It’s in their genes.

A lthough it may seem too obvious to have to argue in 2025 that the press overwhelmingly favors left-wing causes, the facts having been so thoroughly established, it never hurts to address lingering doubts.

There are the big things, such as network anchors breathlessly reporting obvious falsehoods and forgeries as if they were genuine. And there are smaller things, such as the journalistic tendency to legitimize the most extreme left-wing crackpots, including those who saw an insidious Nazi-coded message in a recent jeans advertising campaign.

I’ll make this as brief as possible, because the more I write about it, the dumber I feel: American Eagle hired starlet Sydney Sweeney to serve as the spokeswoman for a new line of jeans. Sweeney, a buxom, blue-eyed blonde, sports the jeans in the ads, each of which concludes with the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring,” she said in one of the commercials, “often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

Get it? It’s a pun. Sweeney is hot, and the jeans look great. You can look hot and great, too, if you buy them. It’s not rocket science, folks.

Amazingly, the ad campaign has inspired criticism and outrage from select corners of social media, with hyper-racialist wingnuts claiming that the ad campaign promotes racism and even fascism.

She said she had good jeans, but she meant “genes”! You know who else believed blonde-haired, blue-eyed people have good, even superior, genes? That’s right. Adolf Hitler.

Eujeanics!

It’s all very, incredibly stupid. Yet, if you can believe it, it gets even dumber, because members of the press are mainstreaming the conspiracy, pushing it into the collective consciousness by treating the obviously nutty overreaction as reasonable and worthy of exploration.

“Some critics saw the wordplay as a nod, either unintentional or deliberate, to eugenics, a discredited theory that held humanity could be improved through selective breeding for certain traits,” the Associated Press reported with a straight face. The AP picked a fine time to drop its suspiciously inconsistent “without evidence” clarifier.

The Wall Street Journal referred to the ad as “widely panned.” If one dredges up a Wall Street Journal article with a lot of anonymous, angry remarks in the comments section, can one call that story “widely panned”? What are the standards here?

“Sydney Sweeney Fronts Ad Campaign for Jeans — Sparks Debate About Eugenics,” reports a Newsweek article, which quotes “advertising expert” Robin Landa, who said, “The campaign’s pun isn’t just tone-deaf — it’s historically loaded.”

The phrase “good genes,” the so-called expert told Newsweek, was key to the American eugenics project, which favored whites and the forced sterilization of minority groups.

All that from an ad about pants.

Best of all comes from The Atlantic, which, among other things, suggests that American Eagle executives must’ve known what they were getting into when they hired an attractive blonde as their model. The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel also credits conservatives with inventing the idea that breasts are sexy. Please, enjoy the following passage (emphasis added):

Did American Eagle know what it was doing when it made the Sweeney advertisement? The company hasn’t addressed the controversy, but the ad—not unlike the famous and controversial Brooke Shields Calvin Klein campaign it appears to be playing off of—seems like it was perhaps meant to walk a line, to be just controversial enough to garner some attention. Casting Sweeney to begin with supports this theory. Her image has been co-opted by the right, accurately or not, in part because of where she’s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars). Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs. (Sweeney’s cultural associations with conservatism have also been helped along by an Instagram post she made in 2022 featuring photos from a “surprise hoedown” party for her mother’s 60th birthday; online sleuths found separate photos depicting guests in MAGA-style hats and “Blue Lives Matter” gear, which led to a backlash.) A marketing executive with enough awareness of Sweeney’s image and the political and cultural conversation around her might have figured that an ad featuring her talking about her good jeans would draw eyeballs.

Implicit and explicit in all these takes is the assumption that the “backlash” to the jeans campaign is reasonable and worthy of exploration. At no point do the Associated Press, Warzel, Newsweek, or any of the others weighing in consider the possibility that the critics are out of their minds and undeserving of serious attention.

This is because journalists tend to treat even the most outrageous left-wing conspiracies and overreactions as deserving of careful, chin-stroking consideration and thoughtful coverage, often applying a “both sides” approach when one side is clearly irrational. The outraged are patronized, their hysterical rantings injected into the mainstream. We need a “national conversation,” you see.

Remember: In mid-July, CBS announced that it would end The Late Show, hosted by Stephen Colbert, scheduling his final episode for May 2026. The reasons for the show’s cancellation aren’t hard to deduce.

On average, Colbert pulls 2.4 million viewers per evening. Not a bad number, but certainly not a fantastic return on investment: The Late Show has an annual operating cost of more than $100 million, according to Puck. Colbert’s salary alone is approximately $15 million. Worse, the show loses an estimated $40 million annually. Worst of all, the average viewing age is 68. Sixty-eight-year-olds are not exactly the holy grail of demographics for advertisers.

Meanwhile, Fox hits nearly the same audience numbers in the 11:00 p.m. to midnight slot, and for a fraction of the cost.

Couple the operating costs with the gradual death of network television in the era of online streaming and you don’t need a degree from Harvard Business School to know that The Late Show as a business investment is neither sustainable nor worthwhile.

Nevertheless, leave it to the online radicals to allege a vast right-wing conspiracy to cancel Colbert. In their eyes, his show was ended not because it loses $40 million per year but as a political favor to President Donald Trump from Skydance Media, which acquired CBS’s parent company, Paramount. Skydance wants to curry favor with the Trump administration, so it sacrificed a frequent Trump critic!

Never mind that Paramount just inked a streaming deal worth $1.5 billion with the creators of South Park, a show that recently aired an episode presenting the cartoon form of President Trump as the opposite of well-endowed.

You and I know that Stephen Colbert is simply dull, while the press indulges the martyrdom conspiracy.

“CBS Says It’s Canceling Colbert Over Money, Not Politics. Is That Truthiness?” asks the New York Times, clumsily employing just-asking-questions mode. “There’s a lot to wonder about,” the report avers. “What we do know is that the president, who has long cried for political comics’ heads, . . . has gotten another item on his wish list.”

At CNN, media critic Brian Stelter reported that “CBS insiders insist, even when speaking frankly on condition of anonymity, that the move was financially driven, not politically motivated.” But then he went on: “Many observers have huge doubts about that, given that Colbert has been an outspoken critic of President Trump.”

Entertainment writer Joanna Robinson said ominously, “This Colbert news should scare you.”

Meanwhile, reasonable theories and observations promoted by the right are often dismissed as conspiracy theories.

Contrast the eujeanics coverage to how our press reacted after Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested in 2020 that the Covid-19 virus may have originated from a research lab in China, probably from the same province where the giant coronavirus research facility is located. We were inundated with news blurbs such as the following, from NPR: “New poll finds 40% of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China. There is zero evidence for this.”

Or consider when the New York Post first reported on the existence of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop. Our very important press told us that the story was too flimsy to be believed and wasted no time legitimizing the theory that Russia was somehow responsible for said laptop.

Certain newsrooms wouldn’t even cover the story, including NPR, which said at the time, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that NPR is covering the Sweeney jeans “backlash.”

But what else should we expect of the industry that publishes headlines such as, “Trump’s DOJ rewrites inclusion rules for grant programs to benefit white Americans”? The rules simply say everyone must be treated equally; suggesting something untoward about the current language is an admission that the previous rules actually were discriminatory, which, oddly enough, is not the headline.

Or consider the headline, “Harvard was planning to distribute 100 air conditioners to Boston residents. Then came the Trump funding freeze.” Never mind that the cost of 100 air conditioners was but a stray pencil mark on the overall $3.75 million the federal government planned to award Harvard to study “heat-related projects.”

These editorial tendencies make sense when you remember that the “corporate press’s greatest flaw is its willingness to believe the worst of its enemies and the best of its friends.”

Shorter version: left good, right bad. It’s not more complicated than that.