BONUS: Sydney Sweeney and rage bait

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's your favorite Sydney Sweeney movie?

• 0:01Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think I've ever seen one.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  You didn't see Immaculate?

• 0:04Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Euphoria?

• 0:07Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Alright, so you're fully neutral as we enter into this conversation. You have no, you have no association to make you biased. That's, that's good journalism.

• 0:16Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think so. I don't think I've ever, let's see.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Well, you're looking let up. I will say I am Grant Irving. This is Panic World.

• 0:24Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Ironic.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:05Ryan Broderick?

  Hello, thank you for having me on my show.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Do you own American Eagle stuff? Are you a, are you a consumer of their goods?

• 1:13Ryan Broderick?

  I was not. I dated a girl in college who liked 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 Southern corporate fan, so I enjoyed the move to Jack's Mannequin.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  It was nice that they had a couch.

• 1:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they had a couch. They had a boyfriend couch.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39Ryan Broderick?

  And, uh, I was a, I was a big Kohl's 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.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Okay, so, so neutral on Sweeney, pretty neutral on American Eagle. Can you describe the, the ad that is, that has upended the internet?

• 2:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, uh, 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.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  So, um, on July 23rd, a Sydney Sweeney fan account on X called, uh, Sweeney Daily X, shared a new ad from, from the campaign. Um, so, so how, how did this, how did this spread? This, this was a, this was a mostly eccentric, um, freak out.

• 2:56Ryan Broderick?

  Eccentric, yes.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Eccentric.

• 2:58Ryan Broderick?

  If you're not on X anymore, it's a much smaller place than it used to be. Uh, 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. Um, they're very into posting video. They are typically running countries with low internet connections.

• 3:37Ryan Broderick?

  So they're, they're kind of stuck on X for a very specific kind of communication. And there are a bunch of Sydney Sweeney ones. Sydney Sweeney X is, hmm, like a fairly decently sized one. Uh, let's see, Sydney Sweeney X has 160,000 followers on the platform. And it just posts about the actress Sydney Sweeney. And it shared her American Eagle ad, uh, earlier this month. And it got a good amount of engagement, uh, got like 400 shares.

• 4:14Ryan Broderick?

  Give or take?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  How did the ad start to spread controversy?

• 4:18Ryan Broderick?

  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. Uh, 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 Sydney Sweeney 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.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  They made a hot ad with a hot person and, uh, people enjoyed it. End of story.

• 5:07Ryan Broderick?

  Well, as I said, things got a little more complicated, uh, for a few reasons. So obviously right now, we've talked about this 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 and loving hot women to feel conservative. They want American Eagle apparently to feel conservative. They, they, they are very still, they are still very focused and angry

• 5:45Ryan Broderick?

  on like the woke advertising, the sort of, uh, 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. Uh, 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 fun.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Um, the turn, see, the, the like, the, the big turn seems to happen when, um, end of, end wokeness, uh, posts about this, right?

• 6:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, an account that is rumored to be Jack Posobiec's account, allegedly. Um, yeah, it's a massive, massive account. It's got like, I don't know, almost four 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 uh, plus size black model in a jeans ad and saying like, look how much better it is now that Sydney Sweeney is in the jeans ad.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Before we get into lefty response with this, is end wokeness mostly just making bait posts? Or does it have more of an agenda than that?

• 7:12Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, most of the accounts like end wokeness, uh, have all started operating under the same playbook. Yeah, libs of TikTok now does the same thing. They, they are effectively just right wing tabloids.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 7:23Ryan Broderick?

  Their audiences are not like pissed off liberals. They're, they're, they're trying to get, they're trying to engagement farm from conservatives. But eh, it's not like they're a troll account. They, they, they, you know, 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. The, the, that is not to piss off liberals. That is to reaffirm a belief of conservatives. And it's doing a Fox News, but for social media. It's a social media based tabloid.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  That's helpful. Um,

• 8:07Speaker 00

  so, so once end wokeness posts this and it gets a lot more spread, that's when we really see the, the, the left response.

• 8:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  No.

• 8:21Ryan Broderick?

  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

• 8:35Ryan Broderick?

  from anyone outside of Sydney Sweeney fans, finance guys, and white nationalists. Like, that's kind of it.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  The trifecta.

• 8:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. This is all happening in the span of about, 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. There's like 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 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 Sydney 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 he hangs dong.

• 9:28Ryan Broderick?

  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 nationalists being like, yes, this is trad wife coded or whatever. And all the finance guys being like, I'm gonna pump and dump American eagle because I'm a psychopath. These are all like 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 Sydney Sweeney's quote unquote jeans. So it's about her having blue eyes and blonde hair. And that's when everyone is like...

• 10:13Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, 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, it's slightly similar to Reels and TikTok, 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. And 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 feed is just nothing but Batman, the animated TV show.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:58Ryan Broderick?

  So stan account, stan accounts, fan accounts, they are very powerful right now. So in a lot of ways, by this third post, it has now escaped containment. And now it's no longer being enjoyed by racists and finance degens and stans. 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 progressives start to get involved.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  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, to escape campaign? Or do you think it was like, hey, you know, it'd be really cool if, if we can get the fascists and the, and the finance bros to like, love American eagle and like, uh, you know, this can just live in its own little world?

• 11:55Ryan Broderick?

  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 jeans ad. Like, like this is a normal jeans ad. It is not even particularly sexy. First of all, Sydney Sweeney, not my type, not into blondes.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  You can't say that, Ryan. You can't say that you're not into blondes.

• 12:25Ryan Broderick?

  Not for me. Uh, second, we are in the midst of a large scale.

• 12:34Ryan Broderick?

  Right wing turn of American culture, very similar to post and very similar to post nine 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 popular music sounds like praise music. And you could, 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, fashi, right-wing culture takeover. And it is happening for a lot of different reasons, in a lot of different ways. And it's

• 13:17Ryan Broderick?

  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, this like fairly normal anodyne jeans 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."

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 13:52Ryan Broderick?

  Like, everyone would be like, "First of all, why is Sydney Sweeney doing ads for American Eagle? They're the Jack's Mannequin store."

• 14:01Ryan Broderick?

  You know?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is, that is all the right context. But so if you were to guess about when, when, when somebody was Don Draper-ing this ad campaign, do you think that they are hoping for this kind of attention?

• 14:16Ryan Broderick?

  I think every, 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 that 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.

• 14:50Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think that they're gonna 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,

• 15:08Ryan Broderick?

  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 this 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, 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 become such a sticking point, such a talking point in culture.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, there's, there's other things that happen along the timeline that, and something I want to get to, but, but maybe it's best to stick with, with this right now. Let's talk about the statement they put out.

• 16:07Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, you want to talk about the statement that American Eagle put out?

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, let's.

• 16:10Ryan Broderick?

  So, when we were talking about doing this episode, I had seen some posts out of context, uh, 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? 88 is used by neo-Nazis to mean HH, the eighth letter, the eighth letter of the alphabet. Hail Hitler, right?

• 16:53Ryan Broderick?

  The 14 words, uh, please do not crop this out of context, please. Um, the 14 words, uh, read, "We must secure," ah, 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, uh, it is from a white supremacist terror group. So it has most recently, uh, 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

• 17:34Ryan Broderick?

  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, haha, you crazy lib. There's, 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, uh, four days ago was Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans, her story. We'll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone. Which is, I think, the exact way to handle this.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, what do you mean that's the exact way to handle, handle it?

• 18:22Ryan Broderick?

  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, it's like, it's like a teenage jeans brand, you know, like, or whatever.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Man, two, two years ago, every brand could be like, fuck Nazis.

• 18:46Ryan Broderick?

  They can't now.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  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. And it didn't sound like that to me when I was in high school, but now American Eagle sounds like a Nazi brand.

• 19:08Ryan Broderick?

  What's really funny is that 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?

• 19:23Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 19:35Ryan Broderick?

  So that's

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Yes, that all sums it up.

• 19:38Ryan Broderick?

  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 gonna get.

• 19:56Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, because you just can't please everybody and they also can't like they're making money off this.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  I wanna, I wanna, I wanna talk about JD Vance and Ted Cruz's response to this and, and like libate 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 corkboard, 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 agency's Twitter just did this recently, posting capital H's and the right number of letters and like.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  But on the other hand, if people just like stop reacting to like Nazi nods, like that makes me very uncomfortable. I'm, I, I don't, I'm not a reply person, but I, I would, I, I fear the day that people go, oh, well, that's not worth replying to. Like that feels really bad, too.

• 21:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's why most like anti fascists say that you just have to kill them.

• 21:07Ryan Broderick?

  Cause there is no way to debate them. Uh, Nazis, of course.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Not, not, uh, copywriters.

• 21:15Ryan Broderick?

  Not American Eagles copyrighters.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Actually, you know, it might just be chat GPT going, going anti woke that this is how.

• 21:21Ryan Broderick?

  It like, no, this is, this is a core problem. There's almost no way to fix it and it is an extremely old problem. It is a problem that's almost two, almost 100 years old at this point.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Okay, you can find the rest of the conversation on the Patreon, patreon.com/panicworld, where Ryan and I will try to solve this totally easy to solve problem. We talk about South Park punching 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/panicworld.