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The culture war seemed subdued in my bubble for a few months, but picked up majorly recently. Oddly enough, the cause (mostly) doesn't seem to be the attempted presidential assassination, the quick Democratic party shifts, the ramping up of tensions in the middle east, or the black female presidential candidate, but the Olympics. Color me surprised.
I see non-stop posting currently about "The Science doesn't support the bigots who think XY chromosomes makes someone a man", "why do they care more about a woman competing in woman's boxing than they do about a literal child rapist competing?", "the people complaining about a woman getting punched in the face by another woman are the same people who don't bat an eye at men beating up women outside of the Olympics". There seems to have been some really high-profile culture war controversies in this Olympics. I really doubt there's more fodder for controversy in the Olympics in general than in everyday life, so why is everyone picking up their keyboards to go vanquish the enemy all of a sudden?
I see the same memes circulating at high speed through Facebook and Twitter. I have a couple of friends whom I can very reliably expect to let me know what the current talking points are with smarmy reposts from accounts with names like "CatLadiesWhoKnowThings" or "Social Justice Tiefling" or "Jedi Tea Witches." (Not actual accounts, but you get the idea.)
JK Rowling has jumped into the Imane Khalif controversy with both feet, outright stating she's a man, which is always good for turning up the heat on a constantly simmering issue.
The other thing I'm noticing is that "Weird" seems to be the Woke Word of the Week (and The New Republic has discovered Curtis Yarvin).
Wasn't the "weird" thing pretty clearly an organized campaign, with the first shot being that commercial with creepy actors strawmanning about reproductive politics? I figure they found an attack vector on Vance that played well with focus groups and are now committing all resources on it.
I just can’t figure out how they expect this to play for anyone other than their own camp. It’s not a real accusation by any stretch of the imagination. There’s nothing behind this other than a sneer and especially for people who don’t follow politics until after the conventions, it’s actually not that good. They’re weird like weird how exactly and why should I, the drone of sector 7G care about this? What is the message here? What agenda do either groups have? How are you going to get groceries and gasoline and housing to the place where the median American family can afford to live with only one job per adult? How are you going to fix my kid’s school? Crime? Why is republicans being “weird”, whatever the heck that actually means, affect my life?
It’s a stupid tactic because it’s so nonspecific that the public can easily disregard it as just name calling. At least the fascist thing was an actual accusation, a charge that would mean something objective and negative to most people. But they can’t do that anymore because it’s seen as too mean to a guy who got shot in the ear. They can’t run on the record, because they didn’t make life better for most Americans. They can’t bring up either schools or the border because they lose on both. So they have the equivalent of being a Becky and sneering at people they consider beneath them even if it’s silly. This is a campaign that would come out of a junior high.
Honestly I think the motivation is that leftists have a bunch of internalised self-consciousness about weirdness. Part of that's driven by the fact that they are broadly the on the side of transgenderism, drag time story hour, polyamory, and other non-mainstream lifestyle choices. Republicans have spent ages hammering them for being insufficiently patriotic, for not caring about the heartland of America, etc etc. And Democrats reject those attacks, but they still hear them and get kind of defensive about it. It's like right wingers and accusations of racism.
And so in my interpretation "Republicans are weird" is the mirror of "Democrats are the real racists". It's not actually an argument that is going to convince any of the people you might plausibly be aiming it at, it's more a story your side is telling itself about why the people who don't like you are actually guilty of the thing they keep accusing you of.
Ding ding ding. Walz probably said it in a folksy calling-it-as-I-see-it manner, but the democrat embrace of it is telling. To use weird deflects that appellation, rubber glue style. Its not just the transgressive quality of progressive beliefs that is weird unto itself because it subverts or attacks existing norms, its that by making the right the weird ones it allows the left views to be laundered into normality.
Most nonsense like this is ultimately ingroup signalling, with the outrage from the right about the label weird being the fact that democrats are transparently trying to pass off THEIR craziness as normal. It just becomes more proof of institutional capture by an out of touch progressive elite that is not able to consider that proles can have their own opinions.
They can't. COVID proved that. The proles will believe what CNN tells them to believe, and if that means Rachel Levine is normal while J.D. Vance is weird, then Rachel Levine is normal while J.D. Vance is weird.
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