“I learned long ago the difference between critics and box office.” So said late President Ronald Reagan, referencing what his experience as a Hollywood actor taught him. Box office is what matters whether you’re selling films, politicians, or anything else. And perhaps illustrating this reality perfectly is the much discussed “un-woke” Sydney Sweeney ad for American Eagle Outfitters (AE) jeans. Though the critics are livid, the lucid are laughing — and AE is laughing all the way to the bank.

In fact, while wokesters are calling the ad “Nazi” propaganda, AE’s stock has jumped 20 percent. It just goes to show that when selling jeans, having good jeans — and models with good genes — really does matter.

(And, yes, there are such things as “good genes.” More on that later.)

Talk about a marketing coup. The ad is only 15 seconds, three sentences, and 28 words long. But no company could buy the exposure it’s getting for free. In it, actress Sydney Sweeney is seen reclining provocatively on a settee, decked out in AE denim. While zipping up her pants, which were unzipped when the camera started rolling (an oversight, I’m sure), she says:

Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.

A narrator then concludes with, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” (video below). Obviously, it’s a play on words.

Now, back in the dark ages of the ’90s, the major complaint would’ve been the feminist one that the spot “objectifies women.” It is true, too, that our society is tragically sexualized (the feminists still get it wrong, though). But today’s Leftist 5.0 almost makes the feminists seem sane. As American Thinker (AT) reported Monday:

Critics accused the spot of echoing eugenic or white supremacist rhetoric because Sweeney is blonde, blue-eyed, and framed as genetically “blue.” Some even labeled it “Nazi propaganda.”

Worthy of mention is one X post, which stated, “Her initials are SS. Can it be more obvious?” Got to admit, that’s clever. Stupid — but clever.

“Yet the real shock was how the backlash backfired,” AT added. “American Eagle’s stock price surged, delivering triple-digit millions to shareholders and a renewed sense of brand vitality.”

Contrast this with Bud Light’s infamous marketing debacle in 2023, involving fake woman Dylan Mulvaney. As columnist Jimmy Failla quipped, “Bud Light should hire Sydney Sweeney and make beer sales great again.”

Then there was auto company Jaguar. As AT reminds us:

In late 2024, Jaguar launched an edgy rebrand without any cars. Instead, it featured a Hunger Games cast with abstract designs and flamboyant visuals described as “diverse,” “avant-garde,” and social-justice oriented. It failed spectacularly.

Regarding clothing retailers, not long ago, some got so woke that their ads could’ve qualified as satire (example below).

Whether or not her “truth” is that she’s a prime candidate for a fatal coronary at 44 was not reported.

Not to be outdone, Adidas created the following gem.

It’s impressive that she could do a split; Adidas’ stock, though, did not.

There also was the below from Victoria’s Secret.

Yeah, something tells me this is one ad campaign that, now, Victoria will want to keep secret.

So it’s critics — and box office. The above abominations are generated by the critics, of the kind disgorged by UC Berkeley’s liberal arts department. As for the “normals,” for good or for ill they generally like seeing beautiful people. As a top YouTube commenter wrote under the AE commercial, “This ad convinced me to buy a Sydney Sweeney.”

Of course, as alluded to earlier, a sane critic may say that today’s advertising and entertainment show too much flesh. But the solution isn’t to use just as scantily-clad models with five times as much flesh to show.

Now, both AE and Sweeney must be dancing a jig enduring their attack — and not because they’re masochists. I’d never even heard of the actress prior to this kerfuffle, and now she’s a household name. Congratulations, wokesters, your attempt at cancellation resulted in elevation. You just made Sweeney’s career. Yet there are deeper issues here, too.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson asserts that leftists don’t hate AE jeans; they hate beauty. This claim brings to mind a 1905 G.K. Chesterton quip.

“Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves,” he observed. “But the artists find it harder.”

Apropos to this, it could occur to one that leftists who hate beauty do so for the same reason many of them hate wealth: They have a relative lack of it — and are jealous of those possessing more. And just as they may thus support wealth redistribution, they may for the same reason advocate beauty “redistribution.” How is this possible?

Well, leftists often deal with morality they dislike (e.g., sexual norms) by trying to eradicate it. The most fundamental way of doing this is to claim “It’s all relative. There’s no black and white — everything is gray.” You can likewise try to eradicate beauty by claiming it’s all relative, too. You can say, for example, that our conception of it is merely a “white norm.” And then there’s that ultimate expression of beauty’s supposed relativity: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

This has been uttered so reflectively and repeatedly that virtually no one even notices it is contradictory. That is, if “beauty” is real, has an existence unto itself, then it’s not “as we behold it.” It is what it is. Another way of saying this is, what are you beholding? If it has “whatness,” it is real, not just imaginary.

Of course, the other possibility is that beauty does not exist and that at issue is mere taste. If so, though, then we can’t rightly say “That woman is beautiful.” We can only correctly state, “I happen to like her.” Either way, the beholder line needs to be retired.

But this all reflects the Left’s long-standing attack on objective reality. When they encounter an inconvenient truth, their very childish reaction is to try to wish it into the cornfield. Just consider academic Marc Lamont Hill, a professor of “urban education.” Appearing on Piers Morgan Uncensored recently, he claimed that “good genes” don’t exist and that the whole concept is “racist.” It’s logical, of course (following from a flawed premise): Beauty doesn’t exist, and what bestows it — good genes — also don’t.

Yet as comedian/commentator Bill Maher amusingly pointed out, this lasts about as long as leftists’ moral relativism does: Right up until making judgments becomes convenient. As he put it recently, the “online social justice girls are like, ‘It’s racist. There’s no such thing as good genes!’”

“Right. And then you go on Tinder and swipe left on every bald guy.”

In this vein, one could ask Hill a question. Let’s say you could, in the hall of souls, have chosen your own genes. One is a set associated with being 6’3”, drop-dead handsome, and robustly athletic, and having a 150-plus IQ and longevity. Another is associated with being 5’3”, plain as an old shoe, and nonathletic, and having an 88 IQ and a tendency toward heart disease.

We all know which set Professor Hill would choose. We also know why: because it’s “better” — though Hill would probably squirm and say it’s “because it’s, uh, optimal.”

Of course, virtually all of us could cite areas in which we didn’t inherit good genes. But our genome is not a matter of choice. The world’s Hills should note, however, that ignorance too often is.