SAM DINGMAN: So, how many stories about Tim Walz and the Democrats using the word “weird” would you say you’ve heard over the last week and a half?
LAUREN GILGER: I’ve honestly lost count.
DINGMAN: Yeah seriously — it’s almost like weird has been normalized.
GILGER: So, why are we talking about it again?
DINGMAN: Well, I read an essay in Wired magazine recently that made me think it’s worth one more conversation about “l’affaire weird.” The piece was written by Angela Watercutter, and it’s called “Welcome to the Weird Era.”
Watercutter writes that everything we’ve been hearing for the last few days is true — “weird” gave the Democrats a colloquial, conversational line of attack against the Republican ticket. But she told me Democrats might want to be careful with it.
Full conversation
ANGELA WATERCUTTER: There is a bit of a line to walk, or a little bit less daylight than maybe one would imagine between calling something weird as a way of being like, “This way that you’re approaching this policy as intrusive or gives me ick” or something like that. But then there’s also like, weird is an insult.
If you call somebody weird on a school playground or something, you actually could be doing something that’s rather offensive, depending on why you’re calling them weird.
DINGMAN: Yeah, and as you point out in the piece, weird is sort of othering and exoticizing language, and that’s the kind of treatment that people in, say, the trans community often call out as dangerous.
WATERCUTTER: We might already be on Weird Discourse 3.0 in the sense that, like, it’s good for a week, like we all can have our moment and try to get our 15 seconds on cable news or whatever. But if they keep at it, you’re sort of reinforcing the message in a way that’s no longer helping you.
DINGMAN: So obviously we’ll see how long it lasts. But, your piece is titled “Welcome to the Weird Era,” which, as we’ve discussed, may already be over.
WATERCUTTER: I didn't do my job on that one, I guess.
DINGMAN: Well, no. This is what I’m interested in, actually. You also in the piece suggest that there are some ways in which weird rhymes with the zeitgeist beyond politics. Tell us about some of those.
WATERCUTTER: Yeah. I mean, I think that we also experience this, especially now as we are sort of constantly grappling with artificial intelligence, which feels like a bit of a leap to make — especially even saying and now I’m kind of like “that is a leap to make.” But I think that anytime you hear anything or anytime you see anything online, you almost have to go back and question whether it was made by a human or came from a human or is the thoughts of a human.
And that sort of unsettling-ness or unsettled-ness feels weird. Google Gemini has an ad that’s been running throughout the Olympics where a parent has asked AI to help their child write a letter to an athlete. And it’s like, or you could just write the letter with them right now. You don’t need a machine to do this. And I think people are pointing out those things as being strange or weird.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, you yourself, you yourself in the piece say, “Watching the peak of human athleticism while being fed images about how machines can do things better is really disconcerting.”
WATERCUTTER: Yes. Yeah, that’s the thing, right? It just sort of feels odd to be like, Simone Biles can do all these things that I would never be able to do in a million years. But you know what I can do is I can write. And to see a commercial after a women's gymnastics performance that’s telling me, “Well, if you ever need to write a letter, we have a tool for you.” I’m like “No you don’t.”
DINGMAN: How dare you?
WATERCUTTER: I actually can do that! Once you sort of have a word like that, it’s much easier to spot other things in the culture that you can sort of apply it to.
DINGMAN: Well, this is why I think there may be — and I’m going to ask you if you agree with this — but that there may be a little bit more durability to weird as an element of discord, we may be headed towards Weird 4.0, say, at least. It’s because I think there’s there’s something about the effectiveness of Walz using this as a line of attack and the Democrats picking up on it that is related to digital culture has really, at this point, driven a pretty firm divide between us and, I don’t know, let’s call it organic experience. Like so much of what we digest is filtered through this digital layer that changes the way that we experience it.
And so there’s this kind of paradox in the fact that the Harris campaign, as you point out, has been able to use digital language as a way of speaking more directly in a very indirect medium.
WATERCUTTER: Yeah. Well, and I think that that also distills the power and the problems of memes and political discourse. Because they provide a really good lens through which to see a thing — having weird as the discourse or having something else, even the brat summer thing. Having that as the discourse finds ways to attract people who are trying to understand these bigger political policy conversations. It gives them a language to do it.
DINGMAN: Just to give you an example of this that I’m honestly just curious to get your take on, obviously: As you write about in the piece, weird starts being used as a line of attack by the Democrats, and then people like Vivek Ramaswamy and others start saying, “Let’s not turn this into a schoolyard bullying.”
And I had the opportunity last week for the station to go to the JD Vance rally here in Arizona. And I was asking folks in the line what they thought about the whole weird phenomenon as a line of attack. And a lot of them said “It’s just cheap, petty insults. It makes me feel like I’m in 5th grade again” — which, you know, understandable point, valid point to make.
But when I brought up the fact to some of those folks that Trump, who’s at the top of the ticket with Vance, has made similar sorts of insults kind of his stock-in-trade — like Meatball Ron, Crooked Hillary, the list goes on. They said, “Well, that’s different.” And that for me was a moment of flummox, I have to admit, a moment where I felt like I was encountering this paradox that we’re discussing.
WATERCUTTER: That conversation is the thing, right? Like having that conversation in and of itself is also weird because what do you say when somebody says, “Well, just because the person I happen to support says it or does this too, that’s different”? There is no sort of comeback for that. We’re kind of in this rhetorical ouroboros.
We’re kind of at a place where, because of the digital layers that you were talking about, it’s getting harder and harder for everybody to understand each other. We kind of — and I’m using the most royal “we” possible — we kind of stopped agreeing on what baseline truth was or baseline reality was.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well and you’re making me remember, actually, there was one woman I spoke to who said they can throw whatever names they want to at Donald Trump. They can call him weird. They can call him a convicted felon. But none of it’s going to stick. And I said, “Well, I do feel obligated to point out he has actually been convicted of a felony.” And she took a deep breath and she goes, “But he’s appealing.”
WATERCUTTER: Is digital culture catching up with politics, or is politics catching up with digital culture? It goes both ways and it has always gone. But like it has always been sort of a two-way street where one kind of feeds into the other.
DINGMAN: There’s that there’s that ouroboros again.
WATERCUTTER: Yeah.
