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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.
I mean you’re not wrong, but in context of this being an apparent campaign message from the top of the democrat party ticket, I just don’t understand what they how to actually accomplish here. Most of the too-online liberals are already completely sold on “vote blue no matter who” so there’s no need to appeal to them. They’d vote for a moldy peach if it was a registered democrat. And as far as reaching anyone outside the circle, as a strategy, it makes no sense. We aren’t voting for homecoming court members, we’re electing a government. Just saying “they’re weird” doesn’t convince outsiders that they should vote for you. And right now, it’s the middle of the country she has to convince.
I think it's a case of typical-minding. Progressives like the message, so they spread the message thinking that other people will like it too. Republicans do the same thing - "I am your retribution" is not a selling point to anyone not already on the Trump train.
I think you over-estimate the amount of secret coordination that occurs. Coordination happens a lot, but it often happens pretty publicly. Politicians frequently use the media to talk to each other. I don't think this was a case of the Harris campaign circulating memos saying "hey we're going to call republicans weird". I think it was a case of one guy saying a thing, other progressives liking and repeating it, and still other progressives going "Oh I guess this is the line we're running with now? Sounds good, let's reinforce it." Now, possibly somewhere along the line we get an actual focus group message testing this pitch to see how it does with swing voters, and possibly the line gets dropped or modified in response to that research, but I don't think that's the first or even the fifth step in this process.
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