Campaign Notes, Elections, Jamie O, Political Crack

Where The Weird Things Are

Weird guy being offputtingly weird.

Back in 2016, one of the odder moments in presidential debate history occurred when Donald Trump spent a lot of the town hall-style debate skulking behind Hillary Clinton while she talked. It made for a creepy, and weird, optic.

In 2018, aides asked the current Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris, how she would handle such a situation.

Harris has considered what it would be like to run against Trump before. In late 2018, over two days of sessions with top aides to decide about running for the Democratic nomination in 2020, among the questions aides pressed her with was what she would do in a town hall-style debate with Trump, similar to the one in 2016 where the Republican infamously stalked around behind Hillary Clinton at times.

Harris’ answer: She’d turn around and say to him, “Why are you being so weird?”

The Democrats are taking this concept and running with it. Republicans are kinda weird, goes the messaging, and the usual suspects are giving the Dems grief about it. This includes Professional Very Serious Person Thomas Friedman, who despite once weirdly telling Iraq to “suck on this” (meaning a bomb), is giving a Very Serious Lecture about how calling Republicans weird is “playground” stuff.

My question for Mr. Friedman and his mustache is what if the Republican Party IS weird? Like, undeniably weird, so much so that it is pretty hard to deny.

Now, there is nothing wrong with “weird,” per se. Weird can spark a lot of creativity, such as Monty Python and Emo Phillips in comedy, and The Talking Heads and Prince in music. Social anxiety can make people feel awkward and weird.

But Republicans are leaning hard into the creepy side of weird. Donald Trump, for example, won’t stop talking about Hannibal Lector, for no apparent reason at all.

If you were at a dinner party and a person started talking like that, on the ride home talking with your friend or spouse how would you characterize it? “That was, um, weird,” you would say to them.

If you write about politics and cover the American right, including their corporate subsidiary, you are going to write about some weird stuff, my First Draft colleagues included. Cassandra wrote this week about the GOP’s Virginia candidate for Senate, and my goodness, is he…well, weird. Among the key issues he is focusing on is the threat of California Wiccans taking over the country.

I’m sorry, Mr. Friedman, but that is pretty weird and there is nothing wrong with saying so.

Then Adrastos kicked off the work week with a funny look at J.D. Vance’s slice of weirdness, in the form of a pop quiz. This includes the couch rumor, which is also pretty weird.

The thing about J.D. is he is not some Hee Haw caricature from deepest Appalachia, but instead a Silicon Valley guy. Specifically, a Peter Thiel guy. This leads me to the two things I’d like to add here.

Having worked in the tech sector for nearly 20 years, I got to know it pretty well, and they have some very strange ideas. One personal example is a guy telling me at a tech conference back in 2000 that making money is a spiritual endeavor, a deeply sacred act. Many of them really do believe this.

But it’s deeper than just that. People like Thiel have some bizarre and rather disturbing ideas. Many of them fly under most Americans’ radar.

The New Republic covered a particularly awful example of their beliefs; their worship of a strange techno-authoritarian from San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. Both Thiel and Vance think this guy’s amazing.

Yarvin’s ideas include dismantling current governments and replacing them with small, corporate-controlled entities called “patchworks.” He promotes authoritarianism, suggesting that these corporate “realms” should have absolute power, free from democratic processes and legal constraints. His disturbing visions include extreme surveillance and control, and his ideas for people he considers “not productive” include converting them to biodiesel for energy and this bizarre form of imprisonment and forced labor he refers to as a “humane alternative to genocide.” You can learn more about it at the article link.

These ideas are strange, disturbing, reprehensible, and yes, weird! And maybe the media should pay more attention to the fact that Vance, the guy who thinks this weirdo is brilliant, is vying to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

The other thing I wanted to point out is the “weird” label is putting the far right on tilt. They are ENRAGED that people are calling them weird. My theory is that a reason that this gets them so enraged is white males, especially white males to the right of center, view themselves as the Arbiters of Weird.

It is they who declare what is weird, for they are the Perfect People. This includes a portion of centrists, who share this view. Anything that they consider weird is also automatically trying to mess with them, so it must be shut down. Anyone to the left of Joe Manchin is considered weird, because those people might like stuff like the aforementioned Talking Heads and hold ideas that they really want to paint as weird, like women having control of their bodies, that sexuality is not a choice, and everyone should be able to afford healthcare.

The idea that DEMOCRATS dare call THEM weird, well, that is an outrage. They are not used to it. So they are having a hard time handling it at the moment.

Maybe they should try not to be so weird. They are going to have a hard time with that. Just ask the Weirdo-in-Chief’s niece:

The last word goes to a band that’s a little weird, King Crimson.