Y’all are weird. In a matter of days, this has become the go-to response in internet discussion. As with all things online, it’s hard to pinpoint where weird started. It may have been Minnesota governor Tim Walz on MSNBC saying “[Republicans] come across as weird.” Or maybe it was the blogs proclaiming “conservatives are struggling to get ahead of the whole ‘weird’ thing.” Maybe it was the reaction in your home to those Google Gemini ads running during the Paris Olympics where a parent encourages their kid to use AI to write a fan letter to their favorite athlete.
Whatever the origins, it’s clear: The Weird Era has begun.
It’s not that no one, no thing, has ever been weird before, or that weirdness hasn’t been demeaned or celebrated. What’s happening now is, rather, a shift in who gets called weird—and who gets to label things as such.
Tuesday, when Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, took the stage at an Atlanta rally she got nods and cheers when she asked the crowd “by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird?” in reference to the attacks she’s received from former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance. The crowd, it seemed, already knew the talking point.
Some of this “weird” talk, likely, stems from recent comments from Vance, who, in a resurfaced Fox News interview, referred to Democrats, and Harris specifically, as “a bunch of childless cat ladies” who had no “direct stake” in the country. Coupled with Vance’s flat-falling jokes about Diet Mountain Dew and the ongoing memes about the senator and couches (Google it, I beg you, it’s too much to type), the prevailing narrative became these people are weirdos—for focusing so much on uteruses and how they’re used, for paying outsize attention to who is having sex and with whom, et cetera.
Last Friday, @TheDemocrats account tweeted “Trump is old and weird.” On Monday, the political action committee Won’t PAC Down posted a message to X that wrote, in all caps, “THESE GUYS ARE JUST WEIRD” alongside a video of increasingly sweaty dudes talking about how much right they have to “control your bedroom.” There were supercuts of Dems calling Republicans “weird” on cable news. Ultimately, it gave Democrats a “narrative advantage that they rarely had when President Joe Biden was still running,” the AP wrote. George Washington University professor David Karpf told the wire service “I don’t know who came up with the message, but I salute them.”
It’s possible, of course, that the weird messaging may not have originated from the Democratic party itself, but rather arose organically online. When President Biden took himself out of the running and endorsed Harris, a vibe shifted and many young voters—the engine of political messages on social media—quickly became engaged.
When Biden was the candidate, he would often try to respond to attacks from the right with broad statements about the future of democracy or somewhat boring bits of policy; when Harris got tapped, it opened a door for Gen Z voters and others to put their responses more plainly, says Pratika Katiyar, activist and researcher at Harvard’s Initiative for a Representative First Amendment.
“It just makes a lot more sense,” Katiyar says. “It’s like anyone who’s not even politically engaged can point to that and be like, ‘Yes, they’re weird.’”
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Naming weirdness goes beyond politics. When last week’s Olympics opening ceremony included a scene featuring drag and other performers doing what appeared to be a Last Supper homage, conservatives and Christians got upset, calling it “satanic” and “crazy.” Some thought such a strong response was weird, pointing out that the tableau was actually a nod to the Greek god Dionysus.
The “weird” label has also spilled over onto the tech and business world, where Vance’s connections to Silicon Valley, where he used to be a VC, have come to the fore. “Where J.D. Vance gets his weird, terrifying techno-authoritarian ideas,” reads the headline in The New Republic.
While we’re at it, all of the ads for AI during the 2024 Paris Olympics are quite odd. Watching the peak of human athleticism while being fed images about how machines can do things better is really disconcerting, but that’s just me talking.
What’s now being called “weird” actually has a history dating back to the Cold War. Conservatives have, for decades, been able to attract followers by moving away from talk of God or religion and toward a demonizing of the “liberal devil,” says Whitney Phillips, a communications professor at the University of Oregon who is about to release a book on the topic called The Shadow Gospel. The result is that concepts like queerness, premarital sex, abortion, and socialism all get lumped together, creating “a sort of vague omnipresent placeholder evil that you can’t really put your finger on, but that you’re really scared of and mad about,” Phillips says.
What liberals are pushing back against, then, is seeing all of these things cobbled together and demonized. “This moment is important, I think, for people to call out,” Phillips says. “You’ve got this strange minoritarianism, this obsession with children and genitals and drag queens and librarians and all of this stuff where you’re like, ‘What is wrong with you guys?’”
Backlash, it’s worth noting, is already afoot. Last weekend, onetime Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took to X to call the “they’re weird” argument “dumb and juvenile,” adding, “this is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest.”
Derek Guy, aka X’s Menswear Guy, responded to Ramaswamy’s post with an image of the former candidate and the caption “big ass shoes,” zooming in on what looked like ill-fitting footwear. It was an attempt to call out Ramaswamy’s own weirdness, but two days later Guy posted a new message to X that “the discourse around ‘weird’ strikes me as not great.”
Calling anyone “weird” implies that someone else is “normal” or deviant, and that has consequences. “That is how trans people get attacked, that is how women who don’t have children get attacked,” Phillips says. Trump and his supporters aren’t going to turn around and rethink their actions, and ultimately “weirdness” could end up being “weaponized in ways that then makes me nervous, even though I also think that not calling attention to the weirdness is dangerous,” she adds.
“Weird as a framing works really well as a meme,” Phillips says, “but it doesn’t work really well as an outreach strategy.”
Katiyar says it will ultimately come down to whether liberals, and the Harris campaign specifically, can back up the memes with something else. “Young voters really do care about social issues, about housing prices, the economy, very substantive issues,” she says. “So I do see [“weird”] losing efficacy if they don’t continue to shift policy to create a difference.” That, to use last week’s buzzword, would be so brat.
Loose Threads
Italian Olympic gymnast Giorgia Villa is a parmesan influencer. This is perfect; I have no notes. Please do check out the photos of her posing with giant wheels of cheese. (Yes, most of these threads are going to be about the Paris Olympics. Sorry not sorry.)
Sure, you’ve heard of walking on water, but have you heard of standing on the air above it? Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina has, and this photo of him doing just that has gone incredibly viral.
South Korean sharpshooter Kim Ye-ji is cooler than you. Everyone thinks so.
Finally, we’d like to leave you with this: A video of gold-medal Olympic gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles dancing with Snoop Dogg.
