The bit here about ignoring what's in front of your face in favor a "juicier" or more conspiratorial thing brings me directly to the Epstein thing with Trump.
It has been driving me insane that potential documents could implicate Trump and that they might exist but are being kept secret is HUGE DEAL.
I'm not saying it isn't. But like, if someone at DOJ or FBI leaked a document to the NYT showing Trump on Epstein "flight logs" is would be an enormous thing.
Except...the fact that Trump flew with Epstein, partied with Epstein, was friends with Epstein, attended, let's say, "women focused events" with Epstein... HAS BEEN PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE, ACKNOWLEDGED BY TRUMP HIMSELF FOR MULTIPLE DECADES!
They just need to follow the money. The money flowed to Epstein from other peoole. The banks flagged unusual transactions, starting all this. So why not track every transactions back to source and see what "products" the money bought - and who bought them?
No. The quote and “admission” from Trump I am speaking about specifically is there was some calendar girl competition Trump invited Epstein to many years ago.
As it stands now, I don’t think there is public evidence that women at that event (super creepy though it sounds) were underaged OR sexually assaulted/Raped/coerced. Nor does there appear to be a current credible accusation that was the case for this specific event.
That does not mean those things didn’t happen or aren’t true. But it’s why I referenced that specific thing the way I did.
I think there’s a missing piece on the out and open Nazi analysis here. I’m reminded of focus groups straight up not believing Romney’s policy proposals were real when presented with them because of how regressive they were. It’s basically the inverse of the Sydney Sweeney conspiracy line. There’s a desire to believe there’s no way these people are truly openly espousing Nazi beliefs, whoever is relaying that must be lying or spinning it.
I think what's missing more is the death of rhetoric as an art form on the liberal side. If the way the proposals are presented to focus groups make them incredulous, you change your presentation of them. You say something like "I couldn't believe this was his policy but wow, there it is in plain English, ridiculous or what?" Or you say "Now I appreciate what the other party is trying to do, but I hope they realize their efforts to better America will *unintentionally* result in [Romney's purposeful policy outcome]."
It's fucking marketing 101 and the libs are too busy treating politics as some holier endeavor than advertising to stop being retarded about it.
Death of rhetoric? They certainly use plenty of rhetoric. It’s just been proven empty as the pot they should have left to piss in. The policies that they purport to support to help people are all a cover for their corrupt, money laundering operation.
How many of those NGOs financed by public funds to ‘combat’ homelessness actually perpetuate it? How about the ‘fire relief’ fund in California that actually pushed totally political spending, while depriving fire victims of any relief? Those are just recent examples.
Ever since the social justice warriors from Tumblr made their presence felt on Twitter, it has made most of us worse off and gives the right free ammunition. It just makes us all look dumb, we don't need to make up conspiracies when there are actual issues in front of us and examples for sure.
Right? Everyone's like "they're secretly winking to the huge eugenics demographic!", and I'm like, "err, no, it's gooner ASMR, and it's been around forever, it just took a break from 2020 to 2024"
I know very little about Sweeney- I highly doubt she went into this with any understanding of this kind of thing going on around her- but my understanding is that the Groyper Right *has* been trying to frame her specifically as their Republican Aryan Sex Goddess for a while, holding her up as the traditional example of Beauty (white, blond, thin, and... buxom*) that the Left is trying to take from you with their "women of color" and their "highlighting of non-traditionally beautiful women". As far as I can tell, she's also been a lot more quiet and apolitical than other young female celebrities who are more openly Center-Left, like Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter. This lets them project their politics onto her, while people on the Left see the absence of Center-Left politics as evidence of low-key Right-wing politics.
With that context, and with how everyone seems to be bending over backward to appeal to Trump and his goons, I can understand why people might be jumping at shadows. But if I were Sweeney's PR person, I would have highly recommended that she have stayed far away from this sort of thing.
*Strange how the Republican party of my youth would have been scandalized by her appearance but their moral degeneration has led them to "AWOOGA = good".
You are absolutely on to something. They tried to claim Taylor Swift was an Aryan goddess for like a decade. The far right wants to be the popular culture so bad, so they keep trying to do the same thing over and over.
When (mostly liberal) celebrities talk publicly about politics, the right tells them to shut up and stop talking down to regular people, but when they don't, the right assumes the only possible reason is that they're secretly extremely right wing.
The thing is... it's her right to be apolitical and to profit from her work, her looks, etc without a mob coming to attack her because a group of lunatics that she has never engaged with or endorsed is using her image. It's something close to victim-blaming - to use a Left jargon.
She has the right to be tone-deaf and people have the right to criticize her in bad faith... but I'd say in both cases people ought to read the room better.
That's what I've been repeating ad nauseam in Brazil - where I wrote even book chapters about the topic and also several articles for the media for over a decade - that the woke mob (that we call identitarians) is not interested in real enemies. Is not interested in actually changing anything. Because if they actually find the real enemy they'll have to... fight. If they change anything they'll lose their relevance. Without racism what would be of the anti-racism folks? If you beat your enemy, you have no reason to get likes on social media.
They are fighting windmills because it's safe. They don't have to do anything other than screaming that they are offended and nothing will change because, well, there's absolutely nothing Nazi or racist behind their objects of revolt. They are not targeting Nazis, they are just screaming at anything they don't like, don't understand or that offends them - even if they don't even understand why or just because they are racists themselves and in their own way, supremacists.
They just want clicks, fame, to destroy something or someone and feel like they did something when, in fact, they accomplished nothing and, worse, they helped the other side. They helped the Nazis, the racists, to hide in plain sight while alienating allies.
Love this-- I'd posit though that this is not a new phenomena by any means (see my recent comment). There's a special internet brand of urban legend and myth that has cropped up in the digital age, but is it really any different from the fantastical witch hunts that have always made people feel better about things they cannot control that scare them?
Exactly. They are too scared to go after actual Nazis, but they know Sydney Sweeney isn’t going to disappear them or go after their families, and they still get to delude themselves into thinking they are “resisting”.
I would say it's less that and more that they think it's at least possible to shame Sidney Sweeney into submission. There's a thing I've noticed recently that even apotasy is much more offensive than staunch heathenism. She's a young Hollywood actress who became famous from the show Euphoria which is watched almost entirely by college educated liberals. She's "supposed" to be on team progressive, so any deviation from doctrine, even if slight, is massively more consequential than the likes of Fresh and Fit openly denying the Holocaust or the Trump admin putting out unambiguous Nazi dogwhistles.
There is something so weird and modern here - the need to hunt for hidden symbolism when they're just saying it out loud.... There is something so comprehensively pathological about our discourse
I mean both things can be true. The openly racist things are openly racist, the covertly racist this are covertly racist. The reactive portion of the social media crowd reacts to both.
But if you don’t think Sydney suggestively ASMR-ing ‘my jeans are BLUE’ as the camera pans to her very blue eyes is not a shout-out to racists and white supremacists, you are not looking hard enough.
Of course it’s not her personally, the ad is not her idea, she didn’t write the lines. But she didn’t say no either.
Thank you for this. Both the criticism of the Sydney Sweeney reach and the scarry 1488 stuff coming from our own federal government. The fact that the people putting that stuff out there are getting paid with our tax dollars to do so should enrage us all and should be front page news but alas. 100% spot on.
The Gutfeld dig is a touch unfair because it was delivered as a joke surrounded by other jokes. A guest followed up with, "Nazi, please...." in place of another n-word. It was not positioned as a serious concept.
I'm sorry, but joking about being a Nazi is messed up already. Do we really want to normalize White Supremacy (which Trump, MAGAs, and allies very much are doing)?
So, what you’re telling us is that we should eliminate idiocy by doubling down on it? Ignore Sweeney’s jean ad because the real problem is Greg Gutfeld’s joke about the stupidity of using the Nazi symbology? You might have something there.
I’m sure you can find somewhere on this Substack some degreed “wokester” with a made-up social justice consultancy devoting entire pages to deconstructing the colonialist, racist and misogynistic messages embedded in this ad. You really have to train for years to be that deranged.
You really missed the point on the "claim the word Nazi" thing from Gutfeld. he's talking about people like you calling everyone Nazis, which proved to be a very effective cudgel that prevents reasonable people from speaking up on important issues. So he's jokingly saying that if it's going to be unreasonable thrown at everyone, we need to disempower it by just using it to refer to oneself. It's definitely a kind of dumb take, but it doesn't mean what you're trying to make it mean.
Yea that was the point regarding Sweeny, etc., but the authors point regarding Gutfeld was "we should stop casually throwing 'Nazi' at everything when there are REAL Nazis out there like Fresh and Fit (that one was a good example actually) and Gutfeld who wants to rehabilitate the term Nazi". So my comment stands, the author missed the point on the Gutfeld example.
It means that nazism is threatening to the country but isn’t a serious challenge to their moral perspective or the justifications for their policy goals. They can rightly reject nazism cuz it’s evil and not many people are likely to be convinced that it’s good. On the other hand acknowledging that there are heritable traits that are determinative of rank within some “objective” hierarchy really undermines their thesis that all differences are driven by oppression. Without the presumption of oppression it’s harder to justify their vast social engineering project. Sydney Sweeney having objectively great tits because of her great genes really is a threat to modern leftism.
I think it’s less about the specifics of the boobs and more the indication that the tide of public opinion is moving against them and they are trying to hold it back
People literally did call out the DHS tweet on twitter. People don't care, Nazi tweets by this administration is nothing new.
The American Eagle ad is a bit fashy and that is somewhat new. A corporation feeling safe pandering to Nazis is much more worrisome than the same coming from the government (as sad as that is).
There is nothing "fashy" about making a pun with the word genes because an actress has a genetic predisposition to stereotypically attractive female traits. Democrats can't be the party of science if they keep pretending like genetics aren't real.
Or could it be her giant boobs which have received an inappropriate amount of coverage in traditional media and social media. Claiming an ad campaign is fascist because it relies on people finding non-obese women with big boobs hot is the kind of obnoxious hysteria that makes people not believe it when there are actual fascists.
Right? "Let's talk about secret coded Nazi numerology" when there's a glorified picture of the "Manifest Destiny" artwork right there. Even the author's example of "clearly out Naziism" misses the forest for the trees. At least they copped to the possibility they were reaching though.
The bit here about ignoring what's in front of your face in favor a "juicier" or more conspiratorial thing brings me directly to the Epstein thing with Trump.
It has been driving me insane that potential documents could implicate Trump and that they might exist but are being kept secret is HUGE DEAL.
I'm not saying it isn't. But like, if someone at DOJ or FBI leaked a document to the NYT showing Trump on Epstein "flight logs" is would be an enormous thing.
Except...the fact that Trump flew with Epstein, partied with Epstein, was friends with Epstein, attended, let's say, "women focused events" with Epstein... HAS BEEN PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE, ACKNOWLEDGED BY TRUMP HIMSELF FOR MULTIPLE DECADES!
They just need to follow the money. The money flowed to Epstein from other peoole. The banks flagged unusual transactions, starting all this. So why not track every transactions back to source and see what "products" the money bought - and who bought them?
No. NOT “Women-focused” events, but “Girl-Child-focused” events, precisely.
No. The quote and “admission” from Trump I am speaking about specifically is there was some calendar girl competition Trump invited Epstein to many years ago.
As it stands now, I don’t think there is public evidence that women at that event (super creepy though it sounds) were underaged OR sexually assaulted/Raped/coerced. Nor does there appear to be a current credible accusation that was the case for this specific event.
That does not mean those things didn’t happen or aren’t true. But it’s why I referenced that specific thing the way I did.
I think there’s a missing piece on the out and open Nazi analysis here. I’m reminded of focus groups straight up not believing Romney’s policy proposals were real when presented with them because of how regressive they were. It’s basically the inverse of the Sydney Sweeney conspiracy line. There’s a desire to believe there’s no way these people are truly openly espousing Nazi beliefs, whoever is relaying that must be lying or spinning it.
"I never thought leopards would eat MY face", sobs woman who voted for the Leapords Eating People's Faces Party
I think what's missing more is the death of rhetoric as an art form on the liberal side. If the way the proposals are presented to focus groups make them incredulous, you change your presentation of them. You say something like "I couldn't believe this was his policy but wow, there it is in plain English, ridiculous or what?" Or you say "Now I appreciate what the other party is trying to do, but I hope they realize their efforts to better America will *unintentionally* result in [Romney's purposeful policy outcome]."
It's fucking marketing 101 and the libs are too busy treating politics as some holier endeavor than advertising to stop being retarded about it.
Death of rhetoric? They certainly use plenty of rhetoric. It’s just been proven empty as the pot they should have left to piss in. The policies that they purport to support to help people are all a cover for their corrupt, money laundering operation.
How many of those NGOs financed by public funds to ‘combat’ homelessness actually perpetuate it? How about the ‘fire relief’ fund in California that actually pushed totally political spending, while depriving fire victims of any relief? Those are just recent examples.
Everyone: Nice, they’re talking about her huge boobs
Intellectuals on Twitter: OH MY GOD IT’S ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY
Ever since the social justice warriors from Tumblr made their presence felt on Twitter, it has made most of us worse off and gives the right free ammunition. It just makes us all look dumb, we don't need to make up conspiracies when there are actual issues in front of us and examples for sure.
Right? Everyone's like "they're secretly winking to the huge eugenics demographic!", and I'm like, "err, no, it's gooner ASMR, and it's been around forever, it just took a break from 2020 to 2024"
I know very little about Sweeney- I highly doubt she went into this with any understanding of this kind of thing going on around her- but my understanding is that the Groyper Right *has* been trying to frame her specifically as their Republican Aryan Sex Goddess for a while, holding her up as the traditional example of Beauty (white, blond, thin, and... buxom*) that the Left is trying to take from you with their "women of color" and their "highlighting of non-traditionally beautiful women". As far as I can tell, she's also been a lot more quiet and apolitical than other young female celebrities who are more openly Center-Left, like Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter. This lets them project their politics onto her, while people on the Left see the absence of Center-Left politics as evidence of low-key Right-wing politics.
With that context, and with how everyone seems to be bending over backward to appeal to Trump and his goons, I can understand why people might be jumping at shadows. But if I were Sweeney's PR person, I would have highly recommended that she have stayed far away from this sort of thing.
*Strange how the Republican party of my youth would have been scandalized by her appearance but their moral degeneration has led them to "AWOOGA = good".
You are absolutely on to something. They tried to claim Taylor Swift was an Aryan goddess for like a decade. The far right wants to be the popular culture so bad, so they keep trying to do the same thing over and over.
When (mostly liberal) celebrities talk publicly about politics, the right tells them to shut up and stop talking down to regular people, but when they don't, the right assumes the only possible reason is that they're secretly extremely right wing.
If I hold that comment up to the mirror the phrase ”far right” mysteriously becomes “far left” and it’s just as true! It’s a political palindrome!
The thing is... it's her right to be apolitical and to profit from her work, her looks, etc without a mob coming to attack her because a group of lunatics that she has never engaged with or endorsed is using her image. It's something close to victim-blaming - to use a Left jargon.
She has the right to be tone-deaf and people have the right to criticize her in bad faith... but I'd say in both cases people ought to read the room better.
It’s a pun about genes. What “room” was she supposed to read?
Who do you think is providing her profit? Live by the sword, die by the sword
That's what I've been repeating ad nauseam in Brazil - where I wrote even book chapters about the topic and also several articles for the media for over a decade - that the woke mob (that we call identitarians) is not interested in real enemies. Is not interested in actually changing anything. Because if they actually find the real enemy they'll have to... fight. If they change anything they'll lose their relevance. Without racism what would be of the anti-racism folks? If you beat your enemy, you have no reason to get likes on social media.
They are fighting windmills because it's safe. They don't have to do anything other than screaming that they are offended and nothing will change because, well, there's absolutely nothing Nazi or racist behind their objects of revolt. They are not targeting Nazis, they are just screaming at anything they don't like, don't understand or that offends them - even if they don't even understand why or just because they are racists themselves and in their own way, supremacists.
They just want clicks, fame, to destroy something or someone and feel like they did something when, in fact, they accomplished nothing and, worse, they helped the other side. They helped the Nazis, the racists, to hide in plain sight while alienating allies.
Spot On!
I would rebroadcast your comment but I don't know how to do that.
Love this-- I'd posit though that this is not a new phenomena by any means (see my recent comment). There's a special internet brand of urban legend and myth that has cropped up in the digital age, but is it really any different from the fantastical witch hunts that have always made people feel better about things they cannot control that scare them?
They just go after who they think they can get. They don't really care about that.
Exactly. They are too scared to go after actual Nazis, but they know Sydney Sweeney isn’t going to disappear them or go after their families, and they still get to delude themselves into thinking they are “resisting”.
No, they’re just like rw trolls. They just make uncomfortable who they can and try to do internet activism.
I would say it's less that and more that they think it's at least possible to shame Sidney Sweeney into submission. There's a thing I've noticed recently that even apotasy is much more offensive than staunch heathenism. She's a young Hollywood actress who became famous from the show Euphoria which is watched almost entirely by college educated liberals. She's "supposed" to be on team progressive, so any deviation from doctrine, even if slight, is massively more consequential than the likes of Fresh and Fit openly denying the Holocaust or the Trump admin putting out unambiguous Nazi dogwhistles.
There is something so weird and modern here - the need to hunt for hidden symbolism when they're just saying it out loud.... There is something so comprehensively pathological about our discourse
Well said.
I mean both things can be true. The openly racist things are openly racist, the covertly racist this are covertly racist. The reactive portion of the social media crowd reacts to both.
But if you don’t think Sydney suggestively ASMR-ing ‘my jeans are BLUE’ as the camera pans to her very blue eyes is not a shout-out to racists and white supremacists, you are not looking hard enough.
Of course it’s not her personally, the ad is not her idea, she didn’t write the lines. But she didn’t say no either.
Wait, she has eyes?
It came as a shock to many of us 😂
Yes, and supporting immigration from non-white countries is also a signal that they want to replace white people right? 🙄
You are tilting at windmills. You must touch grass and spend at least three (3) days without interacting with algorithmically driven social media.
Like, I do understand that nuance is largely dead, but you don’t need to be trampling on its corpse 😂
Thank you for this. Both the criticism of the Sydney Sweeney reach and the scarry 1488 stuff coming from our own federal government. The fact that the people putting that stuff out there are getting paid with our tax dollars to do so should enrage us all and should be front page news but alas. 100% spot on.
The Gutfeld dig is a touch unfair because it was delivered as a joke surrounded by other jokes. A guest followed up with, "Nazi, please...." in place of another n-word. It was not positioned as a serious concept.
I'm sorry, but joking about being a Nazi is messed up already. Do we really want to normalize White Supremacy (which Trump, MAGAs, and allies very much are doing)?
Unless people are constantly calling you a nazi when you’re not even remotely a nazi.
So, what you’re telling us is that we should eliminate idiocy by doubling down on it? Ignore Sweeney’s jean ad because the real problem is Greg Gutfeld’s joke about the stupidity of using the Nazi symbology? You might have something there.
I’m sure you can find somewhere on this Substack some degreed “wokester” with a made-up social justice consultancy devoting entire pages to deconstructing the colonialist, racist and misogynistic messages embedded in this ad. You really have to train for years to be that deranged.
You really missed the point on the "claim the word Nazi" thing from Gutfeld. he's talking about people like you calling everyone Nazis, which proved to be a very effective cudgel that prevents reasonable people from speaking up on important issues. So he's jokingly saying that if it's going to be unreasonable thrown at everyone, we need to disempower it by just using it to refer to oneself. It's definitely a kind of dumb take, but it doesn't mean what you're trying to make it mean.
Yea that was the point regarding Sweeny, etc., but the authors point regarding Gutfeld was "we should stop casually throwing 'Nazi' at everything when there are REAL Nazis out there like Fresh and Fit (that one was a good example actually) and Gutfeld who wants to rehabilitate the term Nazi". So my comment stands, the author missed the point on the Gutfeld example.
You’re obviously right about which is more dangerous to the country but the leftists are also right about which is more dangerous to their world view.
It means that nazism is threatening to the country but isn’t a serious challenge to their moral perspective or the justifications for their policy goals. They can rightly reject nazism cuz it’s evil and not many people are likely to be convinced that it’s good. On the other hand acknowledging that there are heritable traits that are determinative of rank within some “objective” hierarchy really undermines their thesis that all differences are driven by oppression. Without the presumption of oppression it’s harder to justify their vast social engineering project. Sydney Sweeney having objectively great tits because of her great genes really is a threat to modern leftism.
I think it’s less about the specifics of the boobs and more the indication that the tide of public opinion is moving against them and they are trying to hold it back
People literally did call out the DHS tweet on twitter. People don't care, Nazi tweets by this administration is nothing new.
The American Eagle ad is a bit fashy and that is somewhat new. A corporation feeling safe pandering to Nazis is much more worrisome than the same coming from the government (as sad as that is).
There is nothing "fashy" about making a pun with the word genes because an actress has a genetic predisposition to stereotypically attractive female traits. Democrats can't be the party of science if they keep pretending like genetics aren't real.
The stereotypically attractive traits of blonde hair and blue eyes.
Or could it be her giant boobs which have received an inappropriate amount of coverage in traditional media and social media. Claiming an ad campaign is fascist because it relies on people finding non-obese women with big boobs hot is the kind of obnoxious hysteria that makes people not believe it when there are actual fascists.
Even this article is stupid & a reach.
Right? "Let's talk about secret coded Nazi numerology" when there's a glorified picture of the "Manifest Destiny" artwork right there. Even the author's example of "clearly out Naziism" misses the forest for the trees. At least they copped to the possibility they were reaching though.