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If you are confused as to why Donald Trump weighed in on a jeans commercial Monday, then we’d like to extend to you our heartfelt congratulations for not getting drawn into one of the more ridiculous “controversies” that is being talked about these days.

We’d also like to congratulate you on not being a Fox News viewer, because, if you were, there is no way that you could have escaped knowledge of this “scandal.”

The underlying issue is not worth talking about. However, to better understand the point we are going to make, and which is very much worth talking about, here is a brief recap of how we got to this point (for a longer version you can go here).

Actress Sydney Sweeney appeared in an American Eagle commercial that uses a play on words regarding her “good jeans/genes.”

That rubbed some people the wrong way, which isn’t terribly surprising because more than 250 million adults live in the US right now and they all have opinions. In other words, somebody is always going to be offended about something.

In this case, those somebodies were social media users who lamented that the commercial had racial undertones and echoed rhetoric associated with eugenics, a crackpot theory popular with white supremacists that holds that humanity can be improved through selective breeding.

The most infamous eugenicists were the Nazis, who dreamed of creating a blonde and blue-eyed Aryan master race.

To us, that seems like contrived criticism, but, like we said, everybody has an opinion they are willing to share online.

It’s also not important what we think. What is important, however, is what happened next, because it is so illustrative of how the right-wing propaganda machine works.

Even though those publicly objecting to the ad did not include any prominent Democrats or other leading liberal voices, Fox News conjured up a narrative that “The Dems/Libs/Left/Woke mob/Liberal media is/are freaking out/melting down/losing their minds.”

And then they ran with it. In fact, in the early days of this fake “controversy,” Fox News covered the “story” nearly 30 times as much as anything related to Jeffrey Epstein… which makes sense, because this manufactured controversy was designed to distract conservatives from him and his association with Donald Trump.

It worked… in large part because Republicans who wanted to move on from Epstein now had something else to talk about.

Like Vice President JD Vance, who weighed in on the issue on a podcast and echoed Fox’s narrative.

“So much of the Democrats is oriented around hostility to basic American life,” he said. “So you have a pretty girl doing a jeans ad and they can’t help but freak out. It reveals a lot more about them than it does us.”

Actually, it does not.

That’s because there is no “the Democrats” here. And no “they.” Unlike Fox (and Vance), Democrats are talking about Epstein, people getting kicked off Medicaid, and dismal jobs reports.

It is Republicans who don’t want to have those conversations, which is why they make up stuff like this (or the “Russia hoax” hoax that they have been peddling nonstop for a couple of weeks) as a distraction.

Sadly, more often than not, actual news organizations are taking the bait, and, all of a sudden, they are now also talking about these fake controversies instead of important real issues.

And, because they are terrible at what they are doing, they are now “bothsidesing” the story instead of spelling out what is really going on, which is that Fox News, and the rest of that right-wing propaganda machine, are manipulating their audiences into being outraged about made-up sideshows.