Almost immediately upon becoming the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris started attacking her Republican opponents, Donald Trump and JD Vance, as weird. To emphasize the difference between the Democratic ticket’s ostensible normalness and the Republicans’ alleged weirdness, she picked the mostly non-descript Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach. No sooner had Harris delivered the broadside that “weird” became a popular meme on social media criticisms of the Republican ticket.
What does the label refer to specifically? That’s hard to say because Harris and Walz have not litigated the case against the supposed weirdness of Trump and Vance because they are running a “vibes” election campaign mostly free of content. Harris and Walz seem to be implying that Republicans like Trump and Vance want to tell women what to do with their bodies by falsely claiming that a second President Trump term will see a federal ban on abortion. Their attacks often respond to an old Vance quote that politicians that do not have biological children are “cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake” in America’s future.
Trump has called people like himself and Vance “extremely normal” and have unsuccessfully tried to deflect the “weird” charge back to Democrats although without much success.
I tweeted that Walz is hardly normal, that his views are indeed strange, noting specifically a law he signed that required feminine hygiene products in men’s and boys’ restrooms. Apparently the Democrats believe that a boy can be a girl by wishing it so and more implausibly that he might need to change tampons between math class and recess. That the rules apply even to elementary schools shows the lengths to which Democrats are willing to accommodate the gender fetishes of a noisy but tiny minority who wish to deny biological reality and require that everyone else play along with their delusions. Even if men who want to pass as women could menstruate, if I recall my old health class accurately, this is not something that the kids in grade school would need. It is the definition of weird to put feminine hygiene products in the restrooms of kindergarten and Grade 1 kids.
Walz also signed a bill legalizing abortion through all nine months. Democrats in Congress want to pass a law overturning all state restrictions on abortion. Polling shows that the majority of Americans want abortion to be legal in the first trimester and then their views become more complex but generally more pro-life later in pregnancy. You could make the case that pro-life Republicans who support total bans with no exception for rape and incest are “weird” by being outside the majority view on abortion, but it is as easily made about Democrats who do not want any restrictions on prenatal homicide. As Trump noted during the debate, Democrats have no trouble “executing” babies when they are born and while the “fact-checkers” say that is untrue, Democrats have generally opposed any version of an born-alive abortion survivors law that would provide legal protection to babies who survive botched abortions.
It is true that Vance holds ideas that are unusual but which still may be worth exploring, including giving parents extra votes that they will cast on behalf of their children (Demeny voting. He also holds ideas about nationhood and respect for ancestors that were once common but are now viewed suspiciously by self-styled progressives as patriarchal and racist.
Of course, the Harris-Walz charge of weirdness has tapped into a sentiment that is skeptical of Trump’s brand of Republicanism but also worried about being viewed disfavourably by one’s family, colleagues, and neighbours. A major reason the left-wing rachet we see in shifts of public opinion is that many people just go along with the flow.
No sooner had Harris labeled her political opponents weird than the Trudeau Liberals began tossing the charge against Pierre Poilievre and his Conservative Party. Again, it is the label not the argument that matters, although it has been difficult to make their attacks stick. Considering Justin Trudeau’s, er, flamboyance, Poilievre probably doesn’t seem all that odd. And whereas Trump and Vance take so-called controversial opinions on hot-button issues like immigration and family policy, Poilievre and his party have gone out of their way to present as non-threatening to Ottawa’s consensus on a plethora of topics such as immigration and abortion.
As our editorial on the opposite page makes clear, the far Left looks to redefine what marriage or a woman is and those who do not buckle to every newfound and newfangled fashion, that hold true to biological reality or traditions spanning millennia, are called out as weird, curiosities from another age. We see this with exhortations to “get with the times” and “you can’t turn back the clock.” Get with the times often means getting in line with the reliably left-wing New York Times editorial page. As for not being able to turn back the clock, that’s pure nonsense; of course, you can turn back the clock if it is wrong; it would be madness not to. And societies should be able to turn back the clock on cultural changes just as next month Canadians will turn their clocks back to standard time. Standard sounds a lot like normal. It’s time to return to normalcy.
– Paul Tuns
