OPINION: ‘Weird’ is the most effective insult Democrats have tried. Here’s why.

In the summer of 1946, “The Adventures of Superman,” a popular radio show for kids, began a story arc called “The Clan of the Fiery Cross.” In it, the Man of Steel takes on a shadowy xenophobic organization that, quite intentionally, resembled the Ku Klux Klan. The head of the clan is an evil manipulator, but the rank and file are presented mostly as dopes. In one scene, the Grand Scorpion dismissively refers to his followers as “suckers” and “little nobodies.” It comes out that he’s only after their monthly dues; the racism was the tool, not the goal.

The storyline was suggested by a man named Stetson Kennedy, who had infiltrated the KKK and approached producers with the idea of using pop culture to humiliate the organization. Apparently, it worked. In Kennedy’s memoir, he describes attending a meeting after the Superman episodes began airing, and watching hell break loose: “When I came home from work the other night,” one member complained, “there was my kid and a bunch of others, some with towels tied around their necks like capes and some with pillowcases over their heads. The ones with capes was chasing the ones with pillowcases all over the lot. When I asked them what they were doing, they said they were playing a new kind of cops and robbers called Superman against the Klan.” The man continued: “I never felt so ridiculous in all my life! Suppose my own kid finds my Klan robe some day?”

This story has fascinated me, a former English major, ever since I learned about it in the 2005 book “Freakonomics.” It’s all about the power of word choice, rhetoric and peer pressure. Kennedy’s disgruntled Klan member had presumably joined the group because he wanted to seem powerful and noble to his loved ones, and powerful and terrifying to minority groups. But then he was forced to see his own actions through the lens of Superman, at which point he realized that maybe his fellow citizens didn’t see him as heroic or scary. They just thought that he was kind of … lame.

Which brings me to “weird.”

If you hadn’t noticed, Kamala Harris’s supporters have rolled out a new line of attacks against Donald Trump. Whereas the former president may have previously been heralded as a supervillain and aspiring dictator, Harris’s surrogates are more and more just describing him as a big weirdo.

“He’s just a strange, weird dude,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) told an assembled group of 60,000 “White Dudes for Harris” at an online fundraiser Monday evening. Walz is, if not the inventor of this tactic, its most skilled proponent. “These guys are just weird,” he laughed at another recent speaking event, later continuing: “We’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on MSNBC commented that vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s remarks about childless women were “a really strange take,” and said Vance’s “weird style” was going to bring about “weird policies.” Later, Buttigieg went on “The Daily Show” and told Jon Stewart that Vance had “turned out to be,” as he described it, “odd.”

Clearly, at least some of this rhetoric has started getting to at least some Trump surrogates:

“This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile,” posted Vivek Ramaswamy on X. “This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest. … Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please.”

“I wish (I) knew a better way to describe it,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) replied. “Your party’s obsession with drag shows is creepy. Your candidate’s idea to strip the vote away from people without kids is weird. The right wing book banning crusade is super odd. It’s just so so far outside the mainstream.”

In various television appearances or speeches, Walz has described his word choice as a deliberate way to take the wind out of Republican sails. Yes, Trumpy rhetoric might be bullying and authoritarian, Walz has said, but bullying behavior is often just masking cowardice.

But I think that the exchange between Ramaswamy and Murphy — and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who chimed in with, “Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy” — more accurately gets at the dynamics at play.

A central pillar of Trump’s campaign is the idea that liberals are perverted misfits who want to tear down American values. Married men and women who have children are normal, but couples without children, or parents without partners, or children with two dads, or women who have two children but also once had an abortion — those people are morally deficient. All of this is old-school puritanism, but Trump brought it all into a pep rally atmosphere. Not only was it morally correct to pass judgment, but it was also festive and fun. They were strong; libs were weak. They were right; libs were wrong. They were with the prom king, who was telling them they were awesome, and the libs were outcasts in the library, probably being read to by a drag queen.

“Weird” intrudes on that narrative. It doesn’t entirely upend it, but it does plant a seed of doubt. What if, instead of being admired or feared, they are instead being laughed at? What if, instead of edge lords, they are actually just the kids in the corner eating glue off their hands?

“They called us weird so I’ll call them weirder,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), according to an X post — but “weird” is an insult that doesn’t work both ways. Gay kids, trans kids, cat ladies and horse boys have already spent an entire lifetime being told they were weird, and they have learned to wear it as a badge of honor if they need to. But when your whole political movement is based on a return to some “Pleasantville” vision of American normalcy, “weird” actually hurts. It’s not great to wonder whether, in the eyes of your fellow citizens, you’re just kind of ... lame.

At a broader level, what “weird” does is reject the entire premise of the Republican platform, something that Democrats have seemed to be doing more frequently since Harris took over the ticket. In the White Dudes for Harris online rally, which featured speakers such as Mark Hamill and Josh Groban, one early speaker lamented that, “When White men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on,” and that “masculinity as a trope has been ceded to the MAGA right.”

Other speakers used their time to argue that the most fundamental characteristics of masculinity — strength, the ability to provide and protect — were qualities demonstrated by the left, not the right.

“They have Kid Rock, Kevin Sorbo and a dolphin aficionado,” offered actor Josh Gad, best known as the voice of Olaf in Disney’s Frozen franchise. “We have the Hulk, Samwise Gamgee (and) Luke Skywalker.”

Is any of this going to work? I don’t know. But it seems like a more effective strategy than, say, calling Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton did during the 2016 election. “Deplorable,” it turned out, could easily be transformed into “badass” in the eyes of some supporters. “Weird” doesn’t work like that. Because it’s not about a collection of behaviors. It’s about an unpleasant fug that gets on you and follows you, one that you can’t even fix because you can’t even smell.

In the parlance of Michelle Obama: They go low, we go “ew.”

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. In 2022 she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the field of commentary. She’s the author of several novels, most recently, “They Went Left.”

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.