So, Sydney Sweeney Is A Republican
Did she see the sign? Did it open up her eyes?
Actor and jeans model Sydney Sweeney reportedly registered as a Republican in Florida just a few months before the presidential election — specifically on June 14, 2024, which is also Donald Trump’s birthday. This was somehow breaking news, along with the somewhat contrived controversy over her American Eagle ad where she boasted about her “good genes.” (That was probably just a play-on-words call back to a Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad from the 1980s rather than an overt declaration of eugenics-based white supremacy. MAGA is all but wearing Nazi armbands these days, so I think we’ve moved past subtle.)
Many liberals immediately condemned Sweeney after learning she’s possibly a Trump-supporting Republican, which we actually don’t know. Florida is a closed-primary state but Sweeney registered too late to vote against Trump in the primary. However, Florida is solidly Republican now, and it’s not unusual for moderate and even conservative New Yorkers to register as Democrats in their solidly “blue” state. It’s their best chance to influence local politics.
Or the 27-year-old Sweeney, who played Eden in The Handmaid’s Tale, is a straight-up MAGA Republican. It’s like the couples who dance to “The Sign” at their wedding. People sometimes miss the most obvious point. (Watch below.)
Trump was predictably delighted to learn that his fellow Floridian Sweeney is a registered Republican. He told reporters last week, “She’s a registered Republican? Ooh, now I love her ad. Is that right? Is Sydney Sweeney … You’d be surprised at how many people are Republicans. That’s what I wouldn’t have known. But I’m glad you told me that. If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.”
The sick, twisted freak of a president went on to stalk Sweeney online. Let’s hope that’s finally enough for her to reconsider.
While Trump welcome Sweeney to his cultish fold, certain liberals are eager to close the door behind her and change the locks, even if it’s not clear that she’s fully left. Sweeney already received liberal backlash two years ago when she was photographed at her mother’s birthday party where some guests wore MAGA hats. “An innocent celebration … has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention,” she said in a statement. Attacking someone over what their mother’s friends or relatives wear at a private party is a good way to solidify opposition against you. It’s a lesson that many liberal influencers refuse to learn. Chris Evans (no, not that one), a 2020 campaign surrogate for Kamala Harris, responded to the Sweeney news with a post he’d made earlier this year.
Evans wrote, “I have no idea why you guys keep being surprised when you find out any white celebrity is MAGA considering the majority of white Americans have voted Republican since Black people got their civil rights in 1964.”
The mainstream Democratic Party’s public position is not that the GOP has been racist since 1964. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have both insisted that America somehow needs a “strong” Republican Party. Harris even committed during her campaign to putting a Republican on her Cabinet. (That was apparently her chief difference from Joe Biden.) When Republicans like Geoff Duncan and Liz Cheney endorsed Harris, they did so because they believed Trump specifically was awful. They never said that there was no reason a 27-year-old couldn’t register as a Republican because they believe in small government, yadda yadda yadda, tax breaks for rich people, which is perhaps Sweeney’s more relevant political demographic than “white person.”
Liberals have complained that Democrats are often unfairly held accountable for the extremist positions of randos on social media. However, Evans is not some nobody from nowhere. He’s been published in The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and Daily Beast. Former second gentleman Doug Emhoff is his biggest fan, according to reliable source Kamala Harris. (Watch below.)
So, the guy who then-senator Harris embraced at a fancy event and called an “angel from heaven” openly dismisses the majority of white American voters. That’s both bad politics and lousy math. It’s perfectly reasonable to be surprised when someone who doesn’t fit the Marjorie Taylor Greene profile registers as a Republican. It is very bad for the nation and Democratic prospects, so liberals should want to know why.
There is a difference between Bill Clinton’s share of the white vote (or even Barack Obama’s in 2008 and Joe Biden’s in 2020) and a complete wipeout that keeps Dems out of power forever. As recently as 2012, when there was just the one Avengers movie, Democrats won statewide in Iowa, Ohio, and Florida. Obama won white voters outright in Iowa. Of course, Kamala Harris did better with white voters overall than Obama in 2012. She lost because of declining support among Latino and Black voters, particularly men. This ongoing refusal to accept how Harris lost and instead just lob insults at white voters seems rooted in self-defeating bigotry.
Anyone who smugly suggests that “white people are irredeemably racist!” does so with the security of knowing that’s not actually true. If I thought more than 70 percent of the nation was turning full-on Nazi with no hope of redemption I wouldn’t stick around for the end of the Cabaret show. My family would be on a flight to Portugal.
This rhetoric only offends and alienates rather than actually persuade anyone. I spotted another example this week from Guardian opinion columnist Moira Donegan — hardly some “rando” on social media. She wrote, “‘Gifted children’ was a polite fiction told about millennial and Gen Z children to flatter the egos of their bourgeois boomer parents, and it has now created a generation with a embarrassing self-mythologizing justification for what’s really just plain narcissism.”
This stuff makes liberals sound crazy. It’s like how San Francisco eliminated accelerated middle and high school math classes, with justifications that were frankly insulting to minority children. (My Black son is actually extremely good at math — dare I say “gifted.”) These are people who are forming opinions in a bubble and without any real contact with normal people across the country. Even if you have genuine concerns with TAG programs, you should at least start from the position that parents want the best for their kids and aren’t just status-conscious narcissists. That is a debate ender. And if you say “bourgeois” out loud in 2025, you should feel ashamed of yourself.
If Sydney Sweeney genuinely looked at modern liberalism and chose The Handmaid’s Tale instead, it reflects a problem for all of us, one we need to fix right away, with humility not directives for white people to go read the latest anti-racist text and “be better.” This doesn’t mean sacrificing our values. It just means prioritizing the democratic values that matter over lectures and mockery.
"Harris even committed during her campaign to putting a Republican on her Cabinet. (That was apparently her chief difference from Joe Biden.)"
Biden MORE than made up for that 'oversight' with his appointment of Merrick Garland...
Well I await to see what happens when—presumably—an elected Democrat tells online activists to cool it, and how fast they get flayed on social media. Bonus points if Schumer or Jeffries do that (Jeffries already has his ticket punched for the glass cliff). I really want to see when Democratic candidates end up getting a tight leash on people who support them.
Frankly at this point I say just let Newsom have it. I change my stance on letting the Internet faves drive. Because this also means that there's more disincentive for Chris Evans by voters than there is for Laura Loomer. The lady who crashed and burned trying to pick up Nazis in a bar.
I'll only say this though about the electorate in this country. I watched a bunch of voters gladly swallow fiction about innocent Haitian-Americans, under the thrall of sadopopulism. I watch people continue to support literal concentration camps.