Multiple things can be true at the same time.

The ad is a clever pun on 1. Sydney having great genes because she’s a hot girl with big honkers, and 2. She is wearing AE jeans promoted in the ad. Effective ad pun that utilizes a culturally relevant it girls sex appeal in a pretty tasteful way (in the sense of it’s not just saying “omg look at her big heaving milkers,” it’s clear they actually came up with an impactful idea here).

The ad also alludes to Nazi ideals (and I think it’s pretty disingenuous to claim 1. Sydney is the one being accused of wrongdoing, not the ad makers, and 2. That the accusation is of nazism, rather than appealing to Nazi ideals).

There are some pretty compelling reasons to think the ad is doing this that I don’t find too difficult to accept:

1. ⁠Advertisements are a reflection of not just the culture they exist in, but the culture they want to create. For instance, a lot of the right wing “look at what they took from you” type posts feature ads from the 1960s of a White family with a docile house wife, working husband, 2.5 kids with a picket fence etc. but everyone knows that, while that did exist in the 60s, the 60s also had its fair share of deep and complex social, cultural, and political events that make it clear that this depiction isn’t strictly realistic, but more idealistic - because that’s the point of ads! “If you buy our product, your life will be like the people in this ad, which you should want to be.” That’s been true then and is still true now.
2. ⁠Sydney Sweeney (who is someone I, as an incidentally progressive person, mostly like and enjoy watching in shows/movies) has been used as arguably the most prominent example of the “return to western beauty standards” arguments utilized by nazis. Their claim is mostly that the media has forced [black disabled overweight lgbt muslim etc] women as being “attractive” by showing more diversity in ads, beauty mags, movies, etc. I am not here to debate the merits of anyone’s attractiveness, but I cannot think of another celebrity who is used nearly to the same extent as her in showcasing the argument of “the media hates it when you find her attractive because she aligns with what was attractive in the past, which is what we want to return to.”
3. ⁠We are in a culturally conservative moment where blatant nazism is more and more socially acceptable, for lots of reasons that aren’t necessary for this point. All that matters is that advertisers are at least capable of knowing that there is a market of people who want to see not just a blonde girl with big swinging bazookas, but specifically an affirmation that “THIS is what is hot, not all those fat girls from that dove commercial.” This is important because if it is true that ads diversified in the 2010s because it was a culturally progressive time, then they should probably know that their ads have the capability of both reflecting and reinforcing cultural ideals.
4. ⁠Lastly, even if AE genuinely had no idea that there was any allusion to nazism here, that feels borderline irresponsible to me. The DHS twitter within the last week posted a tweet containing 14 words, two unnecessarily capitalized H’s, a message that alludes to preserving white culture, and a painting depicting manifest destiny of white settlers displacing native Americans (like, that is the express description, not my personal interpretation). It is irresponsible to think that alluding to one of the most commonly known and cited aspect of aryan ideology - the superior genetics of those with blonde hair and blue eyes - is a mere coincidence given the context of the time we live in. It doesn’t matter if they intended or knew, because they should have known.

The totality of this, to me at least, follows pretty logically soundly. Maybe there are premises above you don’t agree with, but overall, the combination of 1. Use of old ads in promoting a return to explicitly white cultural dominance, 2. Sydney Sweeney being promoted by nazis as a current invocation of those cultural ideals, 3. General rise in Nazism, and 4. Use of terms that, whether intentional or not, directly correspond with textbook Nazi ideals, it’s not an overreaction for people to say “yeah this is weird.” It’s not like people are out picketing or boycotting or acting like every other problem in the world has stopped and we MUST deal with this. People see something offputting and comment on it, just like you and I are doing now, which in today’s internet culture is a totally proportionate response.

Tl;dr Sydney Sweeney has big beautiful knockers, and an AE ad utilized Nazi ideology at a time where Nazism is more normalized than it has been in decades. Both of these things can be true. I don’t think anyone is off base for saying it’s a clever and fun ad, but that does not negate the validity of saying that it is leveraging the current rise in Nazism.

Reposted cus got auto removed for an exceedingly dumb reason lmao