Why 'Weird' Works
The 'weird' attacks are landing, and it has nothing to do with policy
The political scene is awash in accusations of weirdness. I covered this briefly in the Weekly Scroll last week, but since then ‘weird’ has exploded as an accusation being hurled at Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their legion of online supporters.
The trend has gotten a ton of coverage. The Atlantic asks what’s genuinely weird about the online right, the NYTimes says Trump is weird and Vance is creepy, Vanity Fair takes us inside the Big Weirdo strategy, the New Yorker says Weird is a response to GOP dominance politics, etc. Dozens of thinkpieces have covered this from every angle. Republicans have tried to counter that Democrats are the weird ones, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
Apologies in advance, but we’ve got to go deeper. Despite the volume of coverage, I think there’s something almost all the discussion around Weird has missed. We’ll have to get deeply into Twitter politics to explain why, but the reason it works so well has nothing to do with anyone’s policy positions.
The first thing to acknowledge is that the top of the GOP ticket is legitimately very weird. For example:
This is apparently part of a bit Trump does about transgender athletes in sports? Whatever it is, it’s bizarre. And this kind of thing is typical for Trump.
JD Vance, meanwhile, has the worst vibes (and the worst favorability ratings) of any vice presidential candidate in the last 50 years. His persona is “What if the Nazi child from Knives Out grew up?” He seems like the kind of guy who yells at the Starbucks barista for getting his order wrong, then gives the woman behind him in line unprompted advice about her ‘fertility’. He is utterly juiceless. I dare you to watch that video without cringing.
That’s the first and most obvious reason why these attacks land - there’s an element of truth. It certainly doesn’t help that their megafans and strategists post like schizophrenics:
But what you’ll notice I haven’t said is a factor of weirdness - any of the policy positions held by Trump, Vance, or the right wing of American politics. And that’s because weird isn’t decided by policy, it’s decided by communication style.
Let me throw a controversial idea at you: Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election on January 6th was not weird.
From the standpoint of an authoritarian, subverting elections is actually a very normal thing to do. Trump is an authoritarian, and has turned the Republican party into a cult of personality based around personal loyalty to him, so this was really the most natural thing in the world. He never respected elections - he refused to say he would respect the results of the 2016 election if he lost. That incident was forgotten because he did win the 2016 election, but it’s always been there as a normal part of Trump.
Concrete actions and concrete beliefs aren’t what make a candidate weird. All the things Democrats get really mad about - Republicans want to deport immigrants, ban abortion, cut spending on social programs, ban all kinds of LGBT activity, etc - are not weird. Those ideas have been around a long time, a decent chunk of our population wants them, and it’s entirely possible to advocate for them in a non-weird manner.
What’s weird is the manner in which they communicate. I’ve posted about how strange and bizarre conservatives have become on Twitter, and almost every time, I’ll get a conservative who posts an image like this in my replies:
Yeah, we’re the weird ones while you guys are like this!!!
What I want to say to those folks - beyond the obvious that they shouldn’t be so gross and insulting to trans people - is that this is why the whole world thinks you are weird freaks.
This image was hand-drawn by a conservative account called ‘GrandOldMemes’. They are the ones who painstakingly sketched out all the weird details, the individual hairs, the dildos and lube on the floor. They are the ones obsessed with this caricature, while most of the trans people I know just want to go about their life and be left alone. Nobody made you draw that! Nobody is forcing you to orient your life around being mad at trans people! And yet here we are.
The secret of not being weird is in politics is this: voters don't like hearing weird shit from either direction. They don't want progressive lectures about white guilt. They don’t want in-your-face kinky weird sex stuff. But they also don't like conservatives who hysterically push weird stuff in their faces just to make them scared of it. Right now Democrats aren’t the people pushing these bizarre images into every conversation - Republicans are.
Another example is the failed attempt to label VP nominee Tim Walz as ‘Tampon Tim’. The story here is that as governor of Minnesota, Walz directed that all public school bathrooms should have tampons/pads available for students to use. In some cases, it seems like schools also put the pads in boys’ restrooms as well as the girls’ restrooms.
If you’re a normal person, you probably think ‘Well that’s a little odd’ and then go about your life never thinking about it again. If you’re a fringe political weirdo, you spam my replies with this:
Again, nobody is making Sean Ross Callaghan spend his time thinking about children’s tampons. That’s a choice he made all on his own. The ‘Tampon Tim’ attack doesn’t land because Walz is never talking about this. Progressives aren’t shoving this in anyone’s face, conservatives are. There are conservative men on Twitter who have thought more about tampons in the last 48 hours than most women have thought about tampons in their life. It’s very weird!
Weirdness has nothing to do with substantive ideas or debates. It’s a pure inability to communicate normally that makes Republicans look like bizarre freaks. Take the Trump video from above. When talking about transgender participation in sports, the majority of Americans seem to be against it. If Trump were able to be normal, he’d potentially have a winning issue. But rather than being normal he does… whatever this is.
Another example is JD Vance and the child tax credit. The child tax credit is a broadly popular idea where parents get an extra tax break. A small CTC already exists, and there are voices from both major parties arguing to expand it. JD Vance has spoken favorably of the CTC at times, but in the most off-putting way possible: that childless people should be punished with higher tax rates.
This is a purely semantic distinction. There’s no difference between ‘punish childless people with higher taxes’ and ‘give a tax break to parents’. The math is the same. But saying it the first way is unnecessarily hostile and plain weird. You combine that with Vance’s comments insulting childless cat ladies and he just comes across as a repulsive and creepy guy. It’s not what he believes. It’s how he communicates.
I don’t think there’s anything that can really be done about this, if you’re a Republican. Trump is who he is, and the idea of him exercising restraint is a great joke. In less than a month Vance’s brand has already been established as ‘creepy and weird and likely has an alt account with a racist frog avatar’, and it’s sticking. And the GOP can’t control their legion of culture war maniacs online, not with Chief Weird Guy Elon Musk in charge of Twitter.
In politics, the side that is largely seen as having more/bigger freaks will normally lose. Voters like normal and they don’t like weird stuff constantly being pushed in their faces. If you’re a candidate you always need to keep this in mind, lest you become the party of weird.
Addendum: JD Vance continues to act like he is an alien wearing human skin
https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1821260444054519986
I can't tell how much of this is just me being terminally online for my entire life, but I think there's an underexplored aspect of how much of the weirdness on the Right is exactly because a generation of Nazi kids from Knives Out are now grown-ass adults.
I was thinking about this because Gamergate "celebrates" its 10 year anniversary this month, but really it goes back to 4chan, which is 21 years old. The culture of the online Right is the culture of 4chan- that MS Paint drawing of a trans person is heavily based on 4chan's conniving Jew meme- and the culture of 4chan never shied away from embracing how fucking weird and offputting they were. When I was a teenager, /b/ was spoken of in hushed whispers, its reputation was as a page where even mild curiosity might lead you to be exposed unwillingly to gore or snuff or CP (and Pedobear was an unofficial 4chan mascot character), you knew going in that you had to have zero expectations for human decency.
So if you're on the Right in your mid 20s through mid 30s, you probably spent your impressionable teenage years marinating in so much of that chan culture- either directly or through its memetic reverberations on other sites- that you've lost the ability to relate to regular people. It's how we get DeSantis staffers thinking its funny to cut campaign ads with explicit Sonnenrad imagery.
But it isn't just the under 40s affected by chan culture. Look at QAnon, which was born as an RP account on 8chan, which itself was created because even *4chan* thought the Gamergate harassment campaign went too far for them and the admins made moves to shut it down, and then Q made the jump to Facebook where it got picked up by Boomers who didn't understand the joke and took it seriously*. Steve Bannon ran Breitbart and Breitbart actively cultivated an audience of proto-alt right weirdos by being the only news outlet that treated Gamergate as a legitimate scandal, and not the gnashing and wailing of creepy misogynist nerds. Two years later he was one of Trump's closest advisors.
Like the Weirdo Left has a lot of DNA of mid-2010s Tumblr in it, but Tumblr effectively killed itself with the porn ban, so that period of time when the Left was soaking in toxic Tumblr culture was only about 6-8 years at most. Sure it spread to Twitter and probably TikTok, but the nuclear waste dump from which it spawned has been long abandoned. The Weirdo Right on the other hand still actively congregates in *their* nuclear waste dump, so wherever they go they can't hide that they're practically glowing with radioactivity.
*: The fate of most channers tbh. 4chan used to just be ironically racist for the sake of being shocking and offensive in the 2000s until it became sincerely racist when the next crop of younger kids came in and didn't get the joke. Well, that and Stormfront started spreading their memes there.