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.
I'd disagree with this not being totally about policy. Project 2025 trending was because the policies themselves were weird, even if they were presented in the most boring, think tank way possible. Getting rid of NOAA, for instance, is just so far afield of the Overton window and so fundamentally unexplainable to any normal person who enjoys weather reports that its no surprise the project has received such a uniquely visceral reaction. Cutting governmnet waste isn't weird - that's absolutely a normal, important domain of the right - but the new insistence on cutting even clearly normal, valuable programs, now *that's* weird.
That picture hits the nail on the head. Conservatives very much so desire that the person who wants to live their life as a different gender be viewed as weirder than the person who spends 20 minutes thinking about and drawing a fictional leftist, but like....I dunno, even if normies have varying views on transgenderism, they can at least grok the idea of wanting to live your life how you want, whereas nobody normal can relate to taking precious life minutes to agonize over the details of a dumb drawing making fun of leftists.
I don’t know if I entirely agree that policy positions aren’t weird. I wrote this elsewhere: “The more I think about the power of weird as a descriptor, the more enthusiastic I become. Could it, for example, be used to start to point out the weirdness of many of the US’s apparently unshiftable cultural / policy tropes that cause so much harm and are so wildly out of step with every other developed country? Healthcare bankruptcies are weird. Mass gun death is weird. No worker’s rights is weird. Milk that doesn’t go off for weeks because it’s got so many additives is weird. And above all, shrugging helplessly in the face of these things is weird.”
Saying that the child tax credit has to be funded by taxing other people is called reality. If you increase the credit without raising taxes you pay for it with debt.
The two parties also have differing policies on the CTC. Republicans want to have work requirements and limit its “refund ability”, democrats want the opposite and often want to restrict it only to low income people. In addition to the obvious culture differences there it’s also ignorant of the underlying goal (fertility among the poor also actually higher then the middle class, so it’s not clear why you would want to target your aid away from the middle class to the poor).
Debt is wildly out of control and is one of the worst issues in the current administration (which Kamala was the tie breaking vote on three party line spending bills worth unprecedented trillions). Larry Summers called it the worst economic policy he’s seen in 40 years and warned it would cause massive inflation, which it did.
You’re right that you can avoid talking about trade offs in politics through lies of commission or omission. It’s called “pandering” and while effective at winning elections it tends to lead to bad governance.
The same could basically be said about a lot of the other stuff in this post.
This reply is a fabulous example of how many flavours of weird there are on the right. Who could read the original post and think that what you wrote was a sensible response? It’s a wild series of non sequiturs. It’s just weird
"Right now Democrats aren’t the people pushing these bizarre images into every conversation - Republicans are."
"Right now" is doing a HUGE amount of work in this piece. Almost literally twenty minutes ago, before Harris became the presumptive nominee, it was the other way around (albeit not necessarily by much, Trump has always been Trump).
Obviously she's had an excellent rollout and Republicans are floundering badly (which is part of why they're saying weird shit), but it's still the case that left-liberal control of all major cultural institutions covers for and launders some EXTREME weirdness on their side, and has since forever, while wall-to-wall hostility towards (some pretty serious) weirdness by their adversaries at least encourages normies to immediately forget about the last decade of woke hegemony in favor of, yes, the current thing.
This is not normies' fault; they are normies and rightly don't pay much attention. If anything, it's probably more Republicans' fault than anyone's by not finding a better angle of attack. For example, much better to use photos or video of drag queen story hour rather than goofy poorly-drawn comics.
But this piece implies a catch-22 (which I do think is real and exists largely because of the at least partially ill-gotten dominance of left-liberals across our cultural institutions) that the right can't emphasize and use the left's weirdness against it for fear of seeming weird themselves. Leftist weirdness is consigned to the memory hole, while rightist weirdness is the eternal now. Obviously life isn't fair, but I don't have to like it.
Which specific cultural institutions did you have in mind? Because it’s not school boards, who are right wing and doing weird right wing book banning stuff in many places across the US; it can’t be the media, because OANN and X and Fox and the WSJ and hundreds more outlets are all clearly right wing and impossible to be described as under the “ill-gotten dominance of left-liberals”. Maybe you mean universities: well, there’s nothing ill-gotten about left-liberal dominance there - clever right wing people go to work as plastic surgeons or in business or in finance, they don’t *want* to work as academics because the pay is bad. And anyway, universities hardly play a dominant role in cultural discourse. So which cultural institutions do you have in mind, specifically?
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.
Wait, so did the Tumblr porn ban save our democracy by preventing the left from becoming just as weird as the right?
I'd disagree with this not being totally about policy. Project 2025 trending was because the policies themselves were weird, even if they were presented in the most boring, think tank way possible. Getting rid of NOAA, for instance, is just so far afield of the Overton window and so fundamentally unexplainable to any normal person who enjoys weather reports that its no surprise the project has received such a uniquely visceral reaction. Cutting governmnet waste isn't weird - that's absolutely a normal, important domain of the right - but the new insistence on cutting even clearly normal, valuable programs, now *that's* weird.
That picture hits the nail on the head. Conservatives very much so desire that the person who wants to live their life as a different gender be viewed as weirder than the person who spends 20 minutes thinking about and drawing a fictional leftist, but like....I dunno, even if normies have varying views on transgenderism, they can at least grok the idea of wanting to live your life how you want, whereas nobody normal can relate to taking precious life minutes to agonize over the details of a dumb drawing making fun of leftists.
I don’t know if I entirely agree that policy positions aren’t weird. I wrote this elsewhere: “The more I think about the power of weird as a descriptor, the more enthusiastic I become. Could it, for example, be used to start to point out the weirdness of many of the US’s apparently unshiftable cultural / policy tropes that cause so much harm and are so wildly out of step with every other developed country? Healthcare bankruptcies are weird. Mass gun death is weird. No worker’s rights is weird. Milk that doesn’t go off for weeks because it’s got so many additives is weird. And above all, shrugging helplessly in the face of these things is weird.”
Saying that the child tax credit has to be funded by taxing other people is called reality. If you increase the credit without raising taxes you pay for it with debt.
The two parties also have differing policies on the CTC. Republicans want to have work requirements and limit its “refund ability”, democrats want the opposite and often want to restrict it only to low income people. In addition to the obvious culture differences there it’s also ignorant of the underlying goal (fertility among the poor also actually higher then the middle class, so it’s not clear why you would want to target your aid away from the middle class to the poor).
Debt is wildly out of control and is one of the worst issues in the current administration (which Kamala was the tie breaking vote on three party line spending bills worth unprecedented trillions). Larry Summers called it the worst economic policy he’s seen in 40 years and warned it would cause massive inflation, which it did.
You’re right that you can avoid talking about trade offs in politics through lies of commission or omission. It’s called “pandering” and while effective at winning elections it tends to lead to bad governance.
The same could basically be said about a lot of the other stuff in this post.
This reply is a fabulous example of how many flavours of weird there are on the right. Who could read the original post and think that what you wrote was a sensible response? It’s a wild series of non sequiturs. It’s just weird
"Right now Democrats aren’t the people pushing these bizarre images into every conversation - Republicans are."
"Right now" is doing a HUGE amount of work in this piece. Almost literally twenty minutes ago, before Harris became the presumptive nominee, it was the other way around (albeit not necessarily by much, Trump has always been Trump).
Obviously she's had an excellent rollout and Republicans are floundering badly (which is part of why they're saying weird shit), but it's still the case that left-liberal control of all major cultural institutions covers for and launders some EXTREME weirdness on their side, and has since forever, while wall-to-wall hostility towards (some pretty serious) weirdness by their adversaries at least encourages normies to immediately forget about the last decade of woke hegemony in favor of, yes, the current thing.
This is not normies' fault; they are normies and rightly don't pay much attention. If anything, it's probably more Republicans' fault than anyone's by not finding a better angle of attack. For example, much better to use photos or video of drag queen story hour rather than goofy poorly-drawn comics.
But this piece implies a catch-22 (which I do think is real and exists largely because of the at least partially ill-gotten dominance of left-liberals across our cultural institutions) that the right can't emphasize and use the left's weirdness against it for fear of seeming weird themselves. Leftist weirdness is consigned to the memory hole, while rightist weirdness is the eternal now. Obviously life isn't fair, but I don't have to like it.
Which specific cultural institutions did you have in mind? Because it’s not school boards, who are right wing and doing weird right wing book banning stuff in many places across the US; it can’t be the media, because OANN and X and Fox and the WSJ and hundreds more outlets are all clearly right wing and impossible to be described as under the “ill-gotten dominance of left-liberals”. Maybe you mean universities: well, there’s nothing ill-gotten about left-liberal dominance there - clever right wing people go to work as plastic surgeons or in business or in finance, they don’t *want* to work as academics because the pay is bad. And anyway, universities hardly play a dominant role in cultural discourse. So which cultural institutions do you have in mind, specifically?