Look At These Fucking Weirdos

What a weird week. Just eight(!) days ago, Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee, his party and the campaign were dead in the water, and its voters were begging for a miracle. Today, 99 days out from the election, the Kamala Harris campaign is pulling in donations hand over fist, polls have shifted to a dead heat and perhaps a slight Harris lead, her voters are energized, memes are being churned out, and the Republican Party, stripped of its one effective Bidencentric line of attack—he's old—is flailing mightily. Total shambles. No juice whatsoever.

What happened in that week to cause all of this is, put simply, that Republicans have been trying out angles of attack on Harris—a perfectly milquetoast liberal with a nice family and a big laugh and an occasional kookiness and who can be attacked much more effectively from the left than from the right, something they can't take advantage of—and all their angles of attack have been extremely fucking weird. And, this is crucial: Dems have pointed out just how weird they are.

Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance, the standard-bearer for odd guys you wouldn't want to hang out with, was staked to a years-old clip of him calling Harris a "childless cat lady." This would be just bad political instincts on its own, given that almost half of women in the United States don't have children, about 13 percent are step-parents like Harris, and 46 million U.S. households own cats. Vance, because he can't comprehend how normal people view normal things, doubled down when asked about his comments, saying, "I've got nothing against cats" and calling the Democrats "anti-family."

It is a weird stance to take by a weird guy—who drinks Diet Mountain Dew, let alone drafts it into a culture war joke that fell painfully flat?—but rather than being something that can be laughed off, Vance's oddity extends to policy. Harris supports an expansion of the child tax credit, an incomplete solution to the high cost of raising children; Vance wants to give parents extra votes, one for each of their kids. This is not a serious person.

A serious person doesn't support a ban on pornography, or say that women shouldn't get divorced just because they're unhappy, or oppose abortion in cases of rape and incest. But then, a serious person isn't recommended for the second-highest position in government by the most powerful grotesques of Silicon Valley: litigious vampire Peter Thiel, SPAC grifter Chamath Palihapitiya, even dumber Jason Calacanis David Sacks, and the most divorced man alive, Elon Musk, all of whom pushed Vance on Donald Trump. Vance—Yale Law, venture capitalist, obsessed with sex other people are having—resembles so many other vat-grown Thiel projects that have crashed and burned in previous elections upon voters getting the barest look at them and their values; Blake Masters really thought he could win over normal people by filming himself firing a gun in the desert and portraying his opponent, a literal astronaut, as a soyjak. (If you are not online enough to know what that is: Congratulations. The modern GOP's problem is that it's unsettlingly online.)

Is it any wonder, then, that when someone made up out of whole cloth a joke that Vance fucked a couch, everyone believed it?

People have had enough of this shit. Too many years of Donald Trump and Trump-enthralled Republicans lying and bullying their way to power, and targeting the most vulnerable to score points among their base of freaks and perverts. The When they go low, we go high counterstrategy of the Hillary Clinton era has been abandoned. It was not effective, and it was not satisfying. Now, when they say and do weird shit, Democrats simply point out, Hey, that's real weird.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been the foremost practitioner of the "call them weird" campaign strategy, but Harris has deployed it as well. It resonates with normal people, who just want to live their lives and keep the government out of their underwear and have Thanksgiving dinner without their weird uncle starting some weird fight about some weird Fox News talking head who is still obsessed about finishing fifth in a college swim meet many years ago.

These people are fucking weird! Vance instantly pivoted from pretending to care about rural America to sucking up to Silicon Valley reactionaries the instant he realized he could make more money that way. Trump seems to think Hannibal Lecter is real but also dead and that this is something his rally attendees want to hear him talk about. "Have you seen the guy laugh?" Walz asked of Trump. "It seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six-and-a-half years of being in the public eye and when he laughs it’s at someone—not with them.”

This, then, is the crux: It's a bad kind of weird. There's nothing inherently wrong with weirdness. I'm strange in some ways. I might bring up birds or Swedish melodic death metal in conversation. But I think you would enjoy getting a drink with me. I have opinions on light beers. We could talk about sports. I'd pick on the jukebox some things we'd both enjoy. We could be normal people, having a normal chat. Do you think there's any chance you'd have a normal evening in a bar chatting with Trump or Vance or any of their Roman-statue-head PFP followers? Absolutely not, because their weirdness is the type of weirdness that makes them unpleasant to be around. It's the type of weirdness that cedes Bud Light, Taylor Swift, and the NFL to the left because of all sorts of imagined grievances. And that weirdness, to a normal person, is the same sort of weirdness that would make them highly unpleasant as an omnipresence for the next four years. Do not underestimate the value of that to voters.

It's weird to be so obsessed with genitals, who has them, and what they do with them. It's weird to the point of fetishistic to be so concerned with people "breeding" to avoid being "replaced." It is fundamentally weird to care so much about what other people do when it doesn't affect you at all. Nobody wants to be around people like that, and we should say it.

Now, if everyone were calling me weird, do you know what I'd do? I'd ask someone I trust, "Am I being weird?" and if they said yes, I'd cut it out. That is not what Republicans are doing. They are complaining. They are throwing tantrums of imagined victimhood, which is the thing they do best:

It's working. They're shook. It always works: When everyone tells the schoolyard bully that he's a freak and no one likes him, he loses his power. When Vivek Ramaswamy whines that the campaign should be fought over policy, everyone notices that Trump hasn't talked policy once on the campaign trail, instead rambling about sharks and trying out new nicknames for Harris.

Ramaswamy's is an ineffective counter because GOP policy is as strange as its politicians. Project 2025, an unofficial if widely embraced Conservative platform, calls to, among many other things: ban no-fault divorce; criminalize pornography; get rid of the Department of Education; ban overtime pay; institute "biblically based" interpretations of marriage and labor law, including discouraging working on "the Sabbath"; and eliminate the Department of Agriculture's dietary guidelines. The Heritage Foundation and other Conservative message-drivers have had years to come up with a platform, and it's so incredibly weird!

But the most effective aspect of the Dems' You're weird strategy is that it is an initiative. For my entire life, the Democrats have been passive campaigners, easily drawn into Republican framing of issues. It has been a mug's gambit to get suckered into arguments over where exactly means testing should begin, rather than rejecting it altogether. "Late-term abortion" is a Conservative phrase that when engaged with and adopted by Democrats, shifts the Overton window for Republicans to push for a 15-week abortion ban, which is functionally a full abortion ban. This doesn't work. You can't engage them on their terms, and let them dictate the conversation. The Dems' latest stratagem has the usefulness of both staying on the offensive, and immediately dismissing attempts to change the subject. No, you're weird, I'm not going to get into that with you.

The people crave normalcy. They want elected officials who are recognizable as human beings, with normal human interests and emotions. They want to occasionally go entire days without thinking about the President. Demonstrating that you hear and agree with them, giving them voice by pointing out the sheer weirdness of Republicans, isn't just good politics. It's basic humanity. It's not weird at all that it's working so well.