TBD IF RACIST TWEETS CAN STILL GET YOU FIRED:

“white people don’t have cousin culture. their families are small and uninspired. weird customs. you can see that in kickstarter videos.” —Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker critic

Two weeks ago, shortly after Sydney Sweeney’s “great genes jeans” campaign went live, Doreen St. Félix published a piece in The New Yorker, “The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans,” in which she argued the ad depicted America “as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, its lowest-common-denominator stuff.” The piece contrasts Sweeney with Beyoncé, who also advertised denim recently, in a “Denim Cowboy” campaign for Levi’s. St. Félix argues, essentially, that Beyoncé’s ad is progressive whereas Sweeney’s is regressive.

The piece was very short, just five paragraphs long, mostly focusing on the aesthetics of Sweeney cleaning her Mustang and lying down wearing jeans. “There’s no irony or camp to leaven the trashy, dog-whistle atmosphere,” St. Félix writes, after unpacking what she sees as the ad’s racial subtext:

“Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass. Sweeney, on the precipice of totalizing fame, has an adoring legion, the most extreme of whom want to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess.”

St. Félix goes on to claim that America’s “blondness-as-beauty” standard (both Beyoncé and Sweeney are blonde in these ads) “terrorizes” women.

The piece was published on August 3rd. The New Yorker posted it on X soon after, but it didn’t get much attention until activist Chris Rufo tweeted a screenshot of the above quote on August 14th. He didn’t add any commentary, really, beyond asking what decade we’re in — implying that St. Félix’s piece is regressive because it trades in racist stereotypes.

(Cue a handful of Twitter reactions from white men asking, jokingly: “maybe I’m black?” (because apparently they, too, “hunger for ass.”))

Rufo then quote-tweeted upwards of 15 posts St. Félix published a decade ago in which she expresses vehement racism.

Such bangers as:

And:

Rufo is asking the New Yorker, where to from here?

UPDATE: Two New Yorkers in one!

Shot: The Gospel of Candace Owens.

At an event in London, in 2018, she was asked about the “long-term prognosis” for nationalism and globalism, and she brought up Hitler: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well—O.K., fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German. Everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.” Owens made no mention of the Holocaust. When the remarks surfaced online a couple of months later, they led to an outcry, including in conservative circles. “I was taken completely out of context, in a conversation about nationalism, and how it’s wrongly attributed to Hitler,” Owens told me.

That spring, Kanye West (also known as Ye), who had become increasingly public about his support for President Trump, tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”

—The New Yorker, April 22nd, 2023.

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