I want to do a 🧵 about the Sidney Sweeney thing, because it's *extremely* revealing & educational. First, to be clear: I could not give less of a shit about the details -- the ad, the rhetoric, the jeans, her boobs, whatever. Good lord, who cares. Let's look at the *structure* of the episode. There's a template, which I'm certain American Eagle understands quite well: 1. release something ambiguously controversial, which yields 2. a backlash from libs, which yields 3. a backlash to the backlash from the vast "anti-woke" media, which yields 4. weeks of coverage & boosted jeans sales. At this point, everyone understands the template & is using it to their advantage. There are legions of people & institutions out there desperately *trying* to trigger one of these cycles by being controversial. Cancel me, no, no, cancel me! Over here! Look at me being edgy! No, no, over here! It's so tired. But there's one key feature of this cycle, as it currently runs, that I want to focus on: Step No. 2? The lib backlash that drives the whole thing? It doesn't have to be real! You can just make it up! The thing is, social media is vast. No matter what you say or do, you can find *someone* out there objecting to it on "woke" grounds. You just need to find two or three random comments, attribute the sentiment to "Democrats," & then demand that a bunch of Dems respond to it. It's really key to understand this: ***they don't need actual backlash of any substance or scale to run this cycle***. All they need is a few random comments, which they can always find, which means that you can basically run this cycle at will. You don't need libs to play along at all! That's the skeleton key to understanding this whole episode: there was no lib backlash to the Sweeney ad. There were a few random online comments. That's it. But they ginned that up into a full-fledged, media-dominating news cycle that has been running for *weeks* now. What we see is a whole vast media apparatus, a machine, that runs on this ginned-up bullshit. Right-wing outlets coordinate to drive it into the media cycle & then reactionary conservative outlets like the Free Press or Bill f'ing Maher's show take the baton, running with it. The reactionary centrist take depends on resolutely ignoring the real source of the story & instead pretending that libs, or even more absurdly, *Dems* are responsible for it being in the news. "Why are Dems talking about Sidney Sweeney instead of egg prices? This is why they lose, etc. etc." It can't be exaggerated how many grifters out there on the internet, making Insta reels & TikToks, *depend* on these cycles. They work tirelessly to generate them. I mean seriously, just go search Sweeney: pages & pages & pages of results, dozens, *hundreds* of people commenting on it. Weeks! Everyone gets what they want out of it: 1. The right gets to put Dems on the back foot again, forcing them to address nonsense designed to make them look bad. 2. The reactionary centrist media machine, awash in old-guy donor money, gets content. 3. Dem elites & consultants get to shit on the left. So, to recap: they spun a "lib backlash to Sweeney" up out of basically nothing & it provided weeks of content for the vast network of people & institutions who get money & attention by shitting on the left, convincing the billionaires that the left (not the f'ing fascists) are the real threat. Why am I spending so much time dissecting this silly & ultimately meaningless episode? Because, friends, hear me: this is the template for the last 10 years of US politics. This is the US politics in a nutshell. This is how it *all* works. The whole "woke" hysteria & backlash? "Cancel culture"? It was all this! The controversy over bahn mi in the college cafeteria. The HR guidance that instructed people to say "pregnant people." The trans girl who wanted to swim on the HS team. These are not things *Dems* chose to talk about! The template is, the right drives this dumb shit into the conversation, the reactionary centrists take the baton and push it into mainstream media, and then everyone asks, "why are Dems focusing on this stuff?" They aren't, you credulous fucking dipshits! They didn't do this! If you are asking "why are Dems talking about Sweeney instead of egg prices?" you are either a) an absolutely hopeless mark for grifters, or b) one of those grifters. For "Sweeney," substitute any one of the dozens of culture-war fights over the last decade. The *right* wants these, not the left. This all seems quite obvious to me -- it's the same goddamn cycle running over & over again -- but what baffles & infuriates me is how many Dems, even Dems of good faith, fall for it. "Yes, we suck, yes, we're focused on silly woke stuff, yes, shit on us more." Get a fucking spine. Anyway, to summarize/conclude: this silly Sweeney cycle, wherein a largely imaginary lib backlash leads to weeks of everyone shitting on Dems, is the entire last decade of US politics in miniature. Dems are forced to answer for any & every rando that anyone can find online ... ... while Republicans are never, ever forced to answer for the fact that their ranks are ridden with open nazis, racists, sexual predators, and thugs. There's a machine, funded by billionaires, running this scam over & over again. Maybe stop taking the bait. </fin> OMFG, too perfect. Proof, if you need any, that there is no winning this game.
Worth a read. The NYT lifts the curtain on this sad little charade. Could this be the pattern for how they and other media outlets report on future right wing BS? (doubts, I have) nytimes.com