Dear Sydney Sweeney – Please Don’t Apologize

Recently private photos emerged online of Sydney Sweeney’s mom’s 60th birthday party. People wore red hats in the photos, saying, “Make 60 Great Again.” One person was pictured wearing a Blue Lives Matter t-shirt. As you can imagine, this sent Twitter into a frenzy of rage.

Right about now, Sydney Sweeney’s publicist or anyone else who works with or for the star is starting to sweat. Sweeney’s star is rising after Euphoria and a great role in Mike White’s The White Lotus. How she is expected to respond is to offer a withering apology. I imagine several people are attempting to craft one right now. Sydney is expected to prostrate herself, fall before the court of Oyer and Terminer and beg for mercy.

“I am sorry my family was having a great time.”
“I am sorry for my family wearing hats that would send Twitter into a rage spiral.”
“I’m sorry my brother voted for Trump.”
“I’m sorry my family loves Trump enough to wear hats that remind them of Trump.”
“I’m sorry if they offended anyone and I offended anyone by loving them.”
“I’m sorry I love my family.”
“I’m sorry I love my mom.”
“I’m sorry I love my brother.”
“I’m sorry.”

Now you might think, oh, what’s the big deal? It’s only Twitter.

But the thing is, it isn’t only Twitter. The hysteria has spread across all cultural institutions on the Left, bringing us to this moment. People on the Left, especially on Twitter, but in most media and social media sites, all the way up to the President of the United States himself, believe that Trump supporters are racists.

Even if they don’t really believe it, though most do, how else to justify ongoing rage and hatred? How else to convince Americans to vote for the Democrats? I personally know many people who would be fine with this level of punishment for Sweeney because they believe Trump is such an existential threat to them and their way of life. I understand it, I do. I just think it has gotten to the point where it has become a destructive force like McCarthyism did in 1954, for instance, when the Senator began targeting members of the military.

Maybe if you’ve never been a target online it’s easier to stand on the side of those doing the dehumanizing.

But I know what it feels like to be called a racist. I know what it feels like to have my peers on Twitter stay silent as a group of fanatics tried to paint me as a “white supremacist.” When I complained to Twitter, they said it didn’t amount to abuse. None of those tweets you see here will, either.

If you ask anyone on Twitter right now to talk about this, they will quickly bring up January 6th as though that is the source of their fear, anger, and rage. But it isn’t. It started long before that. Perhaps it is a useful event to validate those feelings, to assume that the mob were trying to reinstate the Confederacy. The truth is slightly more nuanced than that. Social media makes it really easy to generalize people. I’m guilty of it myself. It’s hard not to feel triggered by images and then lash out.

But really, as I’ve written about many times before, this hysteria has been ongoing since Trump was elected in 2016. There is no real way out of it, especially not for Hollywood.

When Green Book was about to win Best Picture, Twitter erupted in a similar kind of mass hysteria, all because one of the screenwriters was a Trump supporter. The level of hysteria around that was hard to separate from the pretend conversation about the movie itself, especially vis-à-vis Roma. Was it a bad movie, or were they mad because of the Trump-supporting screenwriter? We all assumed that when Biden won, much of that would evaporate. But we were wrong. It is baked in as any longstanding hatred of any group often is.

The hysteria over perceived racism is everywhere and in everything. It is in nearly every movie, every ad, and every social media platform. There aren’t many people who will dive into the eye of the hurricane to find the source. They think all we have to do is get rid of Trump and his supporters, shut ourselves off from the bad people, and all will be right in utopia.

But unfortunately, that isn’t how hysteria works. The fear is all-consuming. At some point, there isn’t any way to really know for sure what is inside someone’s heart. It has become too easy to condemn them based on things they said or people they know or what they once wore to a party. Until we deal with the source of the hysteria we’ll be caught up in it.

Does that mean that there aren’t white supremacists who support Trump? No. Of course not. But does that mean we all have a right to generalize and stereotype the 74 million who voted for Trump? Probably many on the Left would say yes, it does.

We live in a time of binaries — good or bad. What decides that is arbitrary. Even in the case of Johnny Depp, for instance, the idea that Amber Heard could have been the liar in that scenario remains up for debate. Once Depp was tagged as “bad,” freeing him from that label has proven difficult. No jury verdict can do it, though it was nice to see one of these things actually put on trial. Courts and facts matter less than what is imagined.

What drives hysteria is all in the mind. Once a person is labeled as a bad thing – rapist or abelist or transphobe or homophobe – then it sticks. They’re “bad.” One’s goodness depends on whether they go along with the mass delusion or not. But the idea that someone is or might be a “racist” is by far the greatest fear and has reached the level of what it was to be a witch in Salem in 1692 or a Communist in 1943. It comes from a place of fear.

Finding a culture’s worst fear often has to do with figuring out what the source of that fear is threatening. It seems pretty clear to me that the rise of the Obama coalition and the birth of “identity politics” helped create a broad ideology, or even a religion, that must prioritize all marginalized groups against the “white male patriarchy.” Any threat to that ideal is an existential threat that must be purged.

Getting over this particular event of ongoing hysteria would require more people to, say, have compassion for Sydney Sweeney and her family rather than to dehumanize them. I will say that Twitter is the Salem Village in this scenario. It drives hysteria and dehumanization like no other platform. If you go on TikTok you will find more nuanced views and thank god for that.

On Twitter, for instance, one person calling Drew Barrymore racist for the video of her enjoying the rain would have probably morphed into a “controversy.” But on TikTok, it was shut down instantly.

@it_is_africanlioness Tell me you hate white people without telling me you hate edits people #fyp #racism #whiteprivilege #humanrace #greenscreenvideo #drewbarrymore ♬ original sound – Attracta Bullet

Back in the 1950s, however, the Left was on the side fighting against the hysteria, as they mostly have been up until right now. Otherwise, you would never have had great Twilight Zone episodes that illustrated this phenomenon well.

If artists, comedians, journalists, even scientists can’t ever be allowed to speak freely and honestly, there will be no confronting it. The price is simply too high to pay. And right about now, Twitter has the Sydney Sweeney team over a barrel.

Probably some apology will be offered up so that she can confess as a witch and live. I would not blame her if she felt she had to sell her own family out to satisfy the unending hunger on Twitter for a daily sacrifice. It’s not easy to defy such a massive force that punishes people without any sort of due process or presumption of innocence.

One of the reasons I write about this stuff is simply because sooner or later, we all have to. And  I mainly wanted Sydney Sweeney to know that someone out there in Hollywoodland has her back.