From last week…
…that was a joke, but today’s Morning Memo features a NYT article about Walz’s Machiavellian rise (archived link), which reports that Walz began using the “Weird” word last February!
It just so happens that on February 3 Joe Ragazzo wrote this:
Something I wonder about a lot is if there is, for lack of a better term, a Weirdness Threshold, beyond which a political movement just dies. It seems like there is but it moves a lot. It used to be that just one erratic yell could do the job. There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the Dean Scream. Taylor Swift seems to be provoking a lot of right wing operatives into testing the Weirdness Threshold. And I wonder what, if anything, it means, for the weirdness of the online right to be exposed to a mainstream audience.
[gives examples of MAGA Swift/Kelce weirdness]
I could be wrong, but I don’t think most people ever think about these things. They think it’s weird shit. They also think it’s kinda weak and loserish. It may be the case that the online right is immune to being too weird, but it also may be the case that Taylor Swift helps inadvertently highlight just how crazy things are getting over there to people who otherwise wouldn’t believe it was possible.