It works because that was Trump’s angle on Harris… But she ran with it first.
It works because he’s fucking creepy weird and Harris is maximally as weird as your fun aunt that sneaks a bit of cooking sherry while making a meal.
Silent? They never shut the fuck up.
The silent majority is neither of those things.
Yells. Screams. Smashes plate on the floor. Smashes plate against the wall. Flings boogers at everyone. Pulls out a gun and literally shoots somebody in the face. “Nobody is paying attention to me. I am the silent majority.”
I think pretending there are A LOT of people like you that want this specific thing that is kind of weird is an attempt to appeal to authority of slightly more invested in politics “masses”. If someone tells a conservative and disconnected corn farmer that ALL conservatives care about that trans thing and that it’s a danger to your style of life, and that they mutilate children, then they might not check if any of that is true. Just assume that someone did, since apparently all their conservative friends are in on it. And you might just make a fool out of yourself if you ask any questions, since you know you don’t really belong with “silent conservative majority” because unlike them you’re not invested in politics and didn’t do your research… So you better keep your mouth shut and go along with the flow. Same thing with facism. Also preys on embarassed ignorance of the “silent majority” …imo
Weird works for some people as it allows them to express disdain without getting violent
Most eyerolling analysis I’ve read in awhile. I don’t know why people suddenly turned against Trump but it certainly wasn’t because of the term “werid”.
You don’t know why? That’s so “weird”. Are you actually from Seattle?
I think weird and similar thoughts are sticking for a few reasons.
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The obvious: Trump was running as the more vigorous and confident candidate and it was working very well, peaking with the debate. But Biden stunned Trump’s campaign and stepped down. Trump’s team seems wholly unprepared for this. Now Trump is the old guy yapping not about policy, but about how Kamala isn’t black. It’s cringe.
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Vance. Trump picked a carbon copy of himself (or a guy pretending to be a carbon copy of him, anyway) but when Vance says these Trumpian things they sound well, weird, coming from a 39 year old guy. For a young guy to be saying that childless adults have less value and should have fewer votes is damn weird. But if Trump said it, it wouldn’t even make the news.
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I think the article is right in that you can call Trump and Vance weird without directly insulting their followers. But I also think another subtlety is that is doesn’t distance the left from the right as much as other attacks might. You’re not calling Trump Hitler and immediately raising the hackles of a conservative and forcing him to dig in against you.
Yes, yes, yes. It’s also sticks though. It’s hard to defend against without proving the point, and it’s already an easy point to prove.
That’s, I think, why it’s landing so well. These are weird, weird people. We’ve all been thinking it and saying it to each other. Remember they did that press conference at a landscape supply company? Wtf?
But their weirdness didn’t become Zeitgeist, until, I think the biggest thing, it’s finally coming from the bully pulpit.
Corporate media was never going to point out how their ownership class and their bullshit are completely weird, but the bully pulpit is called that because it cannot be ignored. My two cents on it. Agree with your post wholly, too.
Supporting Israel is weird.
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The words we’ve been using before – fascists, neonazis, dictators – oddly enough seem to make Republicans laugh at Democrats because we make them sound scary/we sound scared. Calling them weird trivializes them, and reduces them to barely under creepy uncle status. Calling them weird stings because they think themselves the epitome of normal – they think they’re the “real” Americans, not the aberrant ones.
Soooo, I kind of got déjà vu reading this article because … Six days ago I “foresaw” the relevance of “weird.” Comment thread here (I think) or just check out post my post history.
The author brings up a ton of specific points I called out, including using similar words like “flip” the script and referencing how “basket of deplorables” was too directed. Were we all thinking sbout “weird” in this context six days ago already? If not… I am weirded out, y’all.
“Deplorables” and alot of other seemingly insulting, derogatory things could be worn as a badge of honor by that group. For people who pride themselves on being conservative and the representatives of “normality”, “Weird” isn’t something you can easily call yourself, you’re not weird, you’re the normal one, it’s society that’s weird for being so permissive. And then just being called “weird” is hard to defend against because everyone has some weird thing about themselves, just existing as a human being is a weird experience.
Weird isn’t bad, weird is just normal, it’s just life, but in their eyes, weird IS bad, it’s probably a part of themselves that they themselves know is wrong. I think alot of the blatant lies they tell the world aren’t just for other people, part of it is for themselves too, to make the weirdness of fascism go down a bit easier, to make it seem like they’re supporting it for justifiable reasons.
i maintain that this is because Kendrick Lamar thoroughly undermined Drake earlier this summer with a similar approach
It doesn’t work, only voting works.
Hmm, and how do you sway fence sitters and braindead centrists?
Are you implying that calling people names sways votes? Because then it doesn’t matter what the Dems call him, Trump will get every single “undecided” vote for the next century. No one calls people names as much or as bigly as he.
Calling people names was also the official unofficial Democrat campaign strategy until Biden dropped out. Anyone who didn’t enthusiastically support him was a Russian troll and secret Toupee supporter.
It can work. You only need to peel off a few of the normal people and blunt his momentum. While as always you do need the rest of the population to turn up and vote.
Trumps greatest fear would be dancing up on stage at a rally and having the audience silent then slowly start laughing at him when he starts talking his nonsense.
Like the UN did.
The emperor has no clothes. He is weird.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I just don’t see it changing any minds. I fear that anyone who could be convinced not to vote for Trump because he’s “weird” will be just as easily convinced not to vote for Harris for some equally vague, trivial reason. I say focus on the issues where Democrats can actually have an advantage, and leave the shit-flinging to the troglodytes that live in it.
Because it hits at what they are all about: identity.
Why aren’t there rolls of stickers on Amazon of pictures of Republicans with the word “weird” under them to stick on gas pumps?
Probably because liberals are less likely to vandalize people’s property, and buy a roll of stickers. You could probably make more money on large format stickers individually.
I absolutely wouldn’t want to vandalize someone’s property however, had a conservative already put a sticker there I wouldn’t feel bad at all about covering it up.
Vandalize someone’s property
Just to make sure I understand
Vandalize = stick a removable sticker to something
Someone = an oil company
Property = infrastructure to dispense oil to be burned and pumped into the atmosphere
Honestly, I don’t think stickers go nearly far enough. Bomb an oil pipeline instead.
Yeah that won’t kill anybody. F*** over society and raise the prices for 99% of people. That seems like a perfectly well thought-out plan /s
Sounds like an opportunity to make some money. You could be the change you want to see.
How are you any less weird? You support Zionism, just like many Republicans. You are SO WEIRD! Why aren’t there rolls of stickers like that for you, @JustZ@lemmy.world, and for all the other genocide deniers?
Use the ol’ timey word for it and call them queer. Start referring to conservatives as “the queers” just to troll them
The actual queers are gonna hate that. Maybe they can call another queervention (or was it queervalcade?) and get back to us on using it for trolling.
Hopefully one of their ambassadors will swing by and share an opinion. My Gay Agenda says, “In usage of the word “queer,” stay where you are and wait for help.”
Stop using queer as a bad word. The word you are looking for to describe Trump and the other magas is “pedophile”.
I don’t like that either. There are receipts for Trump, so that can stick, but using “pedophile” as a broad pejorative against people I disagree with politically (no matter how severely) requires me to separate that word from what it actually means (people who are sexually attracted to children), and as someone who actually gives a shit about harm reduction and justice for victims of sexual abuse, I’m not willing to stoop to the level of obfuscating the language we use to talk about those things.
This is no different than the right wing adopting “groomer” to mean “anyone who I think intrinsically harms children” (usually queer people working in education or childcare), actively destroying the very valuable vocabulary we have for describing the criminal social manipulation sexually abusive adults can use on children to get them to do what they are told.
Just because “pedo” is the nastiest thing you can call someone doesn’t make it acceptable to cry wolf about such a profoundly serious thing, no matter how much you hate the person you’re insulting.
As a bisexual British person I absolutely support the idea of returning queer to it’s classic meaning. There’s also the option of just using both meanings. Context will establish which one you mean.
The Republicans are a right queer bunch, unlike my fellow queers in the LGBTQ+ community.
Capitalizing Queers to mean our friends and lowercase queers as the descriptor for these weirdos might be a simple distinction as well.
Could also refer to the way Republicans do things as queerly, as in “why is this dumb cunt queerly burning books?”
Why do bullies get mad when you start fighting back? It’s a gawd damned “mystery!”
“Weird” reverses and intervenes at the crucial point of transmission of that idea. No, it says, the appeals by the right to supposed family values (anti-trans bigotry; restricting no-fault divorce; slashing public school funding; hatred of immigrants) are not normal. They aren’t fundamental American values that the liberal elites have somehow derailed. They are, instead, deeply strange. And “we” (a new silent majority that Walz invokes in his use of “weird”) are tired of it.
This sums it up pretty nicely.
Until he ruins his point by trying to claim the silent majority in turn.
I think the secret is it’s just one word that everyone knows. Democrats have a bad tendency to over-explain: “This book makes these 57 points and if you cross reference with these charts and apply this formula you’ll see….” Meanwhile, Trump will just say “what a loser.” Maybe Democrats are finally learning to keep it simple.
Yes people should want to make informed decisions, but maybe part of effective campaigning these days is accepting they don’t.
It’s fallout from the devolution of our educational system. And, well, generational lead poisoning. And I guess we’ll find out what microplastics do to our brains in the coming decades too.
Anyways, it’s frustrating that talking points have to be “dumbed down” to such an extreme degree, but at the end of the day, I’m glad that the Harris campaign is being pragmatic about doing what they have to do with their messaging to actually reach low-info/low intelligence voters.
It works because they’re fascists.
One of the main pillars of every fascist movement is “we’re the only normal ones”. It’s how they justify othering, persecuting, and abusing everyone who’s not a cishet white fascist Christian, preferably male.
To a fascist, anyone who’s not “normal” is one of the OTHERS and thus scary and evil and needs to be suppressed and hidden away, if not violently eradicated.
Small note
It’s how they justify othering, persecuting, and abusing everyone who’s not a cishet white fascist Christian, preferably male.
This is incorrect
It’s how they justify othering, persecuting, and abusing everyone who’s not like them
You can have Fascism in any circle. “Communist” Occupied China is an example of non-white Fascism. And you could point to some military groups in Africa as well
You can have Fascism in any circle. “Communist” Occupied China is an example of non-white Fascism. And you could point to some military groups in Africa as well
I know. The part you quoted was in a separate paragraph because it was specifically about the American Fascist Party rather than fascists in general.
Other examples include Modi’s fascist Hindunationalism and Netanyahu’s fascist apartheid state where the favored religion is Judaism.
where the favored religion is Judaism
This is not how Apartheid works in the West Bank. Zionism may be dependant on Judaism, but that’s not the dividing line.
It is ethnic apartheid between ethnic Jews / white westerners and Arabs. Religion has little to do with what is actually enforced. there are tons of secular Jews. There are evangelical Christian settlements in the West Bank too.
It’s about denying rights to Arabs living in Palestine.
?
It wasn’t separate from this
One of the main pillars of every fascist movement is “we’re the only normal ones”.
What are you doing right now?
Do you really need me to quote their whole paragraph to show that they’re in the same paragraph?
One of the main pillars of every fascist movement is “we’re the only normal ones”. It’s how they justify othering, persecuting, and abusing everyone who’s not a cishet white fascist Christian, preferably male.
Incorrect. Fascism is specifically a white right wing phenomenon.
You can have similar methods in other authoritarian and totalitarian systems. But while they’re certainly equally despicable, that does not make them fascism.
This was the least educated comment you’ve made today
I highly suggest looking into a political literacy class
I assume you’ve gone through my comment history to confidently make that assertion?
Scan the Wikipedia page on fascism. Read a bit more into the citations. Then tell me again how uneducated my comment really was.
Why would I go through your comment history to make an assertion of one comment that I was replying to?
If you don’t know any of my other comments, how can you confidently state that this was ‘the least educated comment’ I made that day?
Because i respect you
Betraying one’s country is really fucking weird.
More to the point, supporting someone that legitimately betrayed the country and is trying to end democracy is really fucking weird.
Especially if the person they are supporting to take lead is a dementia addled, racist rapist. Super weird.
