Congratulating American Eagle’s brand strategists for creating the opposite of a cultural Bud Light moment.

There was a moment on Monday morning, as we gathered around the virtual watercooler here at NR, when one of my colleagues idly mused about how proud he was that we hadn’t run any Sydney Sweeney clickbait pieces. “I’m not saying that it has absolutely zero news value, but if you were judging by my Twitter/X feed, you would think Sweeneygate was the biggest and most consequential news story in the country.”

And inwardly I sighed, because I knew. “We haven’t run any Sydney Sweeney pieces . . . yet.” Yes, like wild horses stampeding and pulling everyone in the Conestoga wagon over the cliff, we have since been dragged against our will into discussing the remarkable natural endowments of this fair young Hollywood lass, and whether they pose an imminent challenge to democracy. Why are we doing this? Has National Review finally sold out to the false gods of clickbait-for-cash?

Boy, I certainly hope so — everybody here deserves a raise. But no, it’s because this is currently the only thing everyone at NPR, NBC, the New York Times, and social media can seem to talk about, our newest plush chew toy to bat around like easily distracted cats as we ignore the realities of politics.

For those who missed out on the newest threat to America, Charlie Cooke disposed of the daftness eloquently in his piece: American Eagle Outfitters — a clothing brand fallen on hard times — hired buxom Hollywood “it” girl Sydney Sweeney to model its blue jeans in a series of advertisements that steal directly from a legendary 1980 Calvin Klein ad. Back then, a 15-year-old Brooke Shields delivered a rather suggestive science lecture about “genes” while wrestling a pair of them on for the camera, ending with thoughts about “selective mating.” (It was scandalous at the time, and honestly it only feels more so now given how notoriously exploited and sexualized a young Shields was by Hollywood.)

Sweeney, however, is very much a woman, and so American Eagle’s playful variation on the theme — “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” — has given rise to a much more urgent conversation among the chattering classes: whether the wordplay “jeans/genes” is an alarming appeal to white supremacy and the unfairness of beauty as a heritable trait. All of the usual suspects have sought to engineer controversy. The Guardian lustily reported on a nonexistent “backlash” confined to online shut-ins, as if willing it into existence. AdAge, which should know better, suggested that American Eagle would be “scaling back” its campaign in response to the cries about its lack of inclusiveness toward the ugly. And as one might expect from a recently gelded media company, NPR captured the hysteria well:

The campaign has sparked backlash online. Some social media users have accused American Eagle of teasing at eugenics, a discredited scientific theory popular among white supremacists that the human race could be improved by breeding out less desirable traits. NPR reached out to American Eagle and a publicist for Sweeney for comment but has not received a response yet.

As it so happens, I have close friends in the advertising world, and when I asked one of them about this she joked that American Eagle’s brand strategists and creatives — whether internal or hired from an agency — probably couldn’t be reached for comment by NPR because they were two days into a massive celebratory bender. (“If they aren’t busy doing all the cocaine right now, they should be.”) As she emphasized, what matters most is that American Eagle has won the “attention war” in a notoriously fickle and divided media ecosystem.

And that matters. When’s the last time you thought about American Eagle jeans? Up until now, they were “yesterday’s brand,” fashion-wise, a relic of an age long past. Now MSNBC is running impassioned pieces denouncing the “unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness” exemplified by shapely blondes wearing denim. You cannot pay for that kind of brand awareness. You can pour as much money into PR, social media influencers, and focus-grouped copywriting as you want, but only a cosmic alignment of cultural obsessions and clever casting can call forth a meteor strike quite like this.

So, while I feel no need to wade into the nonsensically frothy discourse surrounding the Sweeney campaign, I just want to raise a glass to the hardworking professionals out there who put this ad campaign together: Congratulations on creating the opposite of a cultural Bud Light moment for your brand, for getting people talking about your blue jeans in a way that makes them inclined to buy and wear, rather than boycott, them. You are the real men and women of genius.