The New York Times Does Damage Control over Sydney Sweeney Disaster

Gaslighting will only get you so far.

The Democrats have a guy problem. It’s so bad that they’ve dispatched would-be dude-bros on TikTok to make it seem like men should flock to the Democratic Party. They know their brand is blue-haired crazies with septum piercings screaming about how abortion is healthcare, all men are predators, and SMASH THE PATRIARCHY.

No one should be surprised they’re trying to distance themselves from the Sydney Sweeney controversy, considering their party seems to be losing men like rats off a sinking ship. Young men, old men, white men, Black and Brown men - they are fleeing because the Democrat brand is castration - literally and figuratively.

Enter the New York Times to rescue the Democrats from this mess. They’ve come with a hot take: “The Republicans manufactured a controversy!” They have charts and whatnot to prove it. But sorry fellas, the internet is written in ink.

Their “theory” is that because it didn’t hit X right away, that means it was blown out of proportion by the “right” who POUNCED on it. Oh, if it were only true. Oh, if the Left weren’t that crazy. Oh, if we lived in a time when it was okay to be a hot blonde in a jeans ad. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we don’t.

The New York Times says:

The boiling social media frenzy over the American Eagle campaign has been driven, at least in part, by the public’s seemingly insatiable interest in Ms. Sweeney. But it also shows how, on today’s internet, a controversy can sometimes be described as widespread when it isn’t. Instead, people pushing an agenda can cherry-pick from the tens of millions of posts and videos uploaded to social media every day to make their case.

Wrong. It was widespread. Maybe not in Luddite land of the New York Times or on X, but TikTok is much bigger than X, and it was exploding as a trend.

I am a creature of the internet and have spent the last 30 years online, so I know. I saw this blowing up on TikTok, and I had announced the controversy on one of my Twitter accounts.

You can see it has almost no engagement. That’s because most of my diminishing followers have muted and blocked me, long before I ever became a Trump voter. I post it here to show that I was already onto the story even if it wasn’t a thing on X yet. Since I use TikTok and have been online for 30 years, I was ahead of the curve.

Here are some of the videos I made from many days before the New York Times began tracking attention on TikTok:

But the mainstream media on the Left had already gotten the story, too, even if it wasn’t hitting X yet. It would eventually, as the Times points out, but just because it isn’t happening on X doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Here are some stories by mainstream outlets. Here is Salon on July 27th, which says nothing about a “right-wing” fabrication:

From the piece:

“Maybe I’m too … woke,” one viral post read, “but getting a blue-eyed, blonde, white woman and focusing your campaign around her having perfect genetics feels weird…” Others described the slogan as too close to “master race” propaganda and said it echoed eugenics-era language used to validate and promote the superiority of white beauty.

Eugenics movements in the U.S. often promoted the idea of “good genes” to encourage reproduction among white, able-bodied people while justifying the forced sterilization of others. Critics say those ideas still show up in modern advertising and influencer culture, often unexamined.

Note the word “viral.” For the isolated wonks at the Times, that means it was already everywhere on TikTok. Once something goes viral, it is seen and shared by millions who interact with it and use it to build their own platforms.

Here is NBC News a day later, repeating the story as though the “backlash” was real:

Again, nothing about a “right-wing” fabrication.

MSNBC:

The story continued to devolve, with Sweeney becoming some kind of symbol for the Left’s hatred of Trump and MAGA.

I’m sorry this is you, Democrats, but this is you:

Megyn Kelly batted around the Pod Save America bros, who also tried to repeat the lie that it was manufactured by the Left.

She talks about it with Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth.

And of course, Jon Favreau posts the reach-around by the Times:

I don’t know what is more sad - that the whole thing happened at all or that a guy like Jon Favreau and the New York Times have to work so hard to pretend it didn’t.

So let me give you a quick education on how things work, fellas. If you are in any way familiar with how trends and viral videos on TikTok work, you know that this kind of Leftist bullying is a common occurrence on the app. I’ve seen high-profile influencers swarmed and called Nazis and racists by millions of followers.

Here is an example and a story the New York Times would never know about, much less write about. There is a running influencer named Kate Macz who committed the sin of doing an interview with Karoline Leavitt.

You would think she went running wearing a Hitler t-shirt by the way people reacted to this video. It turned into one of the biggest incidents of viral bullying I’ve seen on the app. They love going after white women especially, and if they’re MAGA they feel emboldened to treat them like human garbage.

If the press does not call them out for it, or if the Right does not publicly shame them, they will just keep going.

Things got so bad for Kate Macz that she first deleted the video, then put it back up, then had to lock down her site.

And yes, eventually Fox News covered the story — the New York Times certainly wouldn’t:

The reason it happens on the Left is that to us, the internet was our utopia. We colonized it. We built it. We made the rules. “Cancel culture” is merely a way of purging the undesirables and making them a spectacle to keep others in line.

It’s not quite as bad as the Scold’s Bridle and other forms of public shaming, but it’s not far off.

It isn’t only the Left, but they have more power and share of voice. Some influencers get caught between the Left and the Right if they step out of line, like house cleaning influencer Kylie Perkins. First, she was outed as a Trump supporter and supposedly lost millions of followers:

Then, she posted in protest of ICE, and the Right went after her, and she lost millions of followers:

The same thing happened to “Mama Tot,” who has built a platform by comforting those in emotional pain - that’s it. When the crazy women on the Left tried to cancel her for being MAGA, she had to come out and say she didn’t vote for Trump, which then upset the women on the Right.

The Sydney Sweeney controversy is no different from any of these maniacal swarms that occur on TikTok, except for the fact that it embarrassed the Democrats. Finally, something did.

So, did they come out and say, “You know, we’ve kind of lost our minds on this whole calling everyone a racist thing. Maybe we should chill out.” No, they had to pour gasoline on the fire and say it never happened at all and was driven by the Right.

Maybe that is their passive-aggressive way of sending a message to the insane mob they can’t control and are using the New York Times to do it. The Times, however, has no excuse for this pandering, sloppy reporting. None. If you do not have reporters who understand the internet, then best hire some who do, because you look like fools.

No one says it better than this person on TikTok:

Sorry, Democrats, this is the bed you made. You will have to lie in it.