Sydney Sweeney Highlights the Wokesters’ Fatal Flaw

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, November 07, 2025

 

Again, Sydney Sweeney shows how it’s done. Per Newsweek:

 

Asking Sweeney directly about the backlash, Stoeffel said: “The criticism of the content, which is that maybe, specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority, like that was kind of the criticism, broadly speaking, and since you are talking about this I just wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about that, specifically.”

 

Sweeney said in response, “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”

 

Perfect.

 

Newsweek goes on to suggest that this response has caused “backlash.” But this is nonsense. There has never been any backlash against Sweeney or her American Eagle ad. This whole thing has been an obsession of the weirdest people in America. It is true, alas, that a disproportionate number of those weird people work in the media. But, as Sweeney adroitly showed, they don’t actually have any power that isn’t willingly given to them by their targets. There is no reason that Sweeney should have to explain to a journalist that she’s not a white supremacist, because there was never any reason for anyone to have suspected that Sweeney was a white supremacist in the first instance. The idea is stupid from the ground up. And because it’s stupid from the ground up, the only correct response to it is to ignore the line of inquiry completely while staring contemptuously at the person delivering it.

 

Look again at the question that Sweeney was asked:

 

The criticism of the content, which is that maybe, specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority, like that was kind of the criticism, broadly speaking, and since you are talking about this I just wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about that, specifically.

 

This is vague, nervous, dishonest, fatally self-referential — and, thus, trivially easy to bat away. Instead of saying, “my weirdo friends and I think . . .” — which, while true, would be far less potent a setup — the journalist tries to make it seem as if she’s pointing to a real issue. She alludes to “the criticism of the content”; she invokes “this political climate”; she pretends that there is something about which Americans are “broadly speaking”; and she says, “since you are talking about this,” as if Sweeney, rather than she, brought the topic up. Having done all that, she then tries to cast herself as the hero, by pretending that she’s not trying to trap Sweeney, but to generously help her. “I just wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about that,” she says, her face contorting.

 

But Sweeney doesn’t want an “opportunity to talk about that,” because to “talk about that” is to indulge its lunatic premise. So Sweeney does what everyone ought to do in that situation: She simply says “No.”

 

I have argued for years that, although they have at times seemed powerful, the wokesters’ approach has a key flaw: It contains no follow-up move once a target has declared his or her indifference. The game relies entirely upon acquiescence, and, as such, it can be killed immediately with apathy. Usually, silence will suffice. In Sweeney’s case, she had to say something, and so chose “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.” But both serve the same salutary purpose: To make it clear to obsessive, brain-damaged crackpots that, if they wish to rant and rave, they ought to go do in the nearest public park.