The new “normal”

It’s been kind of amusing to see the Democrats leaning recently into the idea that there’s something basically strange about the Republicans… Minnesota governor Tim Walz seems to have kicked it off in a TV interview and the Harris campaign quickly picked up on it:

“Old and quite weird” indeed. The Republicans aren’t particularly happy at being picked on like this:

And, to be sure, it’s really not the most refined political argument, but then again the Republicans don’t have much in their armoury either that’s better. “Ron DeSanctimonious” was about as sophisticated as Trump got, and someone probably had to come up with it for him. And, as someone says in that Politico piece, people understand Trump being weird better than they understand “an existential threat to democracy”. The latter is, of course, still correct, but “weird” certainly does hit harder in a way.

And let’s face it, THIS shit IS weird. There isn’t any other way to fairly describe whatever the fuck this is if it’s not meant to be some sort of parody of the cult’s iconography. Cos on the face of it, it’s so deranged it looks like it has to be parodic, and indeed I thought it had to be when I first looked at it when someone posted it on Bluesky. But then I saw Tim Pool’s name at the top of the post. Yes, Grim Fool posted this monstrosity (obviously didn’t create it, though, cos that would’ve required him to have talent). I couldn’t believe that either and thought someone must have photoshopped it… no, they didn’t, I went to Tim’s Twitter and, well, that’s exactly what I found there. And Tim is incapable of irony, so he posted this thing with a straight face. Fuck me dead. These people have no sense of their own absurdity.

I mean, look at this silly old chud here. There was a bunch of people like him at the recent Republican convention at which Drumpf appeared with a frankly unnecessarily large bandage covering his putative war wound from that shooting, whereupon it became like a badge for other people there. This is not normal. Weird is the word. I don’t see John Fetterman’s admirers having strokes as a sign of support for him, for example. And see this fuckwit too:

Well, at least her father probably wasn’t a leader in the fucking Ku Klux Klan, which is rather more than can be said for Rod Dreher’s dad. Also, I wonder if she ever published private pictures from a teenage girl’s private Instagram in a major magazine while accusing said girl unjustly of sexually harrassing other girls at her school, cos Rod DEFINITELY did that. That’s clearly weird behaviour on his part. People with normal moral compasses know better than that.

Obviously the left has been kind of tut-tutty about the “weird” thing, too, like the clown I saw harrumphing on Mastodon the other day about how everyone laughing at the couch-fucking thing distracts us from realising that J. Divans (saw him called that on Twitter today and thought it was FUCKING MARVELLOUS) is in fact a monstrous human being… Jesus FUCK, you idiot, NO ONE who’s paying attention thinks Vance isn’t a piece of shit, we know exactly what he thinks. Piss off with your indignation, let the rest of us laugh at the cunt like he deserves. Make him look stupid. Make him look weird.

But the choice of the term “weird” has also drawn some criticism on the grounds of ableism or something like that, which I understand a little better. By the same token, I also understand the arguments I’ve seen some make that the Left deploying “weird” like this gets in the way of the Right defining themselves as “normality”, and about the distinction between “good weird” and “bad weird”… but the latter does kind of assume people’s willingness to actually make it, and I did see someone (wish I could recall who) say something about how what we should really be calling them isn’t so much weird as creepy…

…and, frankly, Malsh Walsh here makes a good argument for that. Let’s face it: the idea that he expresses here (a girl raped by her father should have to give birth so the father’s crime will be discovered) is not only weird and illogical, it’s FUCKING MONSTROUS. Not only is Walsh full of shit, he’s being actively evil here. And I can see why some are saying we should be emphasising their badness more than their oddness, and frankly that’s a line of thought I’m increasingly coming round to myself…

…and the authors of this astounding bit of work have latched onto that aspect of the whole thing; this is profoundly disquieting, nailing the essential unpleasantness of these people, and it’s one of the best political ads I’ve ever seen. The casting is just brilliant, and the SWEAT… oh gods, the SWEAT. I think the increasing amount of sweat is a good way to finally round this post off.