Shiny Objects

The stakes have never been so fake

The story of this week, for those of you who were camping somewhere with no cell or wifi signal, was whether some non-negligible number of Americans believe that the actress Sydney Sweeney is a secret Nazi because of a pun in an ad campaign she was featured in, which starred, like most of her roles, her big naturals.

The story felt like a spacetime wormhole to five years ago, when people actually cared about things like this. But actually it was something much simpler, scientifically speaking: it was fake. There were probably 200 people in America who cared about the imaginary political implications of American Eagle’s snickering ad copy, and they were all internet fiends whose political consciousnesses were forged by the Covid-19 pandemic, which is to say they were brain damaged. Everything else was hype: the right-wing “backlash” to the non-existent liberal outrage, the media feeding frenzy over said fake outrage, the Vice President of the United States ridiculing the fabricated inanity of his political enemies, the President doing the same.

Back in 2020, these kinds of crazy episodes emanated from something that was actually happening in the culture: people were sincerely outraged by the most frivolous offenses, institutions with real power threw themselves behind the online mobs, meaningful consequences were suffered by people both famous and ordinary. This, by contrast, was a deepfake. We’re years past the mass psychosis formation of Peak Woke; none of the cultural conditions are in place for anything like this to actually occur again.

But 2020 was a great year for both the media and conservatives. Every day, journalists could wake up, see what’s trending on Twitter, and grind out some irresistible clickbait slop before their kids had even logged into their Zoom classrooms. Then every Republican in the country could jump into the fray, churn out some hackneyed viral snark about the blue-haired libtards and watch their follower counts grow, while their left-leaning friends and neighbors ran for their foxholes, hoping to make it to the end of the workday without being asked for their opinion on the latest cultural landmine.

There are a lot of people who would love to have that season of easy layups back again. So they’re memeing it into existence. All that’s required is a very bad take and a few anonymous, low-follower social media accounts that may or may not be right-wing shitposter sock puppets to voice it. That’s what happened with Sydney Sweeney and her denim-clad, Aryan Sisterhood mammary glands.

But you could tell from how quickly the story ran out of gas that there were no actual living, breathing, flesh-incarnated human beings feeling this particular outrage. No Democratic politician felt the grudging obligation to condemn Sweeney for her complicity in white supremacy. No internet mobs formed to retroactively cancel Brooke Shields for her nearly identical ad from 45 years ago. There was no clout to chase by carrying this torch forward. Everyone but those with a political or professional interest in doing otherwise rolled their eyes, shrugged and moved on.

I’ve written far too much in the past about the demented incentives of the media business to dwell on it further here. But the incentive for the political right to jump on a fake outrage story like this is somewhat new, if a bit obvious: they’re running out of things to gloat about. So far, both the tariffs and the immigration crackdown have been so unsuccessful at improving job numbers that the President was triggered into firing his chief labor statistician for reporting honestly on them. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza is so unpopular that the White House is suppressing dissent by censoring critics and threatening to withhold disaster relief funds from states that participate in boycotts of Israeli-affiliated products and services. As anyone could have predicted, Putin is ignoring Trump’s wishcasting an end to the war in Ukraine. DOGE was a joke. The Republicans have exploded the federal deficit and cut Medicare and Medicaid even as the President champions the acceleration of job-destroying Artificial Intelligence. On top of all that, Trump has chastised his own supporters for believing their lying eyes about the Epstein scandal. These are not the hallmarks of a successful presidency.

What conservatives could really use right now is an unhinged Democratic Party drunk on self-righteousness, scouring the earth for popular cultural icons to skewer. But that’s not in the cards anymore. That’s why, in the absence of a renewed woke insurgency to laugh at, the right has had to invent one. That’s what this psyop is about.

Get used to it. As our government sells the last granule of our democracy to corporate lobbyists, as our politics are drained of every drop of substance, as voters become more and more irrelevant to the political calculuses of our elected officials, expect to see more of this bullshit. This is what the culture war is for: to distract us with shiny objects while everything around us is stripped and plundered by those who really run the country.