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Evan Gottesman is managing editor of The Next Move and the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative.
Wake up babe, new Sydney Sweeney controversy just dropped!
The 28 year-old actor’s latest offense? Stubborn political neutrality.
Tedious as it is, we have to talk about Sydney Sweeney because the obsession with her is verging on religious pandemonium, and it’s hurting the fight for liberal democracy.
To understand why, let’s rewind the clock to the halcyon days of summer 2025. The Trump administration was already running roughshod over norms and institutions. Wanting for something more important to talk about, parts of the left erupted into moral panic over an ad campaign Sydney Sweeney ran with American Eagle under the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” (a play on genes).
A Nazi dog whistle! An appeal to eugenics! These were real sentiments expressed by real people with big followings [ [link removed] ]. It was an insane accusation that would not make sense to anyone who is not terminally online. No one could fathom that a company was trying to sell denim with a cheap pun and a conventionally attractive celebrity.
Over the past half year, there have been numerous attempts to out Sweeney as MAGA. Internet sleuths found someone with her name registered as a Republican in Florida. In November, a GQ reporter pressed Sweeney to apologize for the jeans ad. The reporter’s meme-worthy look of disbelief [ [link removed] ] went viral after Sweeney refused to recant.
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Now Sweeney is back in the news for an interview [ [link removed] ] she did the other day with Cosmopolitan. “I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” Sweeney told the magazine when asked about being called “MAGA Barbie” (kind of a sexist barb, don’t you think?).
After the Cosmo interview, political influencer and sanctimonious buzzkill Matt Bernstein snarked [ [link removed] ], “if in the big year 2026 you as a rich and famous celebrity adored by the president and attending bezos wedding think you are an apolitical entity then i don’t really know anymore.” (Sweeney was far from the only celebrity [ [link removed] ] at Bezos’s wedding—the man owns a big movie studio, and yes, I get that this is part of the problem).
Bernstein has two million followers on Instagram including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the ACLU. His video takedown [ [link removed] ] of Sweeney broke 600,000 likes with millions more views. Other TikToks and reels dragging the actor’s anti-politics interview climbed to the top of the algorithm last week.
This kind of content makes the rounds and reinforces the left’s reputation for hall monitor behavior. There is no discernable upside to influencer-activists taking up a crusade against a generally well-liked celebrity whose worst action appears to be inaction.
Is the goal to cancel Sydney Sweeney? Leaving aside the ethics of social exile, the actor is too popular to land a conviction in the court of public opinion based on scattered circumstantial evidence. She will still be cast in movies and TV shows, and people will still watch them.
Is the goal to get her to speak up on America’s constitutional crisis? If so, Sweeney’s critics are doing a bang-up job of that. All of the questions lobbed at her basically come down to the overly-broad “what do you think of politics?” or, less generously, “are you racist?” If we really believe it’s important that she speak out then why not pose a more pointed question about ICE or election denial or some other relevant issue?
Or perhaps there is no goal. Mindless destruction for the sake of a mindless discourse. Petty persecution instead of a bold stand for liberal values.
Don’t read this as a defense of Sweeney’s dogged neutrality. Personally, I would not want to be friends with someone who cannot pick a side when government agents are tormenting migrants and killing American citizens [ [link removed] ] in broad daylight. But Sydney Sweeney is not my friend, and she is not yours either (sorry to shatter any weird fantasies).
More than that, Sweeney’s non-partisan orientation is not the worst-case scenario. And it is not guaranteed forever. The denim debacle put Sweeney on Donald Trump’s radar by opening up a new front in the culture war. The president raved that the American Eagle was “fantastic”. [ [link removed] ] If the right wants to co-opt Sweeney, they have an easy path. The loudest voices on the left have been consistently uncharitable with her and it’s natural to gravitate away from those who are mean to you.
Sweeney—who has tens of millions of followers on social media—will do a lot more damage as a spokesperson for Trumpism than she is doing non-aligned. If that’s not convincing, think about how many normal people find this kind of purity politics alienating. Of course, strategic considerations might not be important for content creators like Matt Bernstein—they’re ultimately businesspeople whose clicks come from the already converted. If Sweeney does go full MAGA, the inquisitors will just be happy to have unmasked another witch.
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