Photo: Michael M. Santiago
The intense controversy over blue jeans ads featuring actress Sydney Sweeney may not be so intense,
or so controversial,
after all.
A new YouGov poll finds only 12 percent of Americans found the ads “offensive.”
“This is partially a monster of the media’s creation,” declared relationship expert Julie Nise. “We don’t watch actual news. We get all sorts of radical opinions.”
Playing some homonymous fun with words, he campaign highlighted American Eagles’ jeans, and Sydney’s beautiful genes, touching off cries in left-wing circles of social media about perceived “eugenics,” “fascism” or “Nazism.”
“There are always a few usual suspects who will disagree with or pitch a fit bout all kinds of things in a fairly ridiculous and predicable way,” Nise sighed. “This is one of those.”
Those usual suspects were roundly outnumbered.
39 percent of respondents to the survey thought the ad was “clever.”
40 percent found it neither “offensive” nor “clever.”
“There are always people who will go off,” Nise said, “because they want fame, or they want attention, or they just want to feel special. They have these weird opinions. That how they get their self-esteem.”
There was a sharp political partisan divide.
57 percent of Republicans surveyed thought the ad was “clever,” while only 22 percent of Democrats did.
Nise warned any moderates on the left who were not “triggered” by the ads might want to look closely at their political compatriots who were.
“They’re in a cesspool of ridiculous, delusional, crazy people,” she said. “I would be cringing all over the place. Moderate Democrats should be thinking about whether they want to be associated at all, because it’s gone from ridiculous to literally crazy.”