In case you hadn’t noticed, over the course of the first week of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, when it was hard to know what was real or what was happening, “weird” suddenly became a central part of the story. If this hasn’t locked on your radar yet, this is the gist. It’s hard to know precisely where it started, but Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has gotten the most attention for pushing and then amplifying it. Quite simply, he said, guys like Trump and Vance are just “weird.” And along with the dominating freight train of Kamala Week One, that message, that identification seemed to connect in ways that “authoritarian” and “extremist” and “threat to democracy” never quite did. JD Vance is a big supporters of “menstrual surveillance,” he’s got this weird snarling anger at women with no children. It may be bad and wrong, but everyone gets that they’re just … well, weird.
And look, JD Vance is super weird. But what’s been most interesting to me is that over the last handful of days I’ve had several friends reach out to me and ask, “Where are you on ‘weird’?”
They don’t feel the need for any additional explanation. And they’re right.
