| Political pros often consider August to be silly season, so it would seem the donnybrook over American Eagle jeans model Sydney Sweeney is right on time. Bloomberg Businessweek national correspondent Joshua Green has been covering conservative corporate culture for a while, though, and writes today about the stakes for companies. Plus: Ooni branches out beyond the pizza oven, and Mumbai apartments add all sorts of luxuries. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I certainly didn’t have “Sydney Sweeney culture war eruption” on my political bingo card for this summer. Yet here we are. Everyone up to and including President Donald Trump seems to have weighed in over the past week on the 27-year-old Euphoria and White Lotus actress and her ad for blue jeans from American Eagle Outfitters Inc. Sweeney’s critics charge, somewhat preposterously, that her endorsement of AE’s “great jeans” is racist dog whistle for the homophone “great genes.” Thus—coming from the White, blond and blue-eyed Sweeney, who’s registered as a Republican voter—the ad is evidence of encroaching far-right identity politics in the age of Trump. If that sounds like a stretch, maybe leftist TikTok can convince you that the ad is in fact “Nazi propaganda.” Conservatives have rallied around Sweeney, with Fox News airing 766 mentions of the denim-clad actress in the span of a week, per media analyst Brian Stelter. Perhaps inevitably, Trump, as America’s great culture war accelerant, leapt to Sweeney’s defense, praised the actress for having “the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there” and cast the imbroglio as a backlash to earlier “woke” corporate controversies, such as Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a social media campaign that sparked a boycott. I’ve written quite a bit for Businessweek about how Corporate America is becoming the new battlefield in US politics. So when Sweeney-gate broke, I reached out for perspective to Matt Oczkowski, a former data scientist for Trump’s 2016 campaign, whom I’d profiled amid the Bud Light fallout because he’d founded a research firm that studies shoppers’ political psychology. Oczkowski had long predicted the rise of a conservative consumer culture, and his company helps brands navigate it. Bud Light was a textbook case of a brand misunderstanding and offending its own consumers. So how should we think about American Eagle?  A version of the ad outside an American Eagle store in New York. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg Somewhat to my surprise, Oczkowski didn’t agree with Trump that the American Eagle ad fits neatly within the framework of the corporate culture wars as we’ve come to understand them. That’s because American Eagle wasn’t trying to broaden its appeal by pandering to new consumers in a way that conflicted with the values and politics of its core customers, as Bud Light had done to its beer-swilling, right-leaning male loyalists. But neither was Oczkowski shocked that Sweeney’s ad became politicized. “American Eagle wasn’t trying to do anything political,” he says. “But we’re so dog-whistled now to expect brand controversies that the minute anyone injects a political angle, the whole thing instantly becomes politicized to the point that the president becomes involved.” What’s noteworthy about this scenario, he adds, is how it whipsawed the company’s stock price. At one point on Monday, American Eagle shares shot up 24% as speculators poured in. It was the stock’s the biggest jump since 2000 and proved that the attention around Sweeney had turned the company into something like a political meme stock. The lesson, Oczkowski says, is that brands need to know how to navigate a political maelstrom even if they have no desire to become involved in one. On that front, he thinks American Eagle did such a good job defusing the Sweeney controversy that it could alter how corporations respond to online mobs in the future. Rather than retreat or apologize, the company issued a simple statement reaffirming that the campaign’s intent “is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way.” American Eagle’s rising stock price, Oczkowski says, should embolden other companies to do the same. “I think that’s going to give brands a shield to stick to their convictions and run their branding campaigns the way they want to,” he says. | 
