My three-year-old is currently going through a phase where she calls everyone and everything “poopy” with the utmost glee. Now you may think this is typical toddler behaviour but I reckon she’s got a promising future in Washington DC ahead of her. As you may have noticed, we have entered into a weird phase of the US election cycle – one in which Democrats have realized that childish insults can be quite effective campaigning tools.
The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, started it. He’s been calling Donald Trump and his asinine associates “weird” for months now, but the insult only got traction after he used the term on two separate interviews with MSNBC last week. “These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said. “They want to take books away; they want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to. Don’t go sugarcoating this – these are weird ideas.”
After a clip of these remarks went viral, Walz started leaning more heavily into the phrase. Other Democrats also jumped on the weird bandwagon. Last week, for example, Kamala Harris’s campaign team put out a jokey statement after Donald Trump appeared on Fox News, titled Statement on a 78-year-old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance. One of the takeaways in the release was “Trump is old and quite weird?”
Another press release from the Harris campaign focused on JD Vance’s archaic views on abortion. It called him “creepy” in the subject line and started with the statement: “JD Vance is weird.”
Numerous Democratic senators, including Brian Schatz and Chris Murphy, have also started using the term as an attack line. So too has Illinois’s governor, JB Pritzker, who has been floated as a possible running mate for Harris. “There are a lot of weird, strange things coming out of both the Republican nominee and the vice-presidential nominee … There’s Donald Trump’s fear of sharks … There’s the talk about couches and dolphins,” Pritzker said at a press conference on Monday.
Going low is a new tactic for the civility-obsessed Democrats. But Trump has always understood the power of an on-the-nose insult. Coming up with nasty nicknames for his detractors is a longstanding strategy of his, one that has proved effective in the past. I mean, remember Jeb Bush? Or perhaps you don’t – which proves the point. Back in 2015 Bush, the second son of former president George HW Bush and a younger brother of former president George W Bush, decided to run in the Republican primaries. His name alone would have taken him far were it not for the fact that Trump labelled him “low energy Jeb”. Trump managed to capture Bush’s off-putting essence in that phrase and the insult repeatedly came up in focus groups as an example of why people didn’t like him. His campaign basically became a futile attempt to shed the low-energy label. Eventually he ran out of energy entirely and dropped out.
In the same way that Trump managed to boil down Bush’s biggest weakness into a pithy attack line, “weird” perfectly encapsulates the modern Republican party. “I don’t know who came up with the message, but I salute them,” David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University, told the Associated Press. Not only is it a concise summation of the general off-putting Republican vibe, “it frustrates opponents, leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses”.
In other words: being called a bunch of weirdos has driven Republicans stark raving mad. Honestly, if you want a quick pick-me-up, just take a look at some of the videos of them melting down about it. Their overwhelming response has been to shout WE’RE NOT WEIRD, YOU’RE WEIRD at the top of their lungs. JD Vance, for example, in something of an own goal, tweeted a video of Harris telling everyone her pronouns with the caption “JD Vance is weird”.
While politicians trading silly insults may seem like a step back for US politics, Democrats emphasizing how weird Republicans are is actually progress. For far too long Democrats have made the mistake of treating fanatics on the right like they’re reasonable people who want to have good-faith debates. But there is no way to have a good-faith debate with people who call their opponents “childless cat ladies”, defend 12-year-olds getting married and think 10-year-old rape victims should be forced to give birth. Why even try? Instead of lending credence to their bizarre ideas by attempting to engage with them, it’s far more effective to bluntly call them what they are: a bunch of weirdos.
We have allowed the demonization and dehumanization of male refugees
The category of “civilian” has essentially come to mean women and children, writes Zoe Williams in the Guardian. “We’ve gendered [civilian] so deeply that men of certain skin colours, certain geographies, are presumptively terrorists, or presumptively criminal,” a UN expert tells Williams. I should note that I have fallen into the trap of focusing mostly on women and children when writing about situations like Gaza – it can be so hard to convince some people that Palestinians are humans that focusing on women and kids seems easiest. But ignoring men helps to dehumanize them.
Everyone loves Kim Yeji’s ‘main character energy’
The South Korean markswoman won silver at the Olympics – along with the respect and awe of everyone on the internet. My favourite thing is how Kim looks like a complete badass while also having her daughter’s stuffed elephant toy hanging from her pocket.
Italian boxer Angela Carini rightfully apologizes to Algerian boxer Imane Khelif
The apology comes after a bout between Carini and Khelif lasted just 46 seconds before the Italian boxer abandoned the match in tears, and didn’t shake the Algerian’s hand. A lot of nastiness ensued with big names like JK Rowling and Logan Paul calling Khelif a “man” or insinuating that she was trans. But Khelif is not a man, nor is she a trans woman. There have been reports that Khelif, who has been beaten by plenty of other female athletes in the past, reportedly has a variation in her sex traits, also known as differences of sexual development – but these are unverified. Last year Khelif and another boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, failed a controversial gender eligibility test – the specifics of which have been kept confidential by the examining board. This whole horrible episode shows that sex is complex and that transphobia results in regressive gender policing which affects women as a whole.
Aipac has spent over $7m trying to oust Cori Bush with racist attacks
Bush is the first Black woman to represent Missouri in the US Congress. She’s not your typical politician and has been candid about how her lived experiences – which include being raped, experiencing homelessness and having an abortion – have shaped her politics. Because she is progressive and unapologetically herself, she’s faced constant attacks from the right over the years. Now the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), which is spending millions trying to unseat progressives who are critical of Israel, is accused of distorting Bush’s features into a racist caricature in recent mailers.
The week in pawtriarchy
One of the biggest weirdos on the US right is the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, the architect of the very creepy Project 2025. Roberts has a book coming out soon and, according to a copy reviewed by Media Matters, it contains a bunch of predictable attacks on birth control, in vitro fertilization and abortion. He calls contraception, for example, a “snake strangling the American family”. He also attacks the Swampoodle dog park in Washington DC, “for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children”. Project 2025 isn’t just coming for your womb, it’s coming for your dog parks.
• This article was amended on 5 August to make clear that reports that Imane Khelif has differences in sexual development are unverified.
