Sydney Sweeney’s Transformation Into a Right-Wing Meme Was Not a ‘Total Aesthetic Victory’

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Earlier this month, Sydney Sweeney became the most popular meme on X, as right-wing users rallied around screenshots of the actress from an interview she did with GQ. The meme is still chugging along on the social media platform, used as a reaction image to comment on political issues in the U.S., and it’s just the latest example of a viral moment adopted by extremists online.

Sweeney’s image has been run up the social media flagpole by virtually every right-wing user. Her expression, indeed her entire existence, is supposed to be interpreted now online as a reactionary refusal to apologize for holding right-wing views. More explanation isn’t necessary, and her face is supposed to simply tell the whole story from their perspective.

It’s not uncommon for characters in popular media to become symbols who require no more explanation. The far right has done it over and over again with cultural figures like actor/director Mel Gibson. The question in Sweeney’s case seems to be whether that was really her intention and what that means for the future of her career.

Christy bombs

It all started when Sweeney sat down with GQ’s Kat Stoeffel for a video interview that was published online on November 4. Sweeney was promoting her new movie, Christy, about the boxer Christy Martin. The film has struggled to find a footing in theaters, taking in just $1.3 million domestically on a budget of $15 million.

The interview covers topics like Sweeney’s introduction to martial arts at 12 years old and the themes of Christy, including the domestic violence and homophobia faced by the real-life boxer. Sweeney was also asked about her private life, having recently broken off an engagement, before Stoeffel inquired about the controversy surrounding an ad campaign for American Eagle that she did back in July.

One ad features Sweeney discussing “genes” being passed down from generation to generation. The ad, which has a voiceover that says “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans,” caused some people online to see a message rooted in eugenics and white supremacy. Some went so far as to call it “Nazi propaganda.”

The ad was embraced by right-wing influencers over the summer, and President Donald Trump even chimed in. But that was only after Sweeney’s political affiliation became public during the middle of the media storm.

“Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves.’ Go get ‘em Sydney!” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August.

Trump was apparently reacting to news that Sweeney had registered in Florida as a Republican in June 2024, according to the Guardian, during the lead-up to the presidential election in November. It seemed Trump was sufficiently convinced that Sweeney was a fan.

All of that is the backdrop to what would come earlier this month when people could watch Sweeney’s interview, the first time she was asked directly about the American Eagle ad and whether she wanted to say anything about the controversy.

‘I did a jean ad’

“We’re sort of talking around this American Eagle ad right now, and maybe we should just talk about it,” Stoeffel said during the interview after hinting at the controversy. “So were you surprised by the reaction?”

“I did a jean ad,” Sweeney said. “I mean, the reaction definitely was a surprise, but I love jeans. All I wear are jeans. I’m literally in jeans and a t-shirt, like every day of my life.”

Stoeffel jokingly said that jeans are “uncontroversial” and “awesome,” but followed up as any normal journalist would, to point out that the president himself had tweeted about her and she wanted to ask about that “crazy moment.”

Sweeney said it was “surreal,” without elaborating. Pressed again, Sweeney said that she didn’t really pay attention to media attention like that because she’s working 16-hour days filming and doesn’t bring her phone on set.

“You’ve made a really good case for keeping your thoughts and your life separate from that work. But the risk is that, you know, there’s a chance that somebody will get some idea about what you think about certain issues and feel like I don’t want to see Christy because of that. Like, do you worry about that?” asked Stoeffel.

Sweeney said that she hoped that if someone became closed off to the message of Christy, she hoped something could “open their eyes to being open to art and being open to learning.” Stoeffel specifically mentioned the “good jeans” ad, asking if there was anything she wanted to say about it. Sweeney replied that “the ad spoke for itself.”

“You think the ad spoke for itself. And the criticism of the content, which was basically that maybe specifically in this political climate, like ‘white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority.’ Like that was kind of like the criticism, broadly speaking. And since you are talking about this, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that specifically,” said Stoeffel.

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

And with that, a meme was born.

‘Total aesthetic victory’

Lulu Cheng Meservey, a PR professional who’s worked with Activision Blizzard, Substack, and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, engaged in the discussion about Sweeney’s interview on X, describing her performance as “immaculate handling.”

“Most people old react defensively, get angry, or take the bait. What she did here was great,” wrote Meservey.

“1) Rejects the asinine premise, which was a setup to agree that the ad had anything to do with white supremacy 2) Takes a deliberate pause instead of using filler words (weak) or saying something to regret later 3) No visible emotion, maintains composure but shuts down the topic while leaving a graceful exit.”

Meservey wrote in another tweet that it was a “total aesthetic victory.” She described Stoeffel as having a “simpering smile” as well as an “unctuous toady hiding a knife behind his back.”

Meservey is taken very seriously in Silicon Valley as someone who advocates for a “go direct” messaging campaign. Her “Go Direct Manifesto,” published on Substack in 2024, declared that traditional PR was dead and people shouldn’t rely on intermediaries.

Meservey, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, seems to think Sweeney played this interview perfectly, with the actress refusing to accept what Meservey calls an “asinine premise,” and not using filler words, which she calls weak. She also wrote that Sweeney was deliberate enough in her choice of words that she didn’t say something she would regret later.

Curiously, Meservey said in April on the “How I Write” podcast that using filler words was a way to sound more authentic. And she also suggested that it was important to just throw out as much authentic content as possible, even if it meant alienating some people a small percentage of the time. She gave Elon Musk as a positive example. But putting the inconsistency of her advice aside, it’s unclear if Sweeney actually accomplished what she set out to accomplish with this strategy during the interview, as Meservey seems to believe.

In another tweet, Meservey retweeted Paul Graham, the computer scientist and co-founder of Y Combinator. Graham wrote that the screenshot of Stoeffel showed the “eyebrow equivalent of uptalking.” And Meservey went even further with her observations.

“Perfidious physiognomy,” Meservey tweeted, claiming that Stoeffel was untrustworthy. “Never open up to someone who looks at you like this.”

Physiognomy is a pseudoscience, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, that claims you can determine someone’s character from things like the shape of their head or face. It has extremely racist origins, as you can probably guess, so it’s no surprise that another X user tried to one-up Meservey‘s tweet by throwing a racial slur against Chinese people at her.

Obviously, normal people aren’t talking about things like physiognomy on a daily basis. Most Americans probably have no idea what it even means. But the word is so common on X at this point that throwing out a claim like this—that you can’t trust a given reporter because of her physical characteristics—is just par for the course. And tech founders are stewing in this garbage every day as they’re scrolling through X.

The memes are inescapable on X

What happened next was an overwhelming flood of memes featuring Sweeney. She was the hero in this meme, to be sure, at least to the people who were using it. But she was a hero to some of the most extreme far-right voices on X.

One account wrote, “this template is going to do hiroshima level psychological damage to chopped libtard foids,” using dehumanizing slang that’s supposed to be a shortened form of “female humanoid” which emerged in incel forums. That tweet garnered 1.5 million views and was typical of the attitude of the people using it on X.

One acronym attached to a screenshot of Sweeney among the most far-right voices was WAGTFKY, which stands for We Are Going to Fucking Kill You. It appears to have been first used in memes about JD Vance and often has xenophobic and racist connotations.

Silicon Valley’s most internet-poisoned founders also embraced the Sweeney memes, including Marc Andreessen, who started posting a screenshot of Stoeffel over just about everything he didn’t like.

Andreessen even quote-tweeted something from Pope Leo, who had sent out a message imploring people to maintain a sense of morality while developing AI. That was one step too far, even for some right-wing tech guys, and Andreessen deleted his tweets in shame.

Mark Andreessen Meme
Screenshot: X

X owner Elon Musk also got involved with the meme, as he often does, using Grok to animate the screenshot of Sweeney in an incredibly awkward way.

Musk wrote, “I think Sydney was trying to say this to the interviewer,” and included a video where Sweeney is made to say, “You are so cringe.” The AI Sweeney makes a perplexing hand gesture, and the video was, itself, cringe.

Two right-wing influencers, Matt Walsh and James Lindsay, had a spat on X last week, in which they just started sending images of Stoeffel and Sweeney back and forth.

It seemed to capture perfectly just how shallow the intellectual debate seems on X these days. Eventually, every spat between these folks devolves into “I’m rubber, you’re glue” schoolyard taunts.

Another right-wing account seemed to make a positive comparison to Sweeney and a Nazi character in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.

Sweeney’s face had fully transformed into a reaction that needed no further explanation. One popular tweet put it this way: “the way they’ve made her the face of bigotry.” That was a quote-tweet about someone who had simply tweeted “respect trans people.”

That account was attacked with plenty of the same anti-trans bigotry that’s become so common on X after Elon Musk changed the platform’s rules against hate. But there was an added twist to many of the comments. They simply used images from the Sydney Sweeney interview now. No slurs required.

The other side

It wasn’t just the internet mobs who got riled up by Sweeney’s attitude during marketing for Christy, though admittedly, on the other side of the issue politically. Some of her peers seemed disturbed by it as well. Actress Ruby Rose, who wrote on Threads that she had been attached to play the character Cherry at some point, was frustrated that Sweeney wasn’t from the LGBTQ+ community but was playing a gay character.

“For her PR to talk about it flopping and saying [Sydney Sweeney] did it for the ‘people’. None of ‘the people’ want to see someone who hates them, parading around pretending to be us. You’re a cretin and you ruined the film. Period. Christy deserved better,” Rose wrote.

The only thing we can really say definitively about Sweeney’s personal politics is that she registered as a Republican at a time when being a Republican typically means supporting Donald Trump. The rest of her political views largely need to be made by inference.

For example, Sweeney got a bit of heat a few years ago after photos surfaced from her mom’s birthday party in 2022, where guests donned MAGA-style hats that said “Make Sixty Great Again.” Fans thought it was a message endorsing Trump. But Sweeney said at the time that the incident had been misinterpreted.

“There were so many misinterpretations,” Sweeney told Variety in 2023. “The people in the pictures weren’t even my family. The people who brought the things that people were upset about were actually my mom’s friends from L.A. who have kids that are walking outside in the Pride parade, and they thought it would be funny to wear because they were coming to Idaho.”

But many people are still confused here, a couple of years later.

Where do they go from here?

Sweeney wasn’t just an actress on Christy but also a producer. And she seems to pick projects that wouldn’t necessarily be in line with a Trumpian worldview. Which is why fans are likely scratching their heads about what her actual views are, especially in the wake of the American Eagle ad and the GQ interview. And in a vacuum of any actual beliefs that the average American might be able to grasp, the right-wing trolls of X are happy to embrace her as their own.

Taylor Swift actually experienced something similar a decade ago, when white supremacists latched on to her as a supposed example of Aryan superiority. One viral photo, taken out of context, showed her with her arm extended, appearing to give a Nazi-like salute, even though it’s pretty clear that was not the intended message. More recently, Elon Musk used a manipulated image of Swift blowing a kiss to imply she had done a Nazi-style salute, an attempt to distract from his own salute after Trump was inaugurated in January.

Swift came out against Trump in a 2020 documentary and endorsed Joe Biden, something that caused the far-right to largely abandon her as a meme. But it remains to be seen whether Sweeney will remain a right-wing meme whose message is one of hatred for minorities and trans people. If she chooses to remain silent and leave people guessing, it seems extremely likely that the most extreme voices will see her as their own.

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