Weird Men

The long-term struggle against the strange, fascist far-right

Democrats are finally going for it, they’re shaking off the ‘when they go low we go high’ approach, as Rolling Stone recently wrote, and instead repeatedly calling their fascist opponents weirdos. If the temper tantrums that people from JD Vance to Vivek Ramaswamy are throwing in response is any indication, it’s getting under their skin. And it’s simply true: the Republican Party has become the party of odd fascists who spend too much time online, too much time thinking about the genitalia of queer people and kids, and too much time promoting ideas that the vast majority of people immediately recoil from.

Now, Trump and Vance are especially easy to level these charges against, because these are two remarkably weird men. Donald Trump has said so many strange and off-putting things that they can and probably have filled books. He’s consistently been immensely unpopular outside his base, and adding JD Vance to the ticket brings in the most unpopular Vice Presidential candidate of all time. Comments about cat ladies and headlines about couches and dolphins certainly haven’t helped him dodge the weird loser allegations. But their weirdness goes far, far beyond being unappealing and into the sociopathic, into the type of guy who makes you wonder if they hurt animals in their spare time.

Of course it’s not just that these guys act odd, and say immensely unpleasant, weird things, which is all true. It’s also that their policy preferences are disturbing and that when their particular brand of weirdness is translated into action it makes for real unpleasantness and mass harm. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been leading the charge on this front, saying: “These are weird people on the other side,” and they “want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room, that’s what it comes down to … These are weird ideas.”

Notorious weirdo Vivek Ramaswamy, who no one knew about before he suddenly ran for President, has also added his voice to the growing chorus of Republicans crying about being labeled weirdos. And, in doing so, he accidentally gave us the perfect example of a guy who doesn’t just have strange and off-putting mannerisms, but wants to do a whole lot of unpopular and detrimental stuff if he ever gets power.

Here is a guy who says that the real enemy is the deep state, January 6th was an inside job, and that the Democratic Party wants to replace white people with immigrants (white supremacists' great replacement theory) complaining about being called weird. He is also a 9/11 truther, wants to abolish the Department of Education, and wants a national abortion ban. The list could go on and on, but the short version is that far-right is now the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is the far-right. And these fascist freaks are categorically out of touch with most Americans. In their pitiful attempt to push back against being called strange, they’re acting like the Democrats are suddenly being big bad bullies. Setting aside the fact that Republicans have (often successfully) engaged in far worse name-calling and lying and disparaging of their opponents for decades, there’s also the fact that, while these men are themselves odd and off-putting, it’s ultimately their policies that are miles away from anything most people would consider normal. And that is a real danger worth ostracizing and calling out loud and clear.

It’s no surprise that Republicans can’t help but respond to being called weird with increasingly strange comments that reinforce the claim. They’ve become so divorced from normalcy that waving around accusations of DEI, calling the Olympics satanic, and instantly developing a conspiracy about every major world event are now reflexes for much of the party. Trump didn’t help their cause when he added JD Vance to the ticket, a man, who unsurprisingly, gives us countless prime examples of the weird guy to terrible policy pipeline.

Vance’s comments that “Parents who use daycare don't value their kids” are about as illustrative as it gets. Your first reaction is probably something like “What is he even talking about??” At least I know that was my initial response. Parents send their kids to daycare because they have to work, it’s as simple as that. But Vance, like his increasingly weird party, is advocating for some strange ‘traditional’ views that say wives should stay home and take care of their kids, presumably homeschooling the kids as well while feeding them raw milk, if I understand this new brand of ‘traditional’ conservative. But immediately on the other side of this sheer oddness lies the awful policies of defunding childcare, defunding public schools, and giving public money to religious and wealthy private educational institutions. Here is the short pipeline from being a right-wing weirdo to policies that are detrimental to almost everyone other than their unpleasant little cadre.

These particular men who now dominate the GOP are part of a bigger trend, one we need to look at here. The growing weird guy fascist pipeline has in many ways produced the Vancification of the Republican party, and it’ll take more than beating Republicans in one election to shut it down. Fascist internet culture is very odd, and not by accident. The leaders of this far-right push are well aware that their ideas aren’t popular with most people, and that’s part of the reason they oppose democracy. It’s part of the reason JD Vance subscribes to a weird authoritarian techo-fascist school of thought. But the memes and websites and dark corners of the internet that the alt-right pipelines guide young men down go far, far beyond that. In investigating this cesspool I’m sure I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, but the racist, predatory, gross culture that has been cultivated over there would instantly repulse 90% of people or more. Rape jokes, genocide jokes, and memes depicting every repugnant theme you can imagine are normal on the fascist side of the web.

This is what fascist leaders want. They want anti-social men, and their pipeline strives to both draw them in and create them because once they’re isolated from the rest of society other fascist goons will be the only ones who share their views, and thus the alt-right becomes their only community. So, although they’re a fringe minority, we do have a real problem with the sheer number of these “weird men” and the mainstreaming of misogynistic, racist, anti-queer views. Their success is marked by how prominent this type of man has become in the Republican Party, but the problem goes far beyond the GOP. Teachers report young boys spewing this crap in their classrooms, women everywhere report the effects of this anti-social radicalization, and the pipeline is still recruiting as we speak.

What Democrats are capitalizing on right now is a silver lining, which is that the odd, misogynistic, fascist ideas are still not widely popular, and are in fact widely off-putting. But the "aggrieved entitlement" that a growing number of men feel, especially but not solely young white men, is dragging society into a prolonged struggle for real democracy and even just basic respect for people who aren’t in the weird men in-group. The strangeness of the right is directly related to the chip-on-the-shoulder mentality many of these men hold that says “If the world is no longer built for me I will throw a tantrum.” And although the world is still largely built for them, it isn’t to the degree that it was sixty or one hundred and sixty years ago. So now, unfortunately, their collective tantrum has made them perfect recruits into a decades-long effort to overthrow any semblance of democracy in the U.S. and install a Christo-fascist dictatorship. 

So it’s good to stop simply going high and start really combating these weird men. It’s good to call out Trump and Vance and their salivating acolytes as strange fascists whose weird policies would mean children being forced to get pregnant but being forbidden to read books. And at the same time we must realize that we’re embroiled in something that will continue far beyond this election, whether we want it to or not. We’re engaged in a struggle initiated by some very off-putting men, primarily, and we need to combat patriarchy by fostering more well-adjusted and less isolated and antagonistic men. This long-term work is crucial both for the happiness and safety of everyone in a relationship with men, and for society to dodge the fascist bullet steadily flying towards us all.

As a society that means men unlearning a whole lot, and teaching other men to do the same; it means replacing old ideas of domination and what society owes us with concepts of egalitarianism, justice, and responsiblity to other, combined with the knowledge that happiness is not a zero-sum game – a world where non-men succeed is in no way a world where men inherently suffer. Not at all. But we also need more community, more ways to come together and find fulfillment. All of us need that now more than ever. We need to build and offer alternatives to both the alienation of the status quo and to the weirdness-producing right-wing misogynist ecosystem. This is a long-term, collective societal reshaping and restructuring that requires engagement from men and everyone. Fascism must be crushed on many fronts, from buildng anti-fascist power to building labor power to building a mass movement to defeat the right. And, ultimately, building an infinitely better alternative society where we systemically care for one another is the surest way to cut the far right off at the knees. So let’s give them no quarter, no room to recruit disaffected men into their anti-social, destructive, weirdness pipeline.