On Being Weird:

Brats, Cats, and the Weirdness Trap

J.D. Vance is a weird dude. He has a strange animosity toward people without children. He thinks that liberals think Mountain Dew is racist. He is an arch-conservative who appears to wear guy-liner. And he doesn’t know how to order donuts. 

Of course that is just the tip of the weird little iceberg for Vance and the party he represents on Trump’s presidential ticket. At this particular moment, Vance is promoting a bit of curiously explicit racism, accusing Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, despite zero evidence and the denials of city officials. The marching orders on this topic have been issued as Trump's internet army trolls liberals over their preference for hating the former President instead of protecting the lives of Mee Maw’s little Kitty McFluffer. They found a story about a disturbed woman who killed and ate a neighbor’s cat on their front lawn. Of course, there’s no evidence that she is of Haitian descent and she’s been a registered voter in Ohio for the past six years, but let’s not let facts get in the way of our racist feelings.

Trump went on to double down on the claim in his first (and probably only) debate with Kamala Harris.

And it is weird, right? The modern republican party desperately wants to paint immigrants as some sort of unnatural destructive force. A creeping blight on our previously pristine natural character and composition. But despite decades of fearmongering and Democrat capitulation on the issue, most people aren’t inclined to reflexively view a particular group of people as less than human.

“But what if they out here eating y'all cats though?”

That’s so weird!

The professional media class credits Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz with associating the Republican party with the word “weird”. Personally, I trace this particular piece of rhetoric to the great podcast Know Your Enemy hosted by Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman. KYE has done yeoman's work tracing the intellectual and cultural roots of modern movement conservatism. Of particular note is the post-liberal sect of conservatives, most personified by the Claremont Institute and related organizations. These are the guys shoveling the most coal into the engine of the forever culture war. They count such luminaries as Ben Shapiro and Christopher Rufo as alumni. The Claremont Institute was most responsible for Trump’s 1776 report, his answer to the 1619 product which was an ahistorical collection of jingoistic pablum and revisionist propaganda.

It’s a long and complicated road to understanding the ethos and political project of the post-liberal right (please check out KYE for a deeper and much more substantive explanation than what I’m going to provide here) but the quick and dirty summary is that this is a politics that believes in using state power to establish and reproduce a certain national character. And since this is a conservative project with deep ties to Trump and Vance, you can probably guess what this particular national character involves. The public-facing side of this movement brands itself as a resolute bulwark against the libertine excesses of a Democratic party that has lost the plot. But in practice, these guys want the government to be far more intrusive than the most nanny state loving liberal can imagine, all the while shrinking the conception of the public good as to where positive interactions with the state are limited to those who embody the specific kind of American they want to be in charge.

When I spoke with Sam Adler-Bell about the slow post-liberal revolution in early 2023, I asked him if he was worried that this brand of regressive conservative could eventually take the form of a mass political movement. He wasn’t all that worried:

“Their goal is to make it seem like what they want is totally in keeping with the grain of the American soul. They are trying to preserve what America is and should be, but in many cases what they say and what they do is actually just really weird and not attractive to people who aren’t already fully committed to a political project”

Again this was from a piece I wrote in February of 2023 with a quote from an interview I did in 2022. I don’t want to accuse Tim Walz of stealing weird valor, but the receipts are there. 

As a piece of political rhetoric, “weird” has so far been a decent success for the Democrats and their campaign to remain in the White House. It functions as a neat and tidy rejoinder to the deluge of lies, half-truths, and unhinged rhetoric spread by Republicans as justification for their palpable animosity toward any person who doesn’t aesthetically fit their model of a Real American. The conservative list of bugaboos is long and it gets a lot of play on social media where the business model isn’t much more than algorithmic aggrievement, but in real life, most people haven’t seen liter boxes in their kid's classrooms, they don’t consider books like Gender Queer to be porn, and the trans people they know are pretty normal. Liberals just want people to be able to live their lives as best as they are able, conservatives want to know what's in your pants at all times. 

Weird right?

It’s really weird.

You know what else is weird? This article. If you read this Substack regularly, you’ll know that this isn’t the place you come to for Democratic party exaltation. We like to enjoy a healthy frenemy-type relationship with liberalism around here, precisely because conservatism is so odious and dangerous to many. If we are to be locked into a contest between moderate left-leaning neoliberalism and far-right fascism for the foreseeable future, we want the squishy liberals to be at least competent at holding the enemy at the gates. 

For most of 2024, it seemed like the Democratic party was committed to failing this simple proposition. Offering the presidency back to Trump on a silver platter by insisting on running an actual corpse for reelection. No offense to Joe Biden, we’re all suffering from some form of brain death of varying velocities. But then the wagons got circled, handshakes were made, and God Queen Nancy Pelosi gave the signal to take old Joe out behind the barn to do what was necessary. 

Maybe there were better options than Kamala Harris to pick up the baton, (there were definitely better options) but Harris was the cleanest person to pivot to and she provides the added bonus of driving conservatives to the most racist and reactionary caricatures of themselves by the mere fact of her demographic background. Team Trump can draw up all the Kommunist Kamala memes they want but it’s clear the main thing that incenses them is the fact that she is a woman of color with power.

But for all of the unburdening of coconut speeches, the manic laughter, and brief flirtations with leftist policy positions, Kamala is just kind of a normal Democrat. Her vibe is that of a fun wine mom who keeps a quarter-full glass of merlot at all times and holds court at parties while telling funny stories about coworkers. Like many liberals of her generation, her radical leftist upbringing has been tempered by the pursuit of meritocratic resume building, to the point where her father’s Marxist scholarship is as far from her political presentation as Bernie Sanders was to Hillary Clinton. 

Pivoting to Kamala when they did was a smart move. In the aftermath of Trump’s assassination attempt and the iconic photo it produced, there was no way that Biden could have won in November. Biden's dropping out all but erased Trump’s conspicuous ear bandage from the media cycle and upended all the Republican's plans for attacking the democratic nominee for his age. Polling had been consistently showing that outside of Biden, a generic Democrat held an advantage against generic Republicans in toss-ups and Kamala fits the bill of a generic Democrat.

The smart moves by the Democratic party compounded when Harris picked Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro for VP. The Governor of Pennsylvania was a favorite of party insiders for his relative popularity in a swing state and his moderate positions on issues like fracking and school choice. But it seemed like the biggest selling point for Shapiro was that picking him would send a disciplining message to the party's left flank who found his moderate positions on issues like fracking and school choice to be disqualifying. Somewhat surprisingly, Harris went with Walz, who had been floated by progressives not as a socialist trojan horse, but as a compromise candidate who could speak plainly and promote a liberal-friendly version of economic populism and the public good to a disaffected working class.

Which brings us back to where we started, with Walz successfully branding the Republicans (and especially J.D. Vance) as weird and giving liberals their first effective rhetorical countermeasure in the culture wars since I can remember. 

Of course, all this praise for Democratic Party decision-making comes with a massive caveat. The genocide in Gaza rages on with American material support. Biden and Kamala’s line of “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” has become the tragic real-world version of the “we’re all looking for the guy who did this” sketch from I Think You Should Leave as Israel expands the violence to the West Bank. 

Gaza represents the opportunity for another good choice that Democrats could make. The majority of voters want America to, at the very least, condition military aid to Israel if not pause weapons shipments altogether. There is a large Muslim and Arab population in swing state Michigan, a population who feels alienated and dehumanized by the Democrat's lack of concern for Palestinian lives. The media largely treated the Uncommitted movement as a group of petulant children, more concerned with demanding satisfaction over their pet issue than the more pressing matter of beating Donald Trump. However, the uncommitted movement was expressly a project chiefly concerned with electing Democrats in November by keeping Muslim Americans in the party.

All they wanted was for the Democrats to show that they could be moved by Muslim and Arab voters, that such people were valued as a constituency, and that their pain mattered. The DNC wouldn’t even give them five minutes at the convention. 

It’s like the party used up the allotted quota of good choices for the year. Weird, right?

Yea, now that I think about it, that is pretty weird too.

You know what else is weird? Me. I’m weird.

I’m one of those extremely online weirdos who enjoys two-hour-long videos explaining sock puppet controversies from mid-2010s Tumblr pages. I watched a six-hour-long video of a guy building a secret underground tunnel to his secret underground bunker. I know more than is socially acceptable about Marvel comics and I can’t wait to tell you how to fix the MCU. I hate farms but I kind of love county fairs now. I’m a Black American who thinks Black History Month is a psyop. 

Now you probably read that and thought “None of that is really weird though, what a strange #humblebrag”. But if you’ll allow me to get a bit postmodern here….

The word weird has a social function. Originally derived from the Germanic (and metal-sounding) Wyrd, it originally meant the ability to control destiny. It was associated with the Wyrd Sisters, the Fates of Greek myth famously adapted in Shakespeare's Macbeth. From there weird became associated with things otherworldly and unnatural. People back then thought that being left-handed was otherworldly and unnatural. The point is this is not a label for which we can make an objective measure. 

To say something is weird is to say that it deviates from the norm. When I was a little Black kid growing up in Philadelphia, being obsessed with Marvel comics and This Old House was a deviation from the norm. Using the internet for anything other than jumping into chat rooms to meet girls from the next hood over was a deviation from the norm. But norms are socially constructed. Now superhero movies dominate the pop culture zeitgeist and some of the most famous and wealthy people actively identify as nerds. 

It’s important to understand that calling something weird is not a value judgment. It’s a comparison masquerading as a value judgment. Why is it weird that J.D. Vance seems obsessed with women’s relationships with cats? Because normal people don’t care about what women do with their kitties. What weird does for Democrats is provide a memetic way of reducing a long, complex (and boring) argument against illiberal theological hierarchies being imposed by the state into a universally understood feeling of ick toward creepy guys. The reason why it works so well for Democrats, the reason why I liked it so much, is because it defines the desirable status of normalcy by excluding people who buy into conservative culture war rhetoric. Everyone wants to feel like they belong and the easiest way to belong is to point out who doesn’t. 

The sphere of conservative culture warriors is by its very nature an insular group of people. They have their own media, their own stories that dominate the conversation, and their own lens through which they view the world. And tragically for them, most people don’t live in their bubble. For Trump and Vance, repeating the Haitian feline-feeding frenzy lie isn’t weird. In their world, everyone is talking about it. It’s on TV. But for the majority of people who aren’t refreshing LibsofTikTok constantly, it sounds like the rabid fever dreams of a dying brain. 

J.D. Vance is weird much in the same way I’m weird. We both grew up in communities that we have a love for and yet feel rejected by. That kind of rejection instills a feeling of weirdness that can be hard to shake, even as you grow up and the cultural conception of normal changes. A deep look at Vance’s life and career will show you a person who’s been looking for a place to belong for a long time.  That, and a fat paycheck. He tried belonging to the corporate elite by going to Yale and studying under the Tiger Mom.  He tried belonging to the liberal intelligentsia by writing the ultimate Trump Voter Whisperer Text, but for whatever reasons he jumped ship to the man himself and has been awkwardly existing inside a Spirit Halloween MAGA costume ever since.

I can relate. Weird kids tend to look for college as the place to find where they belong. In my case, I cultivated different friend groups according to my disparate interests and just prayed to God that my jock friends never interacted with my queer nerd friends. Because each group had its own terminology, in-jokes, and culture that the other would find to be….well weird. 

Being weird in and of itself does not say anything substantive about a person. Having interests that aren't popular doesn’t make you the hero of a plucky teen comedy and it doesn’t make you the creature from Black Lagoon either. It just means that your senses lie somewhere outside of a mostly arbitrarily defined mainstream.

J.D. Vance is a weird dude. He’s also a very bad person. Democrats conflating the two is a politically smart thing to do. But it also allows them to employ the same thought-terminating memetic cliché to any and everything else. It wasn’t that long ago that Bernie Sanders was a weird grumpy old hippie who couldn’t stand to see a woman be president. His supporters were weird little basement dwellers searching for social media validation on cheese-dust-encrusted keyboards. Kamala’s K-hive was a weird collection of rabid Twitter accounts pledging undying loyalty to their Kween. Howard Dean was weird for screaming that one time.

I think about that string of good decisions made by the Democratic party and then that one decision that they refuse to make on Palestine. For whatever advances they have made toward functional political strategy, they are still the party that insisted Joe Biden was fit to run for office in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Many of those same people who fought tooth and nail for handing the election to Trump are still respective voices within the party. Most of them are now working for Kamala. They are still the party that insists on funding and arming a genocide against the will of their voters and in violation of both federal and international law. They still are a party bragging about the draconian bipartisan immigration legislation they passed to appease the racist conservative stance on migrants trying to escape the horrific conditions we helped create. 

It’s all well and good when we find ourselves on the good side of weird, but we should be wary of who we allow to set those boundaries and when they are used as a way of shutting down debate rather than dealing with substance. It may be politically smart, and it may keep Trump out of the White House, but ghoulish right-wingers aren’t the only people who find themselves outside of the Democratic Party mainstream these days.

I’m going to keep calling conservatives weird. Because they are weird, it makes them mad to be confronted with the truth that they don’t actually represent a moral majority, but rather a cloistered group of insecure grievance merchants who desperately want a person to blame for all the alienation they feel under late-stage capitalism. I’m also going to pet my cat, because he’s a good boy and he deserves lovins.

But just like my cat, I’m going to keep an eye out for signs of aggression because I don’t want “weird" to come back to bite me in the end.

Solidarity Forever.