Stop Inventing Nazis When the Real Ones Are Right in Front of You

Sydney Sweeney is not your enemy

People are mad at Sydney Sweeney again.

This time, it’s because of an ad she did that makes a pun about “genes” and “jeans.” The ad has Sweeney saying that “genes are passed down from parent to offspring” and the tagline is “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”. It’s a corny pun. Sweeney is hot (genes) and so are these pants (jeans). We’re not exactly breaking any new ground for comedy here.

(video below is SFW)

Despite how bland the ads are, the internet’s most hysterical progressive commentators have decided that Sydney Sweeney is actually a Nazi. She’s been accused of doing Nazi dog-whistles, some accounts are genuinely scared, and it’s even been said that the concept of good genes is Nazi-coded. Salon decided the entire campaign was signaling eugenics. You could travel to the moon with that kind of reach, but these were not niche opinions - many of these posts got hundreds of thousands of likes.

The internet has a bizarre habit of deciding that blandly apolitical celebrities (especially attractive blonde women) are far-right cryptofascists. Think of the many years people insisted Taylor Swift was signaling allegiance to the alt-right based on precisely zero evidence. There are still some people clinging to that idea even after Swift became more political and started endorsing and fundraising for Democrats.

This is all incredibly stupid. And it’s not just “harmless internet drama” stupid, but strategically stupid. Because while idiots are busy squinting at every syllable Sydney Sweeney utters, actual Nazis are broadcasting their ideology in plain sight and getting away with it.

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Here’s what actual Nazi symbolism on social media looks like:

Above is a tweet from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security that includes exactly 14 words and mysteriously capitalizes the letters A, D, H, and H. That’s not subtle. ADHH = 1488 in white supremacist code, a reference to the white supremacist 14 words slogan and “HH” (Heil Hitler).

If you think that’s a coincidence, it’s not. That tweet came after a previous tweet was accused of being racist, and in Trumpian fashion the account decided to double down and make the racism even more explicit. The 20-something staffers running these social media accounts are almost universally groypers whose political awakenings happened on 4chan and incel message boards. They are hyper-online, deeply internet poisoned and they know exactly what they’re doing. Nobody capitalizes random mid-sentence words in a way that just happens to make 1488 happen on accident. It’s Nazi symbolism.

But hey, maybe you still think I’m overreacting in the same way the Sydney Sweeney people are overreacting. Maybe you’re a high trust person who thinks the poor DHS account just got unlucky and did 1488 by accident. Fine. These days the Nazism is usually more blatant than that:

That’s the popular right-wing podcast Fresh and Fit, which has 1.5 million followers just on YouTube. The hosts are open anti-Semites who regularly host roundtable discussions of the ‘Jewish Question’ and think the Holocaust is both fake and the Jews deserved it. I don’t know what else to ‘analyze’ here, they’re just unironically pro-Hitler.

They’re not alone. Fox’s Greg Gutfeld has the highest rated political comedy show on TV and openly muses about “rehabilitating” the term Nazi:

Gutfeld: “You know what? I've said this before, we need to learn from the blacks. The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word word by using it. So from now on it’s: What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?”

You will notice these are not anonymous accounts with 18 followers. The examples above are an official branch of the United States government, an influencer with millions of followers, and the highest rated show in late night.¹ The actual Nazis are famous! They’re not bothering to hide it!

You can go on and on. There are too many giant right wing accounts doing Holocaust revisionism to count. Kanye West has done entire press tours praising Hitler. Elon Musk says that Jews push hatred against whites and does Nazi salutes at giant rallies on national television. These aren’t clues you have to go far and wide to collect. They’re giant neon signs held by celebrities six inches in front of your face.

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So what are we doing? Why is the internet so obsessed with pretending every coquettish blonde with a Gap ad is secretly part of the Fourth Reich, while they completely ignore the people shouting “Hello, I am Adolf Hitler’s #1 fan”?

The paranoia is part of a broader psychological impulse: when confronted with something that’s directly in front of their faces, many people choose to invent wilder, more conspiratorial stories. The Sydney Sweeney freak-out is a left-wing phenomenon, but the right shows the same pattern. QAnon is a right wing conspiracy that believes Tom Hanks was trafficking children in the basement of a pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong, but never seemed to acknowledge that Dennis Hastert (the longest-ever serving Republican Speaker of the House) was a convicted child molester.

Hell, a significant chunk of right wing politics revolves around the idea of protecting children - but it’s Republicans who over-index on high profile pedophiles. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was a pedophile. Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore was a pedophile. Congressman Matt Gaetz had sex with a 17 year old. Congressman Mark Foley sexted teenage boys. I haven’t even bothered to document Republicans at the local level, these are all national figures.²

It’s more fun to make up a conspiracy theory about a pizza parlor than it is to realize that the current Republican President and Republican Speaker of the House are both signaling they want to pardon sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. And you get better engagement by pretending that Sydney Sweeney is a secret fascist than you get pointing out the actual Nazis in plain sight.

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It’s very like me to write about how Republicans are Nazis and still end up yelling at my own side, so sorry about what comes next. But it’s precisely because the modern Republican party is so awful that liberals need to be smarter.

When you call Sydney Sweeney a Nazi, you accomplish a few things:

• You look like an idiot.

• You prime people to think that all accusations of Nazism are stupid and wrong.

• You surrender a portion of basic reality to the enemy.

Sorry, but diluting the meaning of Nazi to mean ‘a blonde woman who makes a pun about jeans’ is stupid. There are actual Nazis to criticize. You don’t need to alienate potential allies. And please, for the love of god, do not make a factual claim like ‘children inherit genes from parents’ a Nazi-coded statement. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep the main thing the main thing.

Sydney Sweeney is not your enemy. She’s not marching with tiki torches. She’s not putting 1488 codes into DHS tweets. She’s not filming antisemitic podcasts or questioning the Holocaust. The people doing those things are out there, right now, in public, daring you to notice them.

So please, notice them. Stop complicating the obvious. The monsters aren’t in the margins. They’re directly in the middle of the frame.

1. Gutfeld’s ratings are significantly higher than Colbert, Kimmel, Maher, Fallon or Meyers.

2. This is why PedoCon theory has gone from a joke to a defining lens of the current political moment.