The recent outrage over an American Eagle ad featuring actress Sydney Sweeney would be hilarious if it weren’t so revealing. The ad shows Sweeney wearing jeans with the cheeky caption, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” It’s a harmless pun — wordplay on both genetics and denim.

But as we know, grievance culture doesn’t do humor. According to outraged leftists, this ad is “Nazi-coded propaganda” because Sweeney has the wrong look: blonde hair and blue eyes. That’s right — Sweeney didn’t goose-step across your screen or quote “Mein Kampf.” She just smiled in a pair of jeans. Apparently, that was enough to unleash the fury of the perpetually offended.

It’s not a crime to recognize beauty. It’s an act of sanity.

Why does something so lighthearted spark such disproportionate rage?

Beauty threatens the left

At first glance, the reaction seems to fit a familiar pattern. Sweeney is white. She’s conventionally attractive. She’s not apologizing for either of those things. That’s three strikes in the diversity, equity, and inclusion playbook.

The new cultural catechism of the left says that beauty is a “social construct.” It’s used by oppressive systems to maintain unjust hierarchies, so it must be redistributed according to equity quotas.

Admiring beauty becomes an offense. It must be deconstructed — if not altogether abolished — and reprogrammed with DEI.

But there’s something deeper at work — something more visceral and more theological. You can sense it in the feral energy of the backlash. It’s not just that Sweeney is beautiful. It’s that she didn’t earn it. And the leftists are mired in high-schoolish insecurity.

She didn’t pass a DEI review. She didn’t seek approval from the sensitivity board. Her looks aren’t the result of a curated political identity — they’re the result of, well, her parents.

And that’s what drives the left insane. Beauty, in this case, violates the central tenet of their moral framework: fairness. Sweeney didn’t do anything to deserve being attractive (aside from perhaps watching her diet and going to the gym). Her features are, largely, inherited — in their language, “privilege.”

‘Why not me?’

The old-school leftists like Herbert Marcuse rightly critiqued the one-dimensionality of ads like American Eagle’s. Commercial culture does not aim at beauty, truth, or goodness. But the modern leftists dropped that message. Now, beauty is whatever the activist class tells you it is, as long as it serves the cause.

This is the theology of the grievance industrial complex: If something is unearned, it’s unjust. It's just not fair. “Why not me?” is the battle cry — less a revolution, more a toddler’s tantrum.

This is why leftists don’t just go after people — they go after beauty itself. I’m not equating sex appeal to beauty. But the outrage is beyond sex appeal and is aimed at the very idea that someone can be beautiful without approval from the Committee of Twelve.

Spend five minutes on any state university campus or in Democrat-run city and look at the newest buildings. They are intentionally not beautiful. They have even abandoned Soviet functionality. Concrete cubes with exposed ductwork and LED-lit virtue slogans where cornices and stained glass used to be are statements of contempt, monuments to cynicism and self-hatred, rather than structures designed to lift the soul.

The leftist assault on beauty goes beyond architecture. University art galleries — such as the one run by my school, Arizona State University — are considered “activist installations.” Chaotic splashes of rage, deconstruction, profanity, and noise aren’t merely misguided attempts at beauty — they are refusals of it. They reject order and celebrate cacophony.

A war on God

This reveals a deeper truth: Leftists' war on beauty is ultimately a war on God.

Beauty is not a construct. It is not the invention of Western power structures. Beauty is real — it flows from the nature of God Himself. As Augustine wrote, ”Being is good.” Evil is not a thing in itself. It’s the corruption of the good. Likewise, beauty is not a weapon of oppression. It’s the radiance of order, truth, and harmony.

But if you hate the Creator, you will hate creation. You won’t rejoice in beauty; you’ll resent it. The truly dark impulse behind much of leftist cultural production is not liberation. It’s vengeance.

A world that won’t conform to their demands must be punished. If they can’t make reality fair by their standards, then they’ll make it ugly and demand that you call it a masterpiece

Reject the mob

But you aren’t required to play along. You don’t have to pretend that brokenness is beauty, that chaos is art, that bitterness is profound, or that atheism is intellectually deep.

You don’t have to nod along when they tell you that Sydney Sweeney’s ad is a hate crime and that art school murals of screaming female body parts are sublime. You can say, without apology: That’s not beautiful.

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Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

And that’s a kind of cultural resistance we desperately need. Christians in particular must recover a theology of beauty. We serve the God who clothes the lilies of the field in splendor, who filled the skies with stars and the oceans with wonder, who made the human form. This God of beauty is the same one who redeems the lost sinner and works all things together for good.

So don’t let the rage mob deprive you of beauty. Don’t let their tantrums over privilege drive you into false guilt. And don’t let the secular liturgists of ugliness define what your heart is allowed to love.

We were made to love what is good, true, and beautiful. That includes a well-cut cathedral, a sonata in a major key, a sunrise over the Grand Canyon — and God, who created all of this.

It’s not a crime to recognize beauty. It’s an act of sanity.