From Sydney Sweeney Fiasco to Candace Owens: Have Both Completely Lost Their Minds?

By Steven Yates

August 8, 2025

Since I don’t follow celebrities, I’d never heard of Sydney Sweeney before a couple weeks ago. But the stir made by her jeans ad for a company I’d also not heard of, American Eagle, was impossible to miss. Here’s the ad below.

What did we just see? A twentysomething woman being a bit sly and seductive, maybe suggestive, without being slutty (like, e.g., Miley Cyrus). She’s clean-appearing and well-dressed, as we’d expect of someone promoting clothing. I see no tattoos or face piercings or other forms of self-mutilation. She reminds me of the way most girls looked when I was in high school.

But she’s white, a blue-eyed blonde, talking about — gasp! — “good jeans,” opening the door to the homonym between jeans and genes.

If there’s anything to send the cultural Marxies into hysterics, it’s that, and hysterics are what we’ve seen from “influencers” on CCP-owned TikTok. And from supposed celebrities in a few mainstream publications, i.e., publications mostly controlled by the cultural left. I say supposed because most of these people I never heard of before, either.

One spoke of the “shift toward whiteness” the ad represented, but— well, I can’t be bothered to quote these lunatics at length. I will note the oft-repeated response of White House communications director Steven Cheung who described “cancel culture run amok,” reminding anyone listening that this is why Trump won and Harris lost. “This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bull***t.”

Score one for the right. They’ve learned what to do when lefties make total fools of themselves. Unfortunately, the right doesn’t get everything right.

Enter Candace Owens, who has launched a crusade to prove that French president Emmanual Macron’s wife Brigitte was born a man and “has a penis.” Apparently she’s made a whole video series about it (no, I haven’t tracked that down, either).

I only heard of this quite recently, too. I thus have no idea whether there’s anything to it or not, but you want to know something? I don’t really care. To be sure, if Owens is right, it proves how decadent French leadership really is. It is interesting that no one seems to have come forth with definitive proof that Owens is wrong, such as presenting valid birth records, verified photos of Brigitte when she was a child, school records, etc. Not that I know of, anyway. Anyone reading — if anyone is reading — can prove me wrong by sending me links, and I will post a corrective addendum.

The bottom line, though: we already had abundant reason for seeing Macron as serving EU (i.e., globalist) power elite interests more than the interests of the French people. He’s an elitist’s elitist, which is why figures like Marine Le Pen continue to have a substantial following.

That’s France. Owens is an American.

Thus the question on my mind: Why is she bothering with this when Americans have real problems, especially with this administration having gone as sideways as it has?

Trump recently signed an executive order empowering federal agencies to clear out homeless encampments and lock up the homeless in mental institutions. Let me hand the mike to John N. Rutherford of the Rutherford Institute:

First, President Trump issues an executive order empowering federal agencies to clear out homeless encampments and lock up the homeless in mental institutions using involuntary civil commitment laws intended for dealing with individuals experiencing mental health crises.

Days later, a gunman allegedly suffering from a mental illness opens fire in New York City, killing four before turning the gun on himself.

Coming on the heels of Trump’s executive order aimed at “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets,” the shooting has all the makings of a modern-day Reichstag fire: a tragedy weaponized to justify allowing the government use mental illness as a pretext for locking more people up without due process.

An Orwellian exercise in doublespeak, Trump’s executive order suggests that jailing the homeless, rather than providing them with affordable housing, is the “compassionate” solution to homelessness.

According to USA Today, social workers, medical experts and mental health service providers say the president’s approach “will likely worsen homelessness across the country, particularly because Trump’s order contains no new funding for mental health or drug treatment. Additionally, they say the president appears to misunderstand the fundamental driver of homelessness: People can’t afford housing.”

Owens chasing after Brigitte Macron is a major miss for the right. And not its only miss.

Consider, too: a Marxist Muslim (or something like that) recently won the Democrat Party’s nomination to run for mayor of New York City. He self-identifies as a democratic socialist, and he’s obviously built a substantial support base.

This time, let’s turn to someone who wouldn’t be caught dead defending someone like that: Tom Woods, who is an arch-Libertarian. From a recent emailing:

Not long ago, Zohran Mamdani — who openly repeats classic Marxian slogans — won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City.

Many people were appalled that such a radical candidate could have gained such purchase with the electorate.

Well, let’s take one group: professionals in their 30s.

They followed the rules. They got the expensive educations. The result: instead of the comfortable lifestyle they were promised, they can barely keep their heads above water in the city of their birth.

As my old friend John Carney put it: 

“These voters are not clamoring for socialism out of youthful rebellion. They’re reacting to a broken bargain. They grew up being told that education was the path to a stable, meaningful life.

“Instead, they’ve entered a labor market that treats professional work as disposable, housing as a luxury good, and children as a financial impossibility. Many have good salaries by national standards — $80,000, even $120,000 — but in New York City that can still mean roommates, debt, and no hope of buying a home. They’re too rich to be poor and too poor to feel secure.”

That is where a lot of Zohran Mamdani’s support is coming from: not from hardcore Marxists, but from disillusioned people who did as they were told, and the promised benefits never materialized.

It goes without saying that Mamdani’s proposed solutions would be disastrous. But when one side is acknowledging the problem and the other is pointing and shouting “Communist!” I think we know which one is going to win.

You can’t beat something with nothing.

My conclusion from this is that if following the rules leads you to such a state of despair that you’d vote for Mamdani, these are stupid rules.

I couldn’t sum it up any better!

When I was much younger, there were folks who “clamor[ed] for socialism out of youthful rebellion.” That’s not what is happening today. In my younger years, housing really was affordable. Now, even college graduates with degrees in real subjects (not “gender studies” type stuff) with what they thought was a ticket to the American Dream are finding (1) no jobs that allow them to use their educations, just “gigs,” many of them not even full-time; and thus (2) home ownership is priced completely out of their reach.

The social contract, as much of Generation Z understood it, is broken! (I don’t even want to think about what Generation Alpha might be facing; the oldest Alphas are just entering their teens.)

This is not an adolescent game. This is real life, the dystopia that has emerged full-force during the New Normal.

This state of affairs is pushing people leftward even as the right pushes back against the left’s silly wokery.

Much of what we’re seeing is structural, not ideological. The structural factors are made worse by our civilization’s lack of an adequate philosophical core or center, unless “greed is good” is supposed to be a philosophy. Doug Casey, the investment advisor and commentator, has often charged that Trump lacks any philosophical center. If he’s right, Trump is just mirroring the institutions around him.

Peter Turchin handles the structural side of things in what could well be this decade’s most important book: End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023). I’ve written of Turchin’s impressive accomplishments before. He observes, first, based on history, that worsening economic inequality is fundamentally destabilizing, especially if a critical mass of have-nots (some of them former haves) come to believe that the haves have somehow rigged the system.

And it’s true: we did not have “hedge fund” billionaires when I was growing up, either. There are reasons for wondering if it is even possible to earn a billion dollars in a year doing actual work that serves others. Come to think of it, I’m not sure we had any visible billionaires at all — products, also, at least in part, of currency debauchment (thank you, Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department, and thank you Richard Milhaus Nixon for killing the gold standard).

Fifteen years ago, Turchin was using models he had developed to forecast that a number of destabilizing factors would converge in the 2020s, and that these could easily lead to a “spiral of social disintegration.”

In End Times, Turchin developed the idea of the wealth pump — what I call welfare-statism in reverse (redistribution of wealth upwards) — when the wealthy have been able to work the system in such a way that wealth flows disproportionately into their coffers, and out of the hands of the middle class. Result: the common lament that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class shrinks. Turchin calls this public immiseration.

Efforts to join elite status as Turchin understands this term — not power-mongers but professional people with serious university educations and skills, the sort of people Tom Woods mentioned — increase faster than there is work for them to do. Elite overproduction is the phrase Turchin uses for this. He compares what’s happening to a game of musical chairs where, instead of the same number of people going after a dwindling number of chairs, the number of competing people increases while the number of chairs stays the same (or, in some areas, actually does shrink).

Competition for the same (or a dwindling) number of jobs that match their skills increases to the point of absurdity, and jobs tend to go to the politically well-connected or those preferentially favored for other reasons (e.g., affirmative action). The fact that people naturally try to economize, i.e., look for the most convenient path through their problems, helps bring about the structural dilemmas.

Conservatives and Libertarians don’t like to talk about structure. To them, that concept has Marxian overtones. But the “disillusioned people” Tom Woods’s friend described aren’t Marxists. They are just frustrated elite aspirants listening to someone they see as having listened to them.

The third factor, the one most likely to lead to a societal death spiral, is the coming of counter-elites: Donald Trump who very effectively positioned himself as a political outsider, or “polarizing” figures like Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens whose listeners include the aggrieved and the alienated. Having gained large followings on their own platforms, these figures have moved the public toward often-justified distrust of the nation’s dominant institutions which are increasingly dysfunctional.

This is a path toward civilizational rupture on multiple fronts: political polarization, class, sex, and just the growing difference between those who still trust the system and us “conspiracy theorists” who are despised by the insiders and the trusting.

Neither the cultural left nor much of the right sees this, I don’t think.

The cultural left sees “neo-Nazis” behind every tree and in the likely innocent ad starring a pretty actress.

The right shouts “Communist!” at someone like Mamdani who is talking about genuine problems such as unaffordable housing even if through a destructive ideological lens, while one of its visible members chases the wife of a foreign president over “gender identity.” If Owens wins the lawsuit the Macrons have filed, what will that have accomplished, insofar as bringing about real solutions to real problems?

Did we ever truly want to Make America Great Again? Then why isn’t the leadership viewing every public issue, every pursuit, though the lens supplied by two questions: will this pursuit contribute to that, and if so, how? If the answer to the first question is No, then the right thing to do is just drop it!

The deepest problem I see: the materialism at the core of our Big Tech controlled and increasingly surveilled dystopia.

We seem faced with a choice between “liberalism” (or is it actually neoliberalism) and “authoritarianism.” Just in case both tacitly presuppose secular materialism, then the “choice” is too simple.

Materialism makes it impossible to develop and maintain the idea of all individual persons as having intrinsic value, except perhaps as an intellectual abstraction. Intellectual abstractions don’t get us anywhere. First premises have to be baked into our lives organically, and into the functioning of our institutions which will then respond to real human problems.

My prediction is that unless we recover the God of Christianity — real, lived, Biblical Christianity, not “Christian Zionism” or dispensationalism — “authoritarianism” will win. We will continue on our present road towards Technocracy and the total surveillance of police-state structural violence.

We won’t have to worry about supposed eugenic implications of “good genes.” The elderly who can’t contribute to the system economically (the primary societal measure of human value in a secular materialist culture) will have to worry about involuntary euthanasia.

The intrinsic value of the human person! That’s what progressives not caught up in foolishness about “neo-Nazis” should be talking about; and that’s what conservatives able to resist going down rabbit holes such as Brigitte Macron’s “gender” status should be talking about.

© 2025 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved

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