The Sydney Sweeney jeans ad was never supposed to be political. It was a denim campaign — the kind of mainstream Americana branding that barely makes a ripple outside of mall storefronts and social media scrolls.
Yet when The New Yorker waded in with an article framing the ad as coded with “whiteness” and branding Sweeney an “Aryan princess,” it lit a fuse that quickly burned back on its author, staff writer Doreen St. Félix.
Almost immediately, critics unearthed years of St. Félix’s own social media posts, many of them unambiguously hostile toward white people. “I hate white men. You all are the worst,” she had written in 2014.
In other posts, she railed against “white capitalism” and even claimed whites were genetically predisposed to causing plagues. The resurfacing of these comments sent shockwaves through the same digital spaces where her Sweeney article had begun circulating. Within days, St. Félix had deleted her entire X account.
This is what The New Yorker is defending, conveniently organized into four screenshots pic.twitter.com/9bcewZzfOR
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 15, 2025
Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, amplified the findings, publishing screenshots to his more than 800,000 followers. He summarized the episode with a blunt conclusion: “Shocker, the author of the insane New Yorker article about Sydney Sweeney is an outright anti-white racist.” Rufo then reported that The New Yorker itself blocked him on X after he pressed the magazine to denounce its writer’s past remarks.
The irony of the episode was not lost on observers. Here was a writer condemning an actress for supposedly embodying racialized symbolism in a jeans ad, while her own archived posts revealed years of explicitly racial animus. It was a reminder of a hard truth in the digital age: the internet has a memory far longer than any editorial cycle, and past rhetoric can quickly overshadow present arguments.
Doreen St. Felix, the New Yorker writer who says that white people “fill [her] with a lot of hate” and believes that whites are genetically predisposed to causing plagues, has deleted her account. pic.twitter.com/1YelVshckE
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 15, 2025
As for Sydney Sweeney, the controversy has already moved on. The claims that her American Eagle campaign somehow promoted “eugenics” or white supremacy never resonated with the broader public. The uproar came mostly from niche corners of progressive media and academic Twitter. For most Americans, the ad was what it was meant to be: denim, Americana, and a popular young actress.
