Posted on 08/16/2024 8:45:51 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
For almost two weeks, the Democrats have had only one term in their word cloud when it comes to J.D. Vance: “Weird.”
On Sunday, Vance finally responded to the charge, on CNN’s State of the Union, calling it: “fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff.” “No, we’re not ,” Trump had told a rally in Montana, a couple of days earlier. “We’re very solid people.”
Yet on it goes. From dawn to dusk, the CNBC/USA Today/NPR message machine has been pumping out the same word in the mouths of different commentators. This is no accident. The “weird” meme is supposed to have started with Tim…
For almost two weeks, the Democrats have had only one term in their word cloud when it comes to J.D. Vance: “Weird.”
On Sunday, Vance finally responded to the charge, on CNN’s State of the Union, calling it: “fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff.” “No, we’re not ,” Trump had told a rally in Montana, a couple of days earlier. “We’re very solid people.”
Yet on it goes. From dawn to dusk, the CNBC/USA Today/NPR message machine has been pumping out the same word in the mouths of different commentators. This is no accident. The “weird” meme is supposed to have started with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s VP pick, during an appearance on the TV breakfast show Morning Joe.
Never mind the disastrous overall failure of the Democrats, their capacity to get everyone pumping out the same line — be it “Biden is in the form of his life” or “Vance is weird” — has never been better.
The recent repetition by Walz of an obviously false meme about how Vance “has sex with couches” is the point at which “weird” loses its attack value, and becomes a potential T-shirt slogan for the VP candidate himself.
It’s easy to see why the Dems felt it to be potent. The Kamala team’s strategy is evidently to polarize the election on a darkside/lightside axis. Kamala herself is clipped on the net running around being giddy with folksy normality. The vibe is that of the openings of Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, where Ellen would come out and dance for five minutes with the studio audience.
Meantime, Trump and the manboy goon he keeps in a basement are out there being “weird.” They want to set up a dichotomy between Dark America and Positive America. After all, “I just want everyone to get along, to be positive” is the proto-political opinion of the core voter soccer moms and cat ladies the Democrats will need to turn out.
In one sense, Vance is about as normal as they come: difficult childhood in working-class America, lawyer, three kids, religious.
But the feeling Democrats are trying to set up is that there is something beyond that. In truth, Vance stands accused of two great American crimes: introspection and intellectualism.
America has often been characterized as an anti-intellectual nation. The intellectual is a bad pose for the US politician, because the politician’s job is to go out and grab hands. The politician, in this reading, must show that his hands are clean — that he is not hiding anything deeper than the persona he presents.
No one could accuse Joe Biden or Donald Trump of having rich inner lives. Obama perhaps. But not George Bush, or even the supremely intelligent Bill Clinton.
Vance is indeed a weirdo, because he seems to be interested in first principles, deep reading, and picking up ideas from unusual places. Much has been made of his interest in the online right, in the amateur political theorist Curtis Yarvin, or the many tendrils of the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
To the likes of Kamala and her outriders, this is basically him sitting in his mom’s basement with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi and Final Fantasy VII: a card-carrying “incel.” They haven’t had the software update as to what the online right is now, and they have only a lo-res vision of their opponents’ psychology, and not much curiosity.
Had they bothered to engage fully with his intellectual biography, they’d find the online right is even weirder than their caricature. There’s an emphasis on wellness fads that seldom stack up — from raw milk to the sunning of the scrotum, to plenty of overly-deterministic evolutionary psychology. Many of the self-professed hard men who propagate these ideas are, in reality, a kind of analogue of the antifa types, in that both would be dead within five minutes of a real conflict breaking out. All parlor game, no street smarts.
The Kamala meme is right in that Vance is intelligent enough to be interested in ideas — and intelligent people often sometimes glom onto bad ideas. The salon debates of intellectuals created the French Revolution; ordinary people are not wrong to be suspicious of them.
But then, they also created the American Revolution. In those times, a self-starting weirdo crank like the pamphleteer Thomas Paine published his Common Sense anonymously – and struggled to find a publisher for a work aimed towards toppling the Empire. These days, he’d have an ironic anime avatar and 15,000 followers.
Here’s how Vance is weird to the left....he’s a Catholic....MARRIED to a WOMAN and has THREE kids....MARINE who WENT to a war zone..... he LOVES America....he WROTE a BEST SELLING BOOK that had a VERY POPULAR MOVIE MADE FROM IT.....Made money....wait for it, Lefties....HONESTLY!! HOW WEIRD!!
To leftists, normal is wierd.
Vance worked his way out of poverty through discipline, hard work, military service and the GI Bill. I am sure many democrats think it is weird for someone to work themselves out of reliance on Government handouts.
Vance‘ mother was a drug addict, who didn’t even raise him, that should be quite normal to Democrats.
To America. Grow up. You’re adults and your nation if failing.
This is America’s Final Exam. We’ll see if they’ve learned anything. Frankly, I’m not optimistic.
Not only weird, it's a threat to their very existence of relying on votes from increasing welfare recipients..
Exactly! Well, almost exactly. You misspelled "weird". :)
I’m weird. You’re weird. JD Vance and Trump are weird. Kamala is weird. Everyone is a little bit weird.
This entire line of attack is weird.
“almost exactly. You misspelled “weird”.”
That must have been hard to do because this Freerepublic message box catches the misspelling. I tried it.
9am speech scheduled. It’s 9:19 right now.
Hitler tactic. Start late. People get antsy. Then show up and there’s more excitement. It’s good for when the zingers in the speech come out.
It’s 9:21 right now.
Look at who the accusations of Vance being weird are coming from - some of the biggest weirdos on the planet (leftists, of course).
“9am speech scheduled. It’s 9:19 right now.”
I think the start of some events is delayed until after the entire audience is seated so security people have time to observe it before the speakers appear on stage.
This is a good piece. I didn’t really “get it” regarding the attacks on him until now. The author is right. It’s JD’s intellectualism that they’re attacking. It’s a cynical play from a party that takes for granted 90% support from university professors, but hypocrisy has never bothered them.
Imagine my pleasant surprise, that JD Vance is a superb orator, a brilliant debater, and the perfect man for President Trump to have on his ticket. In contrast, Sergeant Timmy has been spending too much time defending himself from his Stolen Valor/Bullsperm drinking/Communist Chinese-tripping/COVID paintgun shooting Commie antics.
Cymbeline-you Ould be right. 9:39.
I’ve been thinking about this “weird “ thing. I was raised around a lot of route 23 “hillbillies in Ohio. I think JD might have been a little hard on some of them. To me they were hard working people who loved their families intensely and would fight to the death to protect them. Now democrats who write books like “Heather has Two Mommies” and go to drag shoes and believe in 62 genders are a little bit “weird” to me. The male transportation secretary trying to breastfeed a baby and luggage stealing cross dressers also seem a little weird to me. I feel much safer with white and black blue collar workers who try to earn a decent living and come home to their normal families.
I am a WEIRD, patriotic, proud member of the Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy! ;-)
I noticed my misspelling after I posted when it was too late to fix it.
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