American Eagle recently unveiled a new campaign starring Sydney Sweeney. There are various iterations, but they have a unifying theme: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

Given that denim is one of American Eagle’s staples and that Sweeney is rather attractive, it’s a brilliant pitch replete with a dad-level pun. At least, it’s a brilliant pitch to not insane people. For the insane, though, it’s “Nazi propaganda,” “Nazi fascism,” and “an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness.” 

Given such responses, including clickbait wackadoos proclaiming that Sweeny is mid, it’s tempting to get angry at the unbridled nutjobs propagating such nonsense. But that is exactly the wrong response, for it only builds bridges under which such trolls may take up residence. More importantly, though, is that the completely unhinged and disproportionate response to the campaign shows the inmates who have been running the asylum are losing the plot in real time. 

For starters, it’s an advertisement for blue jeans and, to be honest, not exactly an original one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic marketing, people are talking, and American Eagle’s stock trended upward as a result. But using attractive people to sell products isn’t some revolutionary idea. It’s basically the foundation of advertising, albeit one that was briefly lost to the siren song of “inclusive beauty,” which, lol. Businesses may pretend to care about social causes and stakeholders, and there are definitely true believers ensconced in almost every Fortune 500 company out there, but at the end of the day, the purpose of business is to make money, not engineer social change. 

But the brief stranglehold the inmates held over businesses gave them a false sense of security, of permanence. They thought they’d won the war, whereas we can now see that they only won a few victories and that those victories were not exactly strategic ones. Jaguar copied nothing, and now its sales are, not to put too fine a point on it, in the toilet. To be fair, a large part of that is that the company also stopped making cars, an act that is pretty integral to selling cars. If demand were there, though, Jaguar would be rolling at least something off its assembly lines. 

Meanwhile, American Eagle is, you know, actually continuing to sell blue jeans, not promising a new form of jeans yet to be released sometime in the future. (And if we really want to discuss eugenics, isn’t completely changing the DNA of a company to be in line with a top-down vision of purity more akin to — you know what, never mind.)

Much has been made of the vibe shift, which is truly a thing of beauty, especially to those of us old enough to witness the descent into madness over the past decade, but the thing is, the vibe really has shifted. And those whose worldview and, more importantly, income streams depend on fomenting controversy are on the ropes. They may preach equity, but as always, some pigs deserve a little more equity than others. 

As such, don’t get upset at the dying media for its desperate attempt to cling to the old vibes, to keep beating fascist Nazi colonial whiteness tropes into a bloody pulp better suited for a muumuu than a pair of nice-fitting jeans. (Did I just commit white supremacy by discussing muumuus, insane people of the internet? If so, please let me know on your preferred social media site!)

It’s not that people are waking up and choosing fascism, or any other -isms, it’s that we’re remembering that while life shouldn’t be treated as a joke, it’s still OK to laugh, to have fun, to be happy, to smile, to enjoy beauty, and not to take everything as cats-and-dogs-living-together, end-of-the-world mass hysteria, even if there are some histrionics.

So stop doom scrolling. Stop hate reading. Instead, love read. Hope scroll. Embrace peace and happiness, specifically the peace and happiness that come from knowing that while the arc of history is long, it’s bending away from mentally ill, terminally online fun-crushers who look at a pretty girl and see Hitler.