By Mark Tapscott

Everybody in America by now has seen the American Eagle spot featuring actress Sydney Sweeney moving around in the brand’s jeans and talking about how “genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

We’ve all been assaulted as well by legions of outraged leftists in the mainstream media, as well as throughout college campuses, the Democratic political community and public education precincts. These legions are incessantly screaming that Sweeney, everybody working for American Eagle, and anybody who likes the spot must be racist and advocates of the eugenics movement that inspired Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

They point to Sweeney’s lines in which she declares “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” So then, they scream, what more evidence do you need? Sweeney’s white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes make clear the “real” meaning of the spot’s last line: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

Typical of the protests was the tweet posted by “Jayedii,” who declared, just above side-by-side photos of Adolf Hitler and Sweeney, “Any one saying the Sidney Sweeney jeans/genes ad isn’t disturbing is just outing themselves. American Eagle Outfitters is out here pushing Nazi propaganda for the ‘superior’ Aryan race. Did y'all forget history class or something?”

Leftist journalism outfits like “The 19th” clearly did forget. A left-wing internet-based news and commentary site, The 19th promises readers “deep-dive, evidence-based reporting that exposes gender inequity and injustice.” But for reporter Candice Norwood, her reporting did not go deep enough to mention eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Norwood described eugenics as a movement based on the idea that “some groups of people have ‘good genes’ and others have ‘bad genes’ and are therefore ‘unfit’ members of society.” She then provides an in-depth chronicle of major eugenics developments prior to WWII.

But the words “Margaret Sanger” are never mentioned.

The fact is Sanger, eugenics, racism, and abortion cannot be separated. The abortion movement Sanger brought to the fore in American culture reached its high-water mark with the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the murder of an estimated 63 million unborn baby boys and girls, between a third and half of whom were black.

Consequently, accusing an attractive young American woman of peddling eugenics and Nazi propaganda without mentioning Sanger is especially telling because even Planned Parenthood has disavowed her views in this regard. Under an April 17, 2021, New York Times op-ed headline proclaiming “We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,” Planned Parenthood chief Alexis McGill Johnson declared her organization’s apology for the views and actions of its founder.

“Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate ‘product of her time.’ Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated,” Johnson wrote.

Actually, the facts aren’t complicated at all, if what Johnson then wrote was true.

“Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control. And even though she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement because of its hard turn to explicit racism, she endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which allowed states to sterilize people deemed ‘unfit’ without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge — a ruling that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the 20th century,” Johnson wrote, apparently unaware that “unfit” was an evolutionary code word for brown and black races thought to be inferior to whites.

Johnson went on to acknowledge that Sanger avidly backed the first-ever human trials of birth control, conducted among Puerto Rican women, thousands of whom were never told the experimental drug could have seriously damaging side effects.

Then, in a textbook illustration of temporizing, Johnson cautioned that “we don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices. What we have is a history of focusing on white womanhood relentlessly. Whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question.”

So, Sanger actively sought out the support of the worst White Supremacist group in American history and was a public advocate of eugenics-based calls for selective breeding, but we can’t really know what she believed?

Even NPR, reporting in 2015, acknowledged that “in reading her papers, it is clear Sanger had bought into the [eugenics] movement. She once wrote that ‘consequences of breeding from stock lacking human vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and crime.’”

And the same NPR further acknowledged that “American and German eugenicists closely collaborated, and the Nazis reportedly borrowed much of their 1933 so-called sterilization law from American models. That law allowed the government to forcibly sterilize people with alleged genetic disorders.”

It should also be noted that in 1939, as NPR wrote, Sanger joined an anti-Nazi committee “and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.”

What has not been discussed about the Sweeney spot but which should be is the fact that nothing more effectively demonstrates the reality that the advertising industry remains trapped in the corrupt and corrupting Madison Avenue maxim that “Sex Sells.” Now that would be an issue well worth convening a bipartisan task force to consider!

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.