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Let’s talk about Sydney Sweeney’s great genes. Sorry, jeans. At least that’s what American Eagle’s latest ad campaign wants you to believe.

According to the brand, there’s no hidden message in its new spot featuring the actor, or so they claim. In the ad, Sweeney earnestly explains, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue,” before the narrator wraps up with: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The wordplay is about as subtle as a brick through a window.

Per the marketing team at American Eagle, the campaign — titled Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans — is simply a celebration of denim and confidence. “Her jeans. Her story,” the company insisted in a statement, which is also its non-apology. “We will continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”

Sure.

But the backlash is less about jeans and more about genes. Sweeney, with her blue eyes, blonde hair and aesthetics of white American ‘perfection’, has the kind of genes that, historically, fascist regimes couldn’t stop talking about. And that’s exactly where the internet took the conversation.

Of course, it didn’t help that the ad sounded like a eugenics manifesto.

Many online accused the campaign of evoking Nazi-era obsession with racial purity and ideal genetic traits. According to the New York Post, some slammed it as “Nazi propaganda,” while others called it a “dog whistle to the far-right.”

The phrase “great genes”, especially when spoken over footage of a white, blonde, blue-eyed actor lounging in Americana denim, doesn’t exactly scream diversity and inclusion. It screams something else, and the internet heard it loud and clear.

Sweeney, of course, has already been branded a bombshell and a far-right sweetheart. Articles have been written about “Sweeney and the business of being hot” and the actor’s “style file”. Her past controversies include a MAGA-adjacent family party, photos with Blue Lives Matter fans, and, in June, willingly selling 5,000 bars of soap containing her bathwater for a viral men’s brand — the soap resold online for as much as $1,600, in case capitalism needed a punchline.

So yes, she’s a bombshell. But she’s also become a bit of a cultural Rorschach test, and in Trump’s America, she’s testing positive for a lot of not-great things.

Enter the White House — yes, the White House — to defend the American Eagle ad.

Trump’s White House communications chief, Steven Cheung, called the outrage “dense” and “moronic.” He wrote in an X post, “Cancel culture run amok. This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.”

To recap: an ad that sounded like it came out of an eugenics textbook is now being defended by a White House currently trying to rewrite actual history books. All while American Eagle — which once stood for inclusive, body-positive Gen Z branding — is doubling down on a slogan that feels tailor-made for MAGA couture.

And plenty of people — mostly blonde, blue-eyed Americans, let’s be honest — agree with it.

Supporters of the ad, particularly online, were quick to dismiss the controversy as hypersensitive liberal overreaction. “It’s obviously just a play on blue jeans and her blue eyes,” one user wrote. “It says nothing about supremacy or a master race or anything. You’re too sensitive to harmless things. Blue eyes are really pretty!”

Another tweet insisted, “Sydney Sweeney looks fantastic in jeans and she’s got very good genes,” while one particularly proud defender added, “She’s beautiful and has a great body. American Eagle did nothing wrong, and neither did she. The jeans have sold out.”

It’s a sentiment echoed across right-leaning social media feeds, where defending Sweeney has become the latest skirmish in the never-ending war on wokeness. To them, it’s not just about denim — it’s about defending the right to compliment a white woman’s genetics without being labelled problematic.

But the backlash is also just as petty and precise as you’d hope.

As one user wrote on X, “life is so dystopian [right now]”. Another accused Sweeney of being a Nazi. “The only way Sydney Sweeney would be okay with doing an ad like this is if she were a Nazi. This is blatant white supremacist eugenicist propaganda.”

More chimed in.

A user made a joke about others who also have preferences about genes.

Others added, “The American Eagles ad wasn’t just a commercial. It was a love letter to white nationalism and eugenic fantasies, and Sydney Sweeney knew it”, and “Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign has to be some of the most blatant eugenics propaganda I’ve seen in a minute.”

It’s not just that the ad missed the mark — it’s that it aimed for the wrong mark. The entire execution feels like a wink-and-nod to a kind of beauty that America has always praised and protected above all others. In 2025, with a second Trump term in full swing and culture wars peaking, ads like these aren’t innocuous. They’re calculated.

American Eagle may insist this is about denim, but not everyone is buying it.