes. campaign and it was finance guys that found it first and they were joking that you should basically turn american eagle into a meme stock because sidney swine is hot but there was no political discourse for like the first day or two around the ads at all it was just weird crypto uh you know consumer investor finance guys making jokes about it they made a hot ad with a hot person and uh People enjoyed it. End of story. Well, as I said, things got a little more complicated for a few reasons.

So obviously, right now, we've talked about us on the show a few times. The right wing is very interested in encoding everything as conservative that they like and that they want. So they want masculinity to feel conservative. They want hot women to feel conservative. and loving hot women to feel conservative. They want American Eagle, apparently, to feel conservative. They are still very focused and angry on like the woke advertising, the sort of rainbow capitalism and pink capitalism of the 2010s.

So when this ad started going viral and becoming a meme stock, they were looking at it as proof that if you don't go woke, you don't go broke. Even though people were using it as a meme stock because, like, it wasn't because the advertisement was good. It was just because, like, these guys were pumping it for phone. The turn, the, like, the big turn seems to happen when end of, end wokeness, uh, posts about this, right? Yes.

An account that is rumored to be Jack Posobics account, allegedly. Yeah, it's a massive, massive account. It's got like, I don't know, almost 4 million followers. And it posts about it pretty early. And basically just says that, like, woke is dead. And they compare it to an ad from 2019 of like a plus size black model in a jeans ad and saying, like, look how much better it is, now that Sidney is in a jeans ad. Before we get into lefty response with this, is NWokeness mostly just making bait posts or does it have more of an agenda than that?

I mean, most of the accounts like N. Wokeness have all started operating under the same playbook. Lips of TikTok now does the same thing. They are effectively just right-wing tabloids. Their audiences are not like pissed off liberals. they're trying to get they're trying to engagement farm from conservatives but it's not like they're a troll account they they you know what one of their posts from this week uh was about how new york city has third world quote unquote infrastructure and it's like videos of like the floods in new york or whatever that that is not to piss off liberals that is to reaffirm a belief of conservatives in

It's doing a Fox News, but for social media. It's a social media-based tabloid. That's helpful. So once and Wokeness posts this, and it gets a lot more spread, that's when we really see the left response, yeah? No. So it bounces around the conservative parts, which are most of them, of X for about two days.

And it doesn't really get any attention from anyone outside of Sydney Sweeney fans, finance guys, and white nationalists. Like, that's kind of it. The trifecta. Yeah. This is all happening the span of about three days. So on like the second day, the Sydney Sweeney fan account posts two more times. And it posts two different ads from the campaign. multiple short videos in this campaign.

So it posts two more. And the first one it posts gets a lot of, I guess you'd say liberals or leftist or progressives, but it just seemed to me mainly just like women on X who were upset that the ad was sexist. And there was an entire conversation about why it is sexist for Sidney-Sweeney to have an ad where she puts on jeans. And it wasn't sexist for Jeremy Allen White, the actor, to do Calvin Klein ad, where, hangs dong. And so they're like, why is it okay for Jeremy Allen White to show hog and not Sydney Sweeney to like slowly put on a pair of jeans?

And that was totally separate from like all the white nationalist being like, yes, this is trad wife coded or whatever. And all the finance guys being like, I'm going to pump and dump American Eagle because I'm a psychopath. These are all different conversations. It's not until that same Sydney-Sweeney Daily X account. shares a second video, or now I guess third video, from this ad campaign. And that's the one that's way more explicitly about Sidney's quote unquote gene.

So it's about her having blue eyes and blonde hair. And that's when everyone is like, is this like a Nazi thing? And the reason why that's important to point out is because I've done tests with X's algorithm over the last few years. it's a really interesting one it's slightly similar to reels and ticot but it is a little different it emphasizes quote

posts over like almost anything like if you really want to go viral on x you just like should quote somebody else's post that's like a really easy way to do it it also seems to identify really basic categories so like if you click on

you know i i clicked on a video today about batman the animated TV show and now my feet is just nothing but Batman the animated TV show. Yeah. So Stan accounts, stand accounts, fan accounts, they are very powerful right now. So in a lot of ways, by this third post, it is now escaped continuum. And now it's no longer being enjoyed by racists and finance DGens and stands, but now it's being viewed by real people who are like, this ad is weird.

and that's when the liberals and the leftists the progressive start to get involved do you think the account was made intentionally to be bait do you think that it was a it was an ad campaign devised to escape campaign

or do you think it was like hey you know it would be really cool if we can get the fascist and the and the finance bros to like love American Eagle and like, you know, this can just live in its own little world. Okay, so this is a very complicated question, and it's the center of this entire thing,

and the reason why this thing is so hard to talk about is because you cannot have a nuanced conversation about this within the character limit allowed on blue sky or X or whatever. So it is a very normal geneset. Like this is a normal gene set. It is not even particularly sexy. First of all, Sidney Sweeney, not my type, not into blondes. You can't say that, Ryan.

You can't say that you're not into blondes. Not for me. Second, we are in the midst of a large-scale right-wing turn of American culture, very similar to post-9-11. In fact, a friend of mine, a great writer just last week, Kelsey Weekman over Yahoo Entertainment, wrote a great piece titled, Everyone is listening to secular praise music, yes, even you. And it was all about how everything in poppy music sounds like praise music. And you can really attack this from any direction you want. The rise of like meta-modern storytelling like Superman, Top Gun Maverick.

And Superman is not a conservative film, but we are part of a wider, fashy, right-wing culture takeover. And it is happening for a lot of different reasons in a lot of different ways. and it's not like some conspiracy. It's also, I think, just people reacting to what's around them, but it is happening. And so within that context, this fairly normal anodyne genes ad that is playing off of like genetic, like a joke about genetics, the context of that is unsettling. But if this ad had come out 10 years ago, I don't think anyone would have given a shit. In fact, if this ad had come out 10 years ago, people would be like, that's old and tacky. Interesting.

Like, everyone would be like, first of all, why is Sydney-Sweeney doing ads for American Eagle? They're the Jack's Manichin store, you know? Yeah, that is all the right context. But so if you were to guess about when somebody was Don Drapering this ad campaign, do you think that they are hoping for this kind of attention? I think every advertiser, every brand wants to have a lot of attention.

Do I think that American Eagle wanted to have headlines published every day for three weeks? It said American Eagle racist, American Eagle Nazi? Probably not. But I bet you they are making a lot of money. I bet you they are having internal conversations about how to think

about that and how to process all of that, I don't think that they're going to walk away from this being like, we shouldn't have done that because we are now in a very different world than we used to be. Where if, let's say Forever 21 did an ad campaign that was like, everything is between 14 and 88% off or whatever, right? And they totally didn't understand that, that's a Nazi dog whistle and they got in a lot of trouble for it, that's different than what happened here, where there is not, like, there's really not a way to prove that there is some

secret neo-Nazi working behind the scenes at American Eagle to, like, make this ad campaign. Like, I have, I've watched all these ads. I've read all the stuff. I've read the statement they put out, which we can get to in a minute. Like, I don't see it. I don't see it, really. But it's that uncanny valley of maybe that I think is very seductive. for kind of everyone involved.

It's why it's becomes such a sticking point, such a talking point in culture. Yeah. There's other things that happen along the timeline and something I want to get to, but maybe it's best to stick with this right now. Let's talk about the statement they put out. Wait, you want to talk about the statement that American Eagle put out? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So when we were talking about doing this episode, I had seen some posts out of context that made me think maybe this is like a secret neo-Nazi plot. And the reason I thought that was because of a couple shit posters that took a section of it and put it in a word count app to reveal that one part of the statement has 14 words that are 88 characters long, and there are two sentences that have capital H's in them.

All of these things, by the way, are Nazi dog whistles. So if you're listening to this and you're like, what is all that, 8-8 is used by neo-Nazis to mean H-H, the eighth letter of the alphabet, Hail Hitler, right? The 14 words, please do not crop this out of context, please. The 14 words read, we must secure, I'm just, I shouldn't even do this. We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. And it is from a white supremacist terror group.

So it has most recently in the modern era been used as a prank or a troll. And it's part of the overall campaign to gaslight people during moments exactly like this. Like for instance, if I sneak 1488 into my Forever 21 ad, and then Grant, you pointed out, and you say like, wait a minute, what's going on there? And then what I can say is, you crazy, Lib, there's no way I would do that. But also, if I did do that, that would rule.

You know, like, that's the point. It's to, it's to normalize, it's to push the Overton window. That's what they're doing all the time. So anyways, the statement that American Eagle put out four days ago was Sidney Sweeney has great jeans, is and always was about the genes.

Her jeans, her story. We'll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence their way. Great genes look good on everyone. Which is, I think, the exact way to handle this. Wait, wait, what do you mean that's the exact way to handle it? So, American Eagle has been put in a very complex situation.

They can't totally be like, fuck Nazis because they're a brand. They're like a teen, they're like a, it's like a teenage genes. brand, you know, like, or whatever. Man, two years ago, every brand could be like, fuck Nazis. They can't now. It's, it's, it's, we, the, the window has really moved where they're like, it's, we don't want to, we don't want to alienate our Nazi sect is actually, is actually the hedge that American Eagle, which it does sound like a very Nazi brand.

It didn't sound like that to me when I was in high school, but now American Eagle sounds like a Nazi brand. What's really funny is. the top three replies on this Instagram post, I think, are like the exact cross-section of the conversation here. So one is, so what is the correlation between jeans and eye color again? And then someone writes, love this so much. It's literally a hot girl wearing jeans. And then the third person is saying, I'm so tired of everyone being offended by everything.

So that's. Yes, that all sums it up. And then right beneath that is, It's giving, I'm sorry you feel that way. And then so beneath that is, this is so good. No apologies needed. It goes on and on like this. So basically, like, no one is totally satisfied.

And that is kind of as best as American Eagle is going to get. Because you just can't please everybody. And they also can't, like, they're making money off this. I want to talk about J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz's response to this. and like libby in a second. But like, specifically on this kind of dog whistle, I struggle

because you're playing into their hand if you try to point it out and you seem like Charlie Day pointing at the cork board, if you're like trying to explain what this means to other people. Um, was it the department?

I have it down somewhere. A government agencies, Twitter just did this recently, posting capital H's and the right number of letters and like but on the other hand if people are just like stop reacting to like Nazi knots like that makes me very uncomfortable I'm I don't I'm not a reply person but I would I fear the day that people go oh well that's not worth replying to like that feels really bad too

yeah it's why most like anti-fascists say that you just have to kill them because there is no way to debate them. Nazis, of course. Not not copyrighters. Not American Eagles copyrighters. Actually, you know, it might just be chat GPT going anti-woke that this is how it. Could be. No, this is a core problem.

There is almost no way to fix it. And it is an extremely old problem. It is a problem that's almost 200 years old at this point. Okay. You can find the rest of the conversation. on the Patreon, patreon.com slash panic road, where Ryan and I will try to solve this totally easy to solve problem. We talk about South Park, punting back in a way that was strong and ugly and maybe effective, why it's so rare for the Republicans to seem like the hysterical

ones when like literally everything triggers them. I took the subway today. They would lose their fucking minds. And, you know, to end things on a real positive note, we talk about what might be coming next. If that feels worth $5 to you, I'd really appreciate it.

Patreon.com slash panic world.