Democrats Have a "Crazy People Online" Problem

And why doesn't the Right have to disavow their own online fringe?

I actually had this article in drafts for about a month, but lately, the controversy over Syndey Sweeney’s American Eagle ad made it feel pretty relevant. TLDR for those lucky enough not to be in the know: Sydney Sweeney was the spokeswoman for an American Eagle ad about “good jeans” (get it?) where Sweeney’s “good genes/jeans” were repeatedly mentioned. A few liberals/leftists went viral for reading into the advertisement as a fascist dogwhistle since Sweeney is blonde and blue-eyed. I read into it as a horny dogwhistle since Sweeney is hot with big boobs.

My take? They could have chosen more flattering jeans for this ad.

Anyway, without knowing exact numbers about how many people were doing this, some videos of enraged lefties went viral, from one Pilates instructor promising to give a torturous yet ineffective session to anyone involved in the AE ad, to a woman calling customer support and interrogating a minimum wage customer service rep seemingly located in India, about her decision to pander to “white supremacy” for a marketing campaign.

At the time, I chalked this up to the fact that the Internet is a colorful and weird place, and you can find people being oversensitive or weird about basically anything. But after the White House expressed support for the ad and “slammed the backlash” (I can’t make this shit up, man) it became, at least according to one Democratic Party campaign consultant, a political liability.

Now, this isn’t like Chuck Schumer appeared on C-Span and started complaining about Syndey Sweeney. These are just a bunch of people online, and we have no idea if they’re Democratic voters or “wrote in my roommate’s dog’s name because Kamala is a fascist cop” voters. Plus, the guy who apparently said this is also just the friend of an online person, who may or may not be real. But while these wokescold weirdos are apparently inflicting damage to the Democratic party, the actual Department of Homeland Security has an official Twitter account clearly being run by some kind of groyper (basically, a terminally online Nazi) who did some subtle “heil Hitler” messaging in a recent tweet. No biggie!

Now, people obviously got upset over this, but nobody speculated that it was politically damaging to Trump, even though it’s a lot closer to Trump than random women on TikTok are to whoever is in charge of the Democratic party. It wasn’t in the news nearly as much as the “outraged” libs who were so triggered by Syndey Sweeney.

Increasingly, it seems like wacky far-left people are capable of kneecapping the Democratic party in a way that doesn’t seem to be true for the Right (or at least that’s what *Trump voice* people are saying.) I wanted to explore, first of all, if any of this is true, and second of all: why? Why is the Left responsible for every 17-year-old on Twitter but the Right isn’t responsible for their own official communication channels?