The gravitational pull of political discourse shifted last week with the use of one word: weird. As in “Republicans are weird,” or “J.D. Vance is a weird guy,” or “Donald Trump? Kind of weird.” It’s not clear who used the line first – whether it was Minnesota Governor and current contender to become Kamala Harris’s VP pick, Tim Walz, or Vice President Harris herself – but it has since taken off like wildfire. Currently, a Google search for the word “weird” turns up headlines from The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and a dozen other outlets, all covering what is arguably the most concise and devastating hit on an opponent American politics has seen in at least two decades.
Republicans stung by the coverage will be tempted to blame the “liberal media” for conspiring against them, but they have no one to blame for Weirdgate but themselves: since the hit first emerged last week, high-profile conservatives have responded to it in increasingly bizarre ways, their weird responses spinning the flywheel of coverage about their weirdness.
Failed Presidential candidate and successful Trump sycophant, Vivek Ramaswamy, attempted to dismiss the hit by way of what he probably thought was the high road. “This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile,” Ramaswamy posted on the site formerly known as Twitter, adding that the hit was “a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity and inclusion.’” But Ramaswamy’s attempted riposte simply furthered the point: bringing the evergreen conservative grievances about diversity and inclusion, unprompted, into a conversation which has nothing to do with those things is, well, weird.
Fox News Channel’s Jesse Watters also attempted to rebut the ‘weird’ claim, and, like Ramaswamy, displayed tremendous weirdness in the process. On his Monday night program, Watters affixed his sternest face and attempted apoplexy at the ‘weird’ hit, taking particular umbrage at the online meme from last week that Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance may or may not have shared moments of sexual intimacy with a couch. In attempting to beat back the claims of weirdness – which were fueled in part by the meme of Vance’s loveseat proclivities – Watters, with a straight face, uttered the line: “If you’re going to accuse someone of having sex with a couch, you better have video.”
No, thanks. I’m good.
While the ‘weird’ hit has been amplified at the highest levels, some on the left side of the aisle have tepidly attempted to speak out against it, portraying the hit (like Ramaswamy, but less weirdly) as a schoolyard taunt not befitting politics, or as a word which we should endearingly reserve for art and creative types. I understand these impulses: if we weren’t inclined towards kindness, we probably would not be on the left side of the aisle. But I also disagree with the impulse to jettison the hit. In my twelve-plus years as a political consultant, I polled hundreds of hits against opponents, and made hundreds of attack ads, and I believe that the ‘weird’ hit is solid gold.
One of the main benefits of the ‘weird’ hit is the one Ramaswamy, Watters, and others have already demonstrated: it truly bothers them. In the campaign landscape, attack ads are not just useful for swaying voters, they can also work to frustrate an opponent’s campaign operation. There is always a benefit to riling-up your opponent, to stopping them from thinking clearly and making good decisions – or, more prosaically, to keep them so distracted with incoming fire that they struggle to accomplish the actual, necessary work of campaigning. As we can see from the reactions so far, the ‘weird’ hit is having this impact on Republicans.
The reason the hit is so devastating to conservatives, even as they flail in their attempts to push back against it, is because it goes to the very heart of what conservatives take pride in. Contemporary American conservatives have a long, deep fixation on the idea of normalcy. They believe that they have a right to define it – hence the obsession with banning books which don’t align with their idea of normalcy, their attempts to whip-up moral panics at the slightest perceived provocation, and their abiding, pathological distaste for any and all social trends which did not exist when they were children – and they desperately want the right to enforce it. Hence their increasing tendency towards authoritarian leaders like Putin, Orban, and Trump.
This tendency is not unique to contemporary American conservatives, though. In fact, it is fundamental to the entirety of right-wing politics. Though they have become abstract and simulacrized in modern politics, the terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” have actual meanings in political science – meanings not dependent on vibes or perception. In the simplest terms, left-wing politics are those which seek to achieve a greater degree of social equality, and right-wing politics are those which seek to achieve a greater degree of hierarchy. The conservative obsession with a perceived standard of normalcy is born out of that definitional right-wing tendency towards hierarchy: it provides them with a series of subjective standards by which they can categorize the rest of the population’s worth and social strata. It is this impulse which has driven the last three decades of conservative culture wars: the impulse to define and enforce the social hierarchy.
That is why it’s devastating for so many conservatives to suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of social perceptions of normalcy: they firmly believe – consciously or subconsciously – in the necessity of social hierarchy, and now find themselves on one of that ladder’s lower rungs.
But the psychological impact the ‘weird’ hit has on political opponents is secondary to the hit’s greatest benefit: it puts simple, clear language to a phenomenon everyone can observe with their own senses. Campaign communications have two primary objectives: define yourself, and define your opponent. Traditionally, Republicans have had a firmer grasp of these objectives than the overly policy-minded Democrats. But the ‘weird’ hit flips that dynamic on its head: it is a masterclass in defining your opponent. It is concise and memorable. But, most importantly, Republicans reinforce it at every turn.
Take, for instance, their prurient fixation on the sex everyone else is having – a core trait of 21st century American conservatives. If you visit a conservative relative’s Facebook page right now, you are significantly less likely to see them sharing content about lowering taxes and shrinking the size of government than you are to see them sharing content about other people’s genitals. Which is weird! That kind of content has become so standard, so expected, from conservatives over the past several years that we often fail to stop and recognize it for what it is: very weird. They can say they “oppose the trans agenda” or yell about “making the kids woke!” but none of that changes the underlying fact of their obsession with other people’s genitals, and it definitely does not make it any less weird.
In any context other than conservative politics, being deeply fixated on other people’s genitals could only range from creepy to criminal. On your uncle’s Facebook page, though, it’s shared as casually as sports highlights.
And it’s not just their obsession with thinking and talking and theorizing about other people’s genitals which is so weird and off-putting, it’s also their deep desire to regulate what consenting adults are allowed to do with those genitals. If your neighbor attempted to regulate your sex life – if they came looking through the window, yelling at you about approved positions – you would probably call the police. The Republican Party would put your neighbor on the platform committee.
The ‘weird’ hit suddenly provides simple, memorable language to encapsulate the cavalcade of bizarre behavior we have witnessed from Republicans in recent years.
It was weird, for instance, when Tucker Carlson – then the highest-viewed conservative personality on television – spent multiple episodes of his show in January 2022 complaining that “M&Ms are woke now,” the sort of thing you’d be concerned to hear grandpa muttering in the rest home. Weirder still was the source of Carlson’s angst: he had taken affront to the fact that a recent character redesign had made the anthropomorphized green M&M less sexy. “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” he declared, as if it were even remotely normal to lament a cartoon piece of candy’s declining sex appeal. The story about the woke, unsexy chocolate dominated Fox News’ airwaves for more than a week.
And it was weird, in 2021, when the conservative media ecosystem spun into a frenzy about Mr. Potato Head’s genitals. When the Hasbro corporation announced that it was renaming the brand – which sells both Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head toys – from “Mr. Potato Head” to “Potato Head,” conservatives reacted as if the beloved plastic potato had just been castrated right in front of them (and as if he were not a plastic potato who never had genitals to begin with). “Mr. Potato Head has now been renamed to be gender inclusive,” Colorado’s own Lauren Boebert tweeted. Popular conservative commentator Mark Dice, who has nearly 700,000 followers on the site, responded to the “controversy” by tweeting “It’s time for Republican states to secede.” Secession, he suggested. Because of Mr. Potato Head’s genitals.
The weirdness is not confined to national Republicans, either. Colorado has seen its own fair share. It was weird when Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Ron Hanks, running on a “Big Lie” platform about the 2020 election being stolen, ran a television ad which depicted him unloading a sniper rifle into what was very clearly a copier machine with the words “voting machine” stenciled on the side. That’s just an odd thing to do. And it was weirder still when Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl spent the last several weeks of her ill-fated 2022 race against Gov. Jared Polis endlessly obsessing over whether “furries” use litter boxes. Unequivocally weird.
The reason the ‘weird’ hit works so well is because they can’t shake it. It works so well because it’s true, and because every attempt to prove that it’s not true has the opposite effect. It works so well because, as a column in Tim Walz’s home paper, the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, put it, “Political parties that aren’t weird don’t usually have to prove that they’re not weird.”
But the ‘weird’ moniker is more than an effective political hit: it’s potentially a turning point in the decades-long culture war. Since the beginning, that culture war has been driven by Republicans’ weird fixations, their fetishism for a specific kind of normalcy. And, since the beginning, Democrats and the left have shown a tendency to grant Republican culture war attacks legitimacy, to accept the Republican framing of these issues as the kinds of things about which reasonable people can disagree. But that’s the wrong approach, and it leads to the wrong conclusions.
Maybe that approach was necessary in the early days of the cultural conflict, but those days are gone. Now, we no longer have to accept that “reasonable people can disagree” about the existence of queer people in society, or about the right of consenting adults to have whatever kind of sex they want with each other, or about the right of people to decide whether to have children or not. Because, if we’re being honest with ourselves, reasonable people don’t disagree about those things. Unreasonable people do. These are not the preoccupations of healthy, functional people living full and well-rounded lives; they are the preoccupations of incels, sex-pests, and degenerates. That a major political party has adopted these preoccupations does not change that fact – and the Republican Party’s decision to throw-in with those demographics does not compel us to call their ideas anything other than what they are: just plain weird.
