Genes, memes and manufactured dissent

The story of a Gen Z backlash that never was, a right-wing backlash that eventually was, a left-wing-influencer-academic backlash that definitely was, and a raging culture war that maybe isn’t

Anyone who peers long enough into the abyss will eventually find Piers Morgan staring back at them. (This is my attempt at a modern aphorism.)

So it was that I found myself watching the latest episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored yesterday, in which the American Eagle campaign is argued over in a way that appears to drive all four guests to distraction, while the host periodically barks his characteristic ’Ang on! before cutting to a commercial break that (in my algorithm at least) didn’t involve jeans.

How did we get to this point?

I’m writing this to lay out the timeline of a media storm, because I think it’s an instructive exercise that reflects how a lot of these episodes play out.

But I also want to challenge four theories of the case. First, that this was a storm whipped up by right-wingers based on a few posts by anonymous nobodies. Second, that this was a woke hallucination based on a reading of the ad that had zero validity. Third, that this was a widespread Gen Z backlash that media commentators have subsequently commented on. Fourth, that this was a Pepsi Kendall Jenner rerun, where a misjudged ad led to a predictable public backlash.

Let’s start with the timeline, then come back to how none of those interpretations work, but another one might.

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Timeline of a media storm

Note: I’ve done my best with the digital archaeology, but if I’ve left important gaps in the narrative, please let me know.

July 23: Campaign launches

If you’ve not seen the campaign or the controversy, for Christ’s sake, stop reading this post and continue with your life.

The rest of you know it’s American Eagle jeans, Sydney Sweeney in said jeans, and a brand hoping this will sell some jeans.

On launch day, the American Eagle website featured quotes from Jennifer Foyle, President and Creative Director, who is notably not a reactionary old white male. She was given a Brand Genius award by AdWeek in 2018 for her exceptional talent, bravery and commitment to body confidence and empowerment. The mention in the article of “a little mischief” is the only hint of what is to come.

Marketing Dive also mentions Chief Marketing Officer Craig Brommers. Elsewhere, he describes himself as “passionate for purpose-driven brands” and someone who believes that “purpose-driven brands… can make a difference when they connect with young audiences in an authentic and meaningful way.” To use the TikTok parlance, he is not giving fashy vibes. (Fashy = fascist since about 2017.)

In other coverage, AdWeek cheerfully repeats the genes/jeans pun, and Hollywood Reporter mentions how the campaign’s proceeds will be donated to mental health and crisis intervention charity Crisis Text Line. Again, not very fashy in tone, though there is an ominous mention of Sydney Sweeney owning a German Shepherd puppy.

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July 24: Stock surges, good vibes

We’re 24 hours into the campaign, and most of the headlines are about a stock surge.

Any self-respecting ad person will tell you this surge does NOT reflect any kind of consumer response. Ad campaigns are generally judged over weeks at the soonest, and years or decades if you’re talking long-term brand effects. Nevertheless, the vibes are good and the surge reflects investor optimism about American Eagle doing something big with someone famous, which often works well in advertising.

Meanwhile, CMO Craig Brommers has posted about the campaign on LinkedIn, and for the first 24-48 hours the comments are glowing (see image above), reflecting well on him and Ashley Schapiro, Marketing VP.

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July 25-26: Early, non-eugenic rumblings

Two days post-launch, the first signs of discontent. But they have nothing to do with eugenics. Instead, there’s talk of the link to the charitable cause being ‘tasteless’ and ‘tone deaf’, along with criticism of objectification and the male gaze. On the other hand, Brand Vision is reporting that the campaign has already won Gen Z hearts, claiming that the Sydney Jean stock sold out in 48 hours.

Meanwhile, on the right, there are the first signs of triumphalism about the campaign signalling the ‘end of woke’. Again, none of this coverage mentions eugenics, but is a rerun of the April 2024 viral tweet by Richard Hanania that heralded Sydney Sweeney’s appearance on SNL with the words ‘Wokeness is dead’. Since then, Sweeney has been associated with a memetic strain of ‘America is back’-ness despite not having expressed notable political views herself.

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July 26 (evening): First Nazi sightings

TikTok doesn’t give time stamps, so it’s hard to know the exact chronology. But it seems like the evening of July 26th was when Nazis first entered the chat. On Twitter/X, Ella Yurman had the distinctively modern experience of posting something, going to bed, and waking up in the centre of a global shitstorm. Around the same time on TikTok, the first viral post appears to have come from @midwesterngothic, where he leads with the Nazi propaganda angle, then goes on to talk about over-sexualisation and the visual echo of an old Calvin Klein ad featuring an under-age Brooke Shields.

It’s worth noting that neither poster can be described as a nobody. The former is a trans woman Jewish comedian and antifascist campaigner focusing on labour rights and trans liberation (description taken from her agency representation page on Avalon—not many nobodies have one). The latter is a trans influencer with 74k followers.

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July 27: Influencer wave / first media coverage

Day 4 and the tweets and TikToks take off. It’s hard to trace all of them, but I’ve picked out some of the most shared.

Note how this isn’t members of the public taking to the streets, students attacking shopfronts, Gen Z kids returning their jeans in protest, or mums getting restless on Mumsnet. Typical examples include a millennial PhD scholar with 30k followers (Mia Brett), a millennial gay influencer with 1.3m followers and agency representation (Brandon Edelman), a professional creator with 700k followers (Mariah Rose), a self-described communist and prison abolitionist with 127k followers (evan_loves_worf), and a self-described human rights activist with 17k followers (Hana Katana).

None of this is to criticise any of these individuals, just to illustrate the phenomenon we’re analysing. Most are openly left-wing in their activism, some are involved in professional content creation, some are high-level academics, many are millennial rather than Gen Z, many are white, some are Black.

Meanwhile, the first media coverage of the eugenics-related uproar comes from progressive-leaning Salon (see image above).

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July 28: Amplification in marketing circles…

I’m not sure if it was the 27th or 28th, but Dr Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel made one of the earliest and most influential interventions on LinkedIn (leading eventually to her appearance on the Piers Morgan panel). At the same time, the LinkedIn post by Craig Brommers (CMO of American Eagle) began to attract negative comments, primarily from the highly educated and professionally successful millennial-and-older people you would expect to find on LinkedIn.

… amplification in left-leaning media & marketing press

Still on July 28th, NBC and Washington Post, typically rated centre-left or left-leaning, amplified the story, with NBC contributor Cheryl Overton calling the ads a ‘dog whistle’, and Washington Post contributors talking about how ‘regressive’ they seemed. Meanwhile, the creative advertising press began to report on the story, including a Creative Bloq column that opens “It’s 2025. Do better.”

In all cases, the sources for the stories aren’t on-the-street voxpops or angry phone-in callers, but quotes from the same influencers, academics, and social media posters mentioned above.

… and amplification in the right-wing press

At the same time as Washington Post, NBC and others were lining up to cover a story involving Sydney Sweeney pictures and Adolf Hitler references, the right-wing press eagerly got involved too – some examples here from New York Post, Breitbart and Fox, all reporting on the same social media posts, all gleefully framed as a ‘woke gone mad’ story.

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July 29: Gen Z myth-making, meme warfare, and Ted Cruz

Six days into the campaign and about three days into the backlash, left-leaning media outlets like MSNBC continue to amplify the story with talk of “an unbridled shift towards whiteness”, while Psychology Today talks earnestly of a backlash from young people, though no evidence is given for this. The author seems unaware she’s writing mainly about an online backlash from fellow PhDs and other marketing-adjacent influencers. She also references the “smart online satire” of a meme post by Doja Cat (US rapper of Black South African and Ashkenazi Jewish descent)—which takes the form of Doja Cat delivering Sydney Sweeney’s ad script in an exaggerated southern drawl, which I guess we can leave to the semioticians to decode.

By the evening of 29 July, Ted Cruz gets involved, retweeting the coverage in the New York Post, with a message about the ‘crazy Left’. By this point, rather than plucking an obscure social media post from nowhere to generate some outrage, he’s commenting on a mainstream press article about a story already being covered everywhere.

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July 30: Piers appears

While I’ve left out too many articles, takes and sidebars to mention, that pretty much brings us up to the Piers Morgan Uncensored episode I mentioned at the start—in which Dr Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel is one of the panellists and carries herself (I think) pretty well as she faces a barrage of ‘yoo wot mate?’ eye-rolling from Morgan and others. Nevertheless, her talk is of “the impact that [the campaign] has on audiences and particularly on younger audiences” and how “it is no surprise to me that it was picked up by audiences who reacted in the way that they did”.

It should be clear by now that I don’t think this is what happened. What nearly all of the commentators, columnists and influencers miss is this: Rather than commentating on the phenomenon, they ARE the phenomenon.

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Four theories of the case

Having laid out the timeline, let’s see how those four theories stack up.

1. This was a storm whipped up by right-wingers based on a few posts by anonymous nobodies

This argument has been made widely, but the timeline should show it’s unfounded. Far from anonymous nobodies with little connection to the left, most of the early posts came from people who overtly present themselves as political activists and command big followings. They range from professional influencers and content creators, to PhD authors and academics, to highly-paid marketers, mostly from at least a generation older than Gen Z.

While the right-wing press has, of course, leapt on this with glee and will no doubt milk it for all it’s worth, they’re not the only ones. The progressive and left-leaning press were among the first to amplify the story, and there is an entire ecosystem of people making hay out of it. Ted Cruz was a relative latecomer to the drama, reposting a story that was already in the mainstream media.

2. This was a woke hallucination based on a reading of the ad that had zero validity

I haven’t directly touched on this in the timeline above, but it’s a point worth emphasising. I’ve seen people arguing that concerns of ‘ fascist coding’ and ‘eugenics’ are nothing more than crazy, bad-faith takes with zero validity and fit only for mockery.

I don’t believe that. I think it’s valid for a semiotician, or anyone, to read the ad that way. Ads are cultural documents that emerge from a time and place, and it’s anti-intellectual to say you can never read them in a deeper way. Lord knows, I’ve spent years arguing that corporate purpose ads reveal a lot about the times we’ve just lived through, and none of it is good.

You can certainly argue that some people infer this reading in a cynical way to get clicks—and there’s a flavour of that in some of the earlier posts, where people try out various tacks (masculine gaze, sexualisation, exploitation of cause) before landing on one that gains more purchase (Nazis). But it doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth considering in those readings.

It’s also valid to see those ‘codes’ and ‘tropes’ without claiming intent by the creators. Effect often diverges from intent—again, an argument I’ve made many times in the purpose years.

3. This was a Gen Z backlash that media commentators have subsequently weighed in on.

But what is a hallucination (unless proven otherwise) is the claim that this reading is shared by millions of people, especially those of a specific ethnicity, gender or age group.

It’s one thing for an academic to say: “I fully expect this ad to work—for most people of all backgrounds, it’s just a hot celeb in jeans. But for me, this also says something disturbing about our times etc. etc.” All fine.

It’s another thing for an academic to say: “Here’s why this ad is offensive to people from group X or Y”, or “Here’s why this ad has failed with Gen Z”. If you’re going to say that, you need evidence beyond your own opinion. Every commenter quoted above was opining at least 3-4 days after the launch, at a time when no public outcry was taking place, and all reports were highly positive (including the one about the Sydney Jean product line selling out).

As is sometimes the case in these strange cultural spirals, it’s not out of the question that the reality can eventually catch up to match the narrative. At some point, the sheer heat of the discourse can end up warping reality—I’ll come back to this in the last section.

4. This was a Pepsi Kendall Jenner rerun, where a misjudged ad led to a predictable public backlash and immediate retreat.

But first, let’s quickly dispatch this one. The Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad was launched on 4 April 2017 and withdrawn on 5 April 2017 after being mocked by everyone from the New York Post to Bernice King. The American Eagle campaign lived for 3 days before any mention of Nazis, and continues to live now. I’m sure there have been wobbles in the marketing department, but there’s no sign of an about-turn, and very little reason for one, at least once you realise you’re battling a chimera more than a reality. Even progressive champion Stephen Colbert, speaking on July 31, is more inclined to find humour in the whole thing. And even at the height of the storm, the New York Times has room for sober, contextualising takes from the likes of (Black American) linguist John McWhorter. The spell-like power of the early 2020s woke backlash has weakened.

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So what just happened?

Just over a century ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about the ‘manufacture of consent’ in his book Public Opinion, a phrase later adopted in the book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. The phrase is used to describe the way powerful institutions can shape and control public opinion by selectively presenting information, framing narratives, and limiting the range of acceptable debate, to the point where it seems like the public’s agreement is freely given.

I’m not the first to coin the phrase ‘manufactured dissent’, but I’m surprised it hasn’t become more widespread in recent years. You can see it as the other side of the consent coin: the illusion of dissent that appears spontaneous or grassroots, but exists primarily in a high-level discourse involving brands, academics, influencers, commentators and media reporting on other media. All this creates the impression of raging public debate and intractable generational divides, but its real purpose is to reinforce the legitimacy and cultural status of those giving the opinions.

As I say above, this isn’t to claim the left-wing reading of the ad is entirely baseless, or that you can’t legitimately read tropes and codes at play. But there’s a difference between a handful of media-literate commentators dissecting those tropes and a genuine, bottom-up youth revolt against a campaign.

To recap, this campaign ran for the best part of three days with no eugenics controversy and plenty of media attention. The first negative reaction came not from the masses, but from a handful of professional activists, semioticians, marketers, and academics—mostly older millennials or Gen X, many with agency representation or large media platforms of their own. None were responding to a groundswell, but were creating the appearance of one. Within hours, their posts were being quoted by progressive outlets as evidence of a ‘backlash’ , which in turn fed right-wing counter-commentary, which in turn fed left-wing outrage, until the whole affair became pure spectacle—a story about itself, whirling like a dust devil across a single week in late July.

Of course, I’m now caught up in it too, adding to the discourse about the discourse about the discourse. But hopefully this post offers an off-ramp from the whole thing. The reason it matters is that these illusions have a way of becoming real. Without pushback, even the most online of online outrages ends up affecting things in the real world—adding to a sense of stress, division and anger that is out of all proportion. We all end up like a version of the Piers Morgan panellist, gazing despairingly out of the split screen and praying for the sweet relief of the ad break.

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This post took me too long. For anyone new here, I am this guy and this is my book.