This is an IHeart podcast.

It's that time.

Lock and load.

The Michael Vary Show is on the air.

Jeans are passed down from parents to offspring,

often determining traits like hair color, personality,

and even eye color.

My jeans are blue.

Sidney Sweeney has bird genes.

We begin with the backlash of our new ad campaign featuring actress Sidney Sweeney.

The ads are for American Eagle, and the tagline is, Sidney Sweeney has great jeans. Now in one ad, the blonde hair blue-eyed actress talks about genes as in DNA being passed down from her parents.

The play on words is being compared to Nazi propaganda with racial undertone.

The con, good genes, activates a troubling historical associations for this country.

The American eugenics movement, and its prime between like 1900 and 1940, weaponized the idea

of good genes just to justify white supremacism.

Should we be surprised that a company whose name is literally American Eagle is making

fascist propaganda like this? Probably not.

But it's still really shocking.

Like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman is talking about her good genes. Like,

that is Nazi propaganda. In the past, we've seen her with her family members who are all

clearly red hat people. In the moment, some people gave her a pass for that, obviously, because

you can't choose your family, but her silence since then, and this campaign with American Eagle now really seals the deal with where she's at. Obviously, the campaign goes beyond just a bunch of photos and videos in which she's wearing jeans where none of them seem to fit, which was an odd choice. Every single ad is specifically emphasizing this double entangra with the word jeans, saying that Sidney Sweeney has great jeans.

...