Let’s be real. The Sidney Sweeney “controversy” isn’t about an ad, or jeans, eugenics, or anyone’s cleavage. It’s a case study in how dumb, hollow, made-for-media outrage cycles get manufactured out of thin air by the right wing. A full-on blueprint for how to game the system and force Democrats to go on the defensive over total bullshit. It also serves as a distraction for a media that is as easily distracted as our greyhounds when they see a squirrel at our bird feeder.

Here’s how it works. First, Republicans put out some total bullshit nonsense about something “the left” is allegedly doing. The next step is right-wing media throws gasoline on the burning bullshit and screams about how ridiculous, out-of-touch, and even dangerous the “left” is. The penultimate step is to sucker in enough Very Serious Centrists to write thunk pieces about how silly and foolish those leftists are, and this leads to the final step. And that is to try to force the Democrats to “answer” for this and to condemn it.

So that’s it. That’s the whole play. And the genius and/or sickness of it is that the second step doesn’t even have to be real. You don’t need very much gasoline. You just need a couple of tweets, a TikTok, or maybe a random Reddit comment. Then slap the word “Democrats” on it and pretend it’s a coordinated cultural meltdown.

Congrats. You’ve got yourself a national news story.

We’ve seen this show before. Remember how critical race theory was making white elementary students hate themselves. Remember how they got James Carville to rant non-stop about “woke” whatever that means. Remember YOUR SON WILL GO TO SCHOOL AND COME BACK YOUR DAUGHTER! This is the move now. It’s cheap, repeatable, and everyone knows how to do it. Right-wing figures and/or organizations bait it. Pundits feed it. Centrist columnists moralize about it. And suddenly, Democrats are being asked why they care more about a celebrity’s ad than inflation. Even though they never said a word about it.

This Sidney Sweeney thing? That liberal backlash that supposedly “erupted”? It didn’t happen. Not in any meaningful way. There were a few scattered comments from randos on social media, the kind of thing that floats through the social media sea every second. That was enough. It got spun into a weekslong story that everyone treated like an existential political crisis.

And it works because the machine is already built. Right-wing influencers, tabloid media, “anti-woke” grifters, fake-moderate talk show hosts and writers, etc., all grab the baton and run the same play. Stir up a fake culture war, frame it as a moral failure of the left that is a serious threat to the nation, and then use it as a distraction, drum it up as a campaign issue, or even monetize it.

Meanwhile, social media is churning out thousands of posts about it. Creators are bathing in engagement. Everyone’s got a take. Everyone’s got a reel. All of this buries the truth under a mountain of bullshit.

This whole outrage economy depends on blaming the left for fights the left never picked. It only functions if people keep pretending Democrats are the ones obsessed with this garbage. They’re not. But try telling that to the guy who saw three tweets shared by Ben Shapiro and now thinks there’s a woke army coming for his God-given right to drool over Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad.

It’s the same old con. Make up a crisis, blame your enemies for it, and then yell at them for being distracted by the thing you made up in the first place.

And the most infuriating part? Plenty of Democrats fall for it. They buy the premise. They apologize. They distance themselves from the “radical left” because someone, somewhere, said something online. The good news is this particular outrage seems to be mainly limited to the right-wing feversphere. It’s not getting the traction they were hoping for. In fact, the New York Times this week has an article about how the entire controversy is nonsense, and a small number of online leftists with limited followings are even bothering to make a stink about this.

The bottom line about the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ad is the actual far right is out here pushing open bigotry, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and somehow never has to answer for any of it.

This is the scam. And it only works if people keep taking the bait. But the latest grift doesn’t seem to be working.

Keep not taking the bait.

The last word goes to The View.