“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” —Script from American Eagle blue jeans ad commercial
“Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” —Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron”
The outrage over American Eagle’s recent ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney is remarkable. Critics from the progressive left have denounced the campaign as Nazi propaganda, accusing its makers of promoting a eugenic ideal, simply because it presented a traditionally beautiful woman in a manner consistent with prevailing standards of physical attractiveness.
The critique typically takes the form of a split-screen video, with a progressive off to one side decrying eurocentrism and the male gaze. There are too many videos to share here, but if you want to see instances, you can’t swing a stick on the platform X and not hit one.
The vitriol is telling: it reflects a cultural project not merely to broaden conceptions of beauty but to invert them entirely. DEI-aligned cultural critics seek to deconstruct and reconstruct aesthetic norms to favor those purportedly previously marginalized—not by lifting others, but by tearing down and shaming natural excellence. The woke seek to replace the standard embodied by Sweeney with a new one, most notably, obese, intentionally unattractive, and gender nonconforming.
DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—is widely embraced across academia, business, and cultural and media institutions as a moral virtue. But beneath the language of its virtuous altruism lies a regime of practices hostile to the very values it claims to uphold. Rather than eliminating prejudice, DEI programs formalize new forms of bias, undermine standards of individual merit and equality, and stifle dissent. Hysteria over Western aesthetics is a predictable feature of the woke worldview.
Here, I will critique all pillars of DEI (admittedly, not my first rodeo); however, their intersection reveals itself throughout this critique. Woke progressive strives to be a total ideological system. I will conclude with the uproar over American Eagle’s ad campaign, which represents the emotional and popular cultural sensibilities of DEI. As DEI advocates find themselves increasingly marginalized, their attempts to keep the project going become more desperate and deranged. The Sweeney ad triggered them something fierce.
I begin with diversity. While diversity ostensibly champions the inclusion of people from various demographic categories—some of which, e.g., the transgender class, are inventions of progressive ideology—it has, putting the matter charitably, devolved into a superficial numbers game focused primarily on immutable characteristics such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. Uncharitably, this was the purpose all along.
Consider the academic job search and screen process. If a list of ten finalists contains none of the categories sought by the DEI officer in the human resources department, a dean will ask the search and screen committee to reexamine the files and adjust the list accordingly. This will necessarily entail the removal of files previously selected based on rational criteria. This practice has its counterpart in commercial advertising. American Eagle deviated from the new norm.
The insistence on achieving demographic quotas—and this is what they are—sidelines individual merit and intellectual diversity. Ironically, in pursuing diversity in this way, organizations perpetrate a form of discrimination by excluding or undervaluing individuals from majority groups or those whose views do not align with prevailing progressive orthodoxies. The selective valuing of identities represents a new kind of prejudice that prioritizes group identity over personal qualification and, in doing so, fosters reverse racism, resentment, and tribalism.
In the final analysis, diversity in DEI programming constitutes a flipping of the presumed hierarchy, marginalizing conservatives and classical liberals, Christians and Jews, heterosexual males, and whites of both genders.
Equity, unlike equality, does not aim to give everyone the same opportunities but rather to engineer equal outcomes among groups. As I have explained in previous essays on this platform, the meaning embedded in this usage of equity is a new construction, taking what was heretofore a recognition of group differences to achieve positive liberty and substantive equality (e.g., between females and males) and redefining it as equality of outcomes. Equity defined in this way veers into social engineering, requiring unequal treatment under the guise of justice. By assuming that disparities in outcomes must be the result of systemic injustice—a core assumption of the progressive worldview—equity-based policies establish and enforce gender and racial preferences that disadvantage individuals from groups deemed “overrepresented.”
This logic replaces fairness with favoritism—favorites chosen not by emergent sensibilities but by ideologically captured institutions. Far from correcting injustice, equity redistributes it, rewarding some based on identity while punishing others for historical wrongs they did not commit, implicit biases they do not hold, and appearances that embody white cultural imperialism. Such practices mirror the very discrimination DEI claims to oppose, just inverted. Put another way, equity-based programs institutionalize racism, etc., in reverse.
Inclusion is intended to foster a welcoming environment for all individuals, but in practice, it results in bad faith (in the sense that people reflexively lie), censorship, and intellectual conformity. Under the banner of inclusion, dissent is discouraged, dissenting voices—particularly those skeptical of DEI—are marginalized, and speech is policed. If the male gaze falls on Sweeney, it is racism that draws it there.
Rather than cultivating a true marketplace of ideas, inclusion initiatives prioritize emotional safety over open dialogue, resulting in environments where certain viewpoints are systematically excluded, while others are elevated to truisms. The paradox is clear: inclusion, when enforced through rigid ideological filters, becomes exclusionary. This undermines the democratic values of critical inquiry and free expression, replacing them with a culture of ideological intolerance and moral gatekeeping. It means good people aren’t wowed by Sweeney in a muscle car or at the gun range.
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron” offers a vivid literary warning against the kind of coerced egalitarianism embodied in the DEI conception of equity. It’s as if Vonnegut had a crystal ball. In Vonnegut’s imagined future, the government imposes handicaps on the talented to ensure everyone is “equal”—not in dignity or opportunity, but in outcome. Beautiful people must wear masks, the intelligent are fitted with devices to interrupt their thoughts, and the strong are burdened with weights.
The story’s central premise critiques the same ideological impulse that underlies equity-based initiatives today: the belief that equality must mean sameness, even at the cost of excellence, liberty, and merit. In this light, equity programs appear not as instruments of justice but as mechanisms of mediocrity—compelled leveling that punishes distinction and treats competence as a threat.
Vonnegut’s satire suggests that the pursuit of equity, if unchecked, does not liberate but enslaves, flattening human potential in a misguided attempt at fairness, resulting in a tyrannical social order that crushes individuality and liberty.
Friedrich Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty, published in 1960, similarly critiques the philosophical and practical dangers of equity as conceived by progressives. Hayek distinguishes between equality before the law and enforced equality of condition, arguing that the latter necessarily entails coercion and injustice. When the state (or an institution) attempts to guarantee equal outcomes, it must treat individuals unequally—it must allocate burdens, opportunities, and resources not according to individual choice or merit, but according to group identity and a bureaucratic vision of “fairness.”
Hayek warns that such practices inevitably lead to the erosion of freedom and the rule of law, as administrators are empowered to override emergent, natural, and neutral principles in favor of ideologically and politically determined outcomes. In the DEI context, this means substituting (color)blind justice with partiality based on selected (and arbitrary) identity status. For Hayek, such equity is not only unjust but destructive, undermining the organic order of a free society in favor of a rigid, top-down regime of redistribution and control.
With the American Eagle ad campaign, a striking real-world example of the Vonnegut-Hayek dynamic is manifest. The hysteria eliminates any remaining doubts one might have been clinging to about the darkness that lurks behind the rhetoric of social justice.
Sweeney’s appearance became offensive not because it imposed a new standard, but because it reasserted an old one (and not so old at that): that attractiveness is unevenly distributed and not subject to ideological desire or political will. The left’s angry reaction reveals that at the heart of DEI’s equity obsession lies not compassion, but envy—a desire to socially engineer what cannot be engineered.
Beauty, like athleticism and intelligence, emerges naturally, and any attempt to force its redistribution leads to absurdity and resentment. The fury over the ad campaign thus underscores the broader DEI impulse: to create a culture of coerced affirmation, where traditional standards—whether of merit, beauty, or excellence—must be dismantled not because they are unjust, but because they are unequal.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, developed most fully in his 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals, offers a psychological framework for understanding the emotional engine that drives such outrage, particularly in its obsession with equity and leveling outcomes.
Ressentiment arises when individuals, unable to act upon their feelings of envy or inferiority through achievement and strength, transmute those feelings into a moral narrative that condemns what they cannot attain. Rather than admiring beauty, excellence, and success, the ressentiment-driven person declares them oppressive or unjust. Within DEI, this moral inversion is evident in efforts to elevate mediocrity under the guise of fairness, pathologizing traditional standards, and stigmatizing merit.
The Sydney Sweeney episode exemplifies this dynamic in spades: it was not beauty per se that offended (although the uniform unattractiveness of her detractors suggests it played a role), but the reappearance of a standard that could not be democratized. As Nietzsche warned, ressentiment does not produce new values through strength but revalues the world through weakness, recasting virtue as vice, and vice as virtue. This helps explain the punitive fervor in much of DEI discourse: its energy comes not from love of the marginalized (woke progressives really don’t care about poor working class folk—indeed, they loathe the deplorable), but from animus toward the excellent, which for them is often unattainable.
The bottom line is that, even where DEI is administered with noble intentions (and there are plenty of true believers), its execution mirrors the very injustices it seeks to address. By emphasizing emotion over reason, group identity over individual accomplishment, character, and talent, outcomes over opportunities, the primitive over the modern, the unwell over the healthy, ugliness over beauty, DEI represents a program entrenching a new caste system built on gender, race, and rigid ideological alignment, one that overturns Enlightenment standards.
A genuine commitment to fairness, human dignity, and justice requires rejecting the dogmas of DEI and reaffirming the principles of equality under the law, freedom of thought, individual merit, and the standards of attractiveness that require so much effort to suppress.
freedom and reason 