The Weird Obsessions of the Online Right

Last week, I struck up a conversation with the guy cutting my hair, who was a Frenchman living in London. When I told him that my job was writing about politics, he gave a passable impression of being interested.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Did I hear something about Donald Trump getting shot?”

I stared back at him with the awestruck bafflement of a soon-to-be-dead missionary contemplating the Sentinelese: How wondrous to meet someone so untouched by modern life! But, of course, by poring over swing-state polls, consuming coconut memes, and developing strong opinions about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, I have become the weird one. Most Americans follow political news sporadically and sketchily. About 73 million people watched at least some of the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden in 2020, but a month before the 2016 election, 40 percent of Americans could not name the vice-presidential candidate from either party. They simply allocated no space in their brain for the existence of Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate—and in retrospect, who could say that was the wrong decision?

One of the dangers of following politics too closely is that you assume too much knowledge, and interest, among regular voters. You overinterpret every event—this speech will definitely move the race!—and you assume that niche opinions are widely held. You end up talking with your peers rather than the public. You become, to use the word of the moment, weird.

None of this, however, has gotten through to the extremely online conservatives who are upset with the sudden popularity of that word among Vice President Kamala Harris and an army of campaign surrogates. In the space of a few days, some of my favorite bully-boy right-wing influencers have gone from Cry harder, libs to This negative tone is unbecoming. Guys, you care about politics. This makes you weird. The people attacking you, who also care about politics? They are weird too. If we are holding a contest about who is most normal, and that contest is playing out in television studios, YouTube clips, and posts on X, both sides have already lost.

Also, when trying to rebut the charge that you and your allies are weird, you should not—as the right-wing influencer Dave Rubin recently did—circulate a supercut of people calling you weird and claim that the allegation is being spread by “NPCs.” If you know what NPCs are, you are very weird. (The phrase means non-playable characters, named after the digital extras who mill around in the background of video games, and it is the online right’s new version of sheeple. If you needed that explanation, congratulations on being normal.)

What Rubin identified in his clip was not a phalanx of mindless drones parroting their orders from the great cat-lady hive mind but something we call an “attack line,” a completely mundane and totally expected part of election campaigns. Only someone who just fell out of a coconut tree would be surprised to hear a chorus of voices all saying the same thing about a political opponent. Remember the concerns over Hillary Clinton’s emails? They were quite popular at one time.

Political slogans have to be repeated over and over to be effective. Here in Britain in the 2010s, a running joke among political reporters was that London Mayor Sadiq Khan had a tic disorder forcing him to mention that his father had been a bus driver. One day, Khan chastened the assembled press pack by pointing out that if they were bored by the line, that meant undecided voters had probably heard it at least once. The new British prime minister, Keir Starmer, had a similar addiction to mentioning that his father was a “toolmaker.” Political messages are designed to reach voters like my hairdresser, who tune in briefly between hobbies and friendships and fulfilling personal lives. If a particular political argument feels repetitive, take it as a sign from the universe that you are watching too much cable news.

The rollout of the weird wars shows how transformative the switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris has been. After months of low-grade misery, the Democrats seem much more energized overall—not only because Harris is campaigning more aggressively than Biden could but because half a dozen of the party’s best communicators are auditioning for the VP spot by road-testing attack lines at rallies and on television.

[Anne Applebaum: Suddenly Trump looks older and more deranged]

The weird attacks on Trump seem to have originated with one of those potential running mates, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who recently embarked on a tour of the television studios to expand on the criticism. “Listen to the guy,” Walz told Jake Tapper on CNN. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks.” Walz added that the Democrats’ previous attack line on Trump—that he was an existential threat to democracy—credited the former president with too much power, puffing him up instead of knocking him down. Walz might have added that it has been a bust. Trump is currently ahead in most polls.

Forget fear, then, and try mockery. “You know there’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz told MSNBC. “That stuff is weird.” His basic message has since been echoed by a pro-Harris super PAC and by the official Harris campaign. Walz’s schtick also builds on Harris’s attempt to reclaim the word freedom from the right: She launched her campaign with an ad soundtracked by Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” framing abortion rights as “the freedom to make decisions about your own body.”

The decision to echo Walz is a big rhetorical shift in the Democratic campaign, and it’ll be fascinating to see whether the strategy sticks. One of the most reliable proxies for voting intention is asking whether a candidate “shares my values,” and the Walz line is an elegant variation on this theme. So was the rest of the Minnesota governor’s CNN appearance, which he began by faux-casually slipping in the fact that he was once a schoolteacher.

A normal job, in other words. Regular. Not weird.

Now, weirdness is a bipartisan weapon: The first big attack line on Harris was the charge that her laugh was upsetting and alienating. Vance’s “childless cat lady” criticism, captured on a three-year-old video, was an assertion that Democrats are out of touch with ordinary families.

And yet having the charge of weirdness thrown back at them has clearly wounded many on the right: Vance visibly recoiled when a Fox News reporter asked him about it. He knows that the mainstream media and political influencers are currently conducting a referendum on his weirdness, and his future career could depend on the outcome. The Republican Hillbilly Elegy version of Vance is broadly appealing: the poor kid from Ohio who became a Marine. The Democratic portrait of him is not: the venture capitalist whose friends don’t like democracy that much. The weirdness charge ties him to Silicon Valley, from which he draws much of his support, and which is one of America’s great bastions of oddness: The prospect of an AI singularity is a concern for people who have good stock options.

[Elaine Godfrey: Kamala Harris’s white-boy summer]

The weirdness accusation also pops the bubble of the online right, revealing just how far some of its members have drifted from the median American voter in social and economic terms. Many right-wing influencers with big followings on Rumble, Truth Social, X, and YouTube are wedded to the idea that left-wing elites are the ones who are out of touch with real America. Their vision of the Democratic Party is a drag queen holding hands with a childless woman, forcing you to go to an HR seminar on whiteness, forever. The online right has had great success with this attack because it has some truth to it—to casual observers, the baroque etiquette rules and unchallenged assumptions of “White Women for Kamala” are indeed extremely cringe. The Democratic message of inclusivity and equality has become female-coded: Voters who say that men are getting a raw deal in today’s America are much more likely to vote Republican. Many of Harris’s stances from the “peak woke” era will not serve her well in a national election in 2024.

But the online right has its own fair share of shibboleths and unexamined beliefs. Its echo chamber is so big and so luxurious—people are out there making millions by interviewing their buddies about how correct they both are about everything—that some of its most influential members have forgotten that they, too, do not live regular lives or hold regular opinions or use the same vocabulary that regular people do. Hence the feigned naivete about coordinated attack lines. Hence the casual use of words such as longhouse—a kind of dwelling found in matriarchal early societies—to invoke fears of a supposedly overfeminized culture. And hence the attempt to pretend that negative campaigning is a new and disgustingly feminine pastime. (If using gratuitous and unfounded personal insults makes Kamala Harris a “mean girl,” then Donald Trump is Queen Bee of the Plastics.)

Trump has always prospered by presenting himself as an ebullient eccentric rather than a tedious monomaniac—not the kind of guy who would corner you at a party to talk about the upsides of colonialism or his favorite 19th-century philosopher. He is wary even of the great and abiding obsessions of the right, such as abortion and gun rights. Notably, his campaign’s new attack ad focuses on broad criticisms of Harris’s record (the border crisis, fentanyl-related deaths, “migrant crimes”) rather than being insider bait about her being a “DEI hire” and a cat lady, or mocking her laugh or her love of Venn diagrams. Presumably his campaign has also decided that the fixations of the too-online right are a bit weird.

After all, if you talk about shark attacks and natalism, and the other side puts up Tim Walz—a cheery, red-faced man who looks like a mall Santa who’s just taken off his beard—then, yes, you are going to look weird.