'Weird' isn't the point. 'Weird' is the path

Everyone wants another hot take on why Kamala Harris presidential campaign and its allies have apparently struck gold with the simple message that Donald Trump and his most devoted fans are, and we all know this to be true, weird. Wait, you don't? You don't want another take? You've seen too many takes already? You saw that horrible, ridiculous Thomas Friedman take and it murdered your eternal soul, and you never want to hear any analysis from anyone about anything ever again?

Well too bad, because pestering people to start treating the Republican cavalcade of freaky racists, misogynists, open incels and conspiracy nuts not as important policy thinkers with valid and reasonable points to make but instead as laughingstocks who the press has validated with important-person status out of sheer gullibility has been my entire reason for existing for the past 20 years. Welcome to my wheelhouse, everyone.

It took only a few press releases from the Harris campaign before Republicans and their Serious Person allies started heading for their fainting couches. At this point we're about here:

And that's indeed instructive because the Project 2025-allied fascist right doesn't get particularly miffed when you point out that they're backing the architects of an attempted coup, and nobody gets terribly indignant when you call them fascists or point out all the various ways their narrative of "national rebirth to be achieved by purging the homeland of ideological enemies, using the law when possible and going outside the law when it is not" is fascism in its purest form, but call the people ranting about communism and demanding to inspect children's genitals weird and they will go All The Way Off on you.

What's going on here is actually pretty simple. Authoritarianism is about power. And mockery is about removing power.

In order for authoritarianism to take hold, the authoritarians must be seen as serious thinkers who in fact might have the answers to whatever national problems they are promoting as supposedly existential. This is true of politics in general, but it becomes more true the more you work your way up towards the pinnacle of authoritarianism, were making fun of the ruling party is invariably criminalized—or will simply get you executed outright. Nobody is going to pledge to upend a nation's government to instead install a man wearing a duck costume and tooting a kazoo, at least nobody other than people who are also wearing duck costumes and tooting kazoos. A movement loses power when the public finds it mockable, rather than revolutionary.

Most importantly, the members of a nation's public most attracted to authoritarian movements tend to be the faux-hypermasculine, self-imagined Great Men who cannot stand being mocked for their own unusual beliefs and who see, in Dear Leader and his associates, validation that those beliefs are not weird, and not out of the mainstream, and not worthy of scorn. That is the whole premise of their support: They don't want to be mocked. They want to be treated as Important.

The more gravitas The Movement can be designed to have, the more important and influential its public backers can imagine themselves to be. But the opposite is also true; if The Movement is instead broadly made fun of as a collection of clowns and crackpots, suddenly it becomes a much more uncomfortable experience for these would-be movement members to publicly declare themselves fans. It becomes not a way to project gravitas, but just another declaration that makes those around them either laugh at them or look at them with scorn.

Think of flamboyantly masculine showmen like former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan, one of the celebrities that graced Trump's Republican renomination for the presidency during a convention that attempted to exude an aura of strength and inevitability. You can either think of Hulk Hogan as an avatar of masculinity, a hard-fighting crazy-eyed warrior against whichever manufactured enemy the broader kayfabe has most recently installed, or you can think of him as a greased-up man in his underpants shrieking performatively at similarly greased-up co-workers for the sake of gawking and possibly drunk crowds.

Which of those two baskets does Donald Trump himself fit into? It depends on who you ask. Movement cartoonists like Ben Garrison draw him as the first, and apparently non-satirically. The people who know Trump best seem to lump him in the second category. But it's been the press that's most enforced public perceptions of supposed masculinity, power, and authority in Trump, and it's done so with at-least-borderline-unethically aggressive rewrites of Trump's actual statements and outbursts to portray him as the statesman they imagine a sitting and former president ought to be rather than the relentlessly ignorant stream-of-consciousness ranter that video continually shows him to be.

The danger to Trump and his acolytes has always been the risk of exposure, Wizard of Oz-style, in which the figures being propped up as the historic Great Men ready to lead the nation into a new time of rebirth and renewal are instead revealed to be a collection of rapists, tax cheats, foreign agents, white supremacists, odious misogynists, greasy flim-flammers, cocaine fiends, and the sort of antisocial if not sociopathic freaks who believe that human society was perfected back when women weren't allowed to taunt men by showing ankles or having their own bank accounts.

And those things are, of course, all broadly true. Half of them describe Dear Leader himself, and you can tick off all of them off during any Mar-a-Lago-hosted brunch.

The danger of the 'weird' narrative to our new would-be authoritarians is that it suggests, quite reasonably, that the emperor might not have clothes.

Yes, these people are weird. But weird is not the actual attack. Weird is fine, and broadly celebrated. But the danger of the weird narrative to our new would-be authoritarians is that it suggests, quite reasonably, that the emperor might not have clothes. That Trump and his acolytes are not, in fact, Great Men capable of leading the nation into greatness but instead are just a bunch of grown men and women prancing around in duck costumes blowing cheap kazoos.

I will never understand why Democratic lawmakers have followed the press lead in insisting that the profoundly goofy, ignorant, and unserious Republicans now dominating the House and Senate be treated with dignity. It's possible that they presumed that treating clowns as clowns would do them little good inside the Capitol, where the clowns outnumber them and are seated across from them during every committee hearing, and would only have resulted in the bitter conservative whining we're now seeing, generating plenty of heat but accomplishing nothing. But there's really no downside in the public pointing out that, for example, throwing away 300 years worth of American and colonial laws to instead prioritize rules laid out by misogynistic witch hunters back in 16th or 17th century Europe is a damn weird position to take, and that by weird in this instance we mean "sounds a lot like something you'd read in a school shooter's online manifesto."

The same goes for Project 2025 insistences that the federal government discourage working on "the Sabbath." It goes for new laws looking to police children's genitals, and laws designed to monitor American women to ensure they are not "traveling for the purposes of abortion," and moves to restrict or ban birth control, and to abolish the Department of Education, and to imprison librarians, and to deport millions, and all the rest of it.

It's not just "weird." It is clown-staring-at-you-from-a-grove-of-trees weird. It is an uncanny level of creepiness that is difficult to put into words, and for the first time since these people became politically ascendent, public talk has finally turned to the question of whether these supposed bold thinkers are, in fact, just emotionally stunted freaks whose entire "ideology" consists of lashing out at whoever parts of society have done the most damage to their egos.

That is the danger fascists face. The danger that people will begin to look at the extreme and wildly illogical premises that the fascists have so proudly written down and think: Wait a minute. These people are just nuts. And the more the public narrative becomes not this is bold, but this is odd, the more such opinions snowball.

If we had a press that wasn't entirely in the pocket of whoever they're groveling for quotes from, this would have come up a long time ago. If either Barack Obama or Joe Biden weren't so compulsively wed to the notion of gentility in politics, even against people who want you dead, we might have reached the point regardless. But perhaps the biggest problem has been that Being Total Clownshoes isn't a state, but a continuum; we have so long been accustomed to the footprints of the Jonah Goldbergs and Ross Douthats that when Stephen Miller or Sebastian Gorka wandered onto the scene with rowboats strapped to their feet it didn't feel all that dissimilar from what had come before. Being Clownshoes has been a lucrative career choice for a long time now; we entered the danger zone when politics degraded into a mere size competition.

It's likely that weird will not be the narrative that carries us through to election day. It's being embraced now because it is the first damn time in a very long damn while that the public has been allowed to have fun at the fascists' expense; even when the news was full of the news that Donald Trump was being held liable for rape, or being indicted for hoarding ultra-classified state secrets in a Mar-a-Lago club closet like some sort of possibly-treasonous squirrel, or especially when he let loose a violent mob to assault Congress rather than abiding his own election loss, none of those things were fun because all of them are objectively horrible things to have happened. There's no fun in seditious conspiracy.

But this? I mean Jeebus, people, how the hell are you supposed to look at people like this and claim that this is a movement with deep insights into how to make even the local fast food joint "great again?"

What's going to happen first is that we will all have a great amount of fun finally acknowledging that the coup-backing movement propping up seditious felon Donald Trump is made up not of deep thinkers, but of freaks. And then, as we're now seeing, the people who laugh at the jokes will become a lot more eager to look up where the jokes are coming from.

None of these conservatives care if you call them weird. But they're terrified of losing the thin veneer of gravitas they've wrapped their batshit wacky opinions in. If they lose that "important person thinking important thoughts" designation, it doesn't matter if far-right billionaires throw a million dollars their way or 50 million, they've lost their ability to influence public opinion. They become has-beens.

I forget how many times I've done this, but I'm going to circle back to the Hunter theory of politics, which is that granting people "dignity" based solely on the office or title they hold is poisonous to a free society. People who advocate for atrocious things should be treated with contempt, and pointing to a sign on someone's door and declaring that that person ought to be immune to such contempt because they're simply too Important or Influential to be treated with the same scorn as you'd treat anyone who did not have that power and influence but who piped up with atrocities like "we should shoot Black Lives Matters protesters" or "we should throw Judy Blume in prison as a 'pornographer'" or who fouls conversations with talk about the proper "distribution of women." Would you invite those people to your house? Would you let them babysit your children?

The hell you would. No, people who scribble up ridiculous or viciously cruel plans can either shut their pie holes or face scorn for it. That is how decent societies are supposed to work; doling out at least some reputational consequences for contemptible behavior is the minimal requirement, otherwise nobody can claim to have been decent in the first place.

There is no public exemption that ought to make it within the bounds of polite discourse for members of Congress to attempt to overthrow the elected government, and for the press to continue to treat any of those seditious cretins with dignity, for journalists to not have hounded them out of office with laser-like and long-lasting focus on the depravity of those acts, is a sin against the public. There is no such thing as a distinguished racist, misogynist, or theocrat, or autocrat. Those who would deconstruct society in order to place themselves in charge of it are not free thinkers; they are merely malevolent.

So again I repeat: None of these people are people you'd trust to babysit your kids, or your pets, or are people you'd let use your bathroom unless you were already resigned to them stealing whatever pills they could find. We know them to be liars, cheats, and scoundrels. Just because they seek power does not mean they ought to be immune from public scorn. Calling them weird is the mildest possible pushback against these anti-everything freaks, and they are already up in arms over it.

The path to defeating authoritarians is to show the public that the authoritarians are not masculine defenders against evil, but small-minded cowards lost in their own impotence and delusions. It is to point out that banning abortion nationwide is not a path to national greatness, but merely bowing to the whims of sex-obsessed theocrats, and that waving flags on behalf of one of the most ridiculous liars modern America has ever propped up is not allying oneself with strength, but a demonstration of sublime gullibility. Make the voting public embarrassed to be associated with such ridiculous figures. Make the true believers begin to question whether they even want to be associated with each other.

This fascist moment is not made up of strong-minded ideologues writing out prescriptions for national rebirth; it is made up of antisocial misfits, incels, and other societal cast-offs who have used billionaires' wealth and the media's vapidity to pretend at dignity even as they tweet their little kazoos and get furious at anyone who laughs. Be the child who points and laughs, and the movement will fall. Strip the fascists of their pomp and pretensions and they have nothing—no intellect, no coherent ideology, and certainly no valor—to fall back on.