A haphazard Kamala Harris campaign plucked Walz straight from cable news, where he was effectively defining the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird” throughout the mid-summer of 2024. Clips of Walz — a Midwestern Dad seemingly straight from central casting — were going viral on social media during the heyday of Couchgate: baseless allegations that JD Vance had once engaged in sexual activity with a couch. Indeed, just one day after Harris named him to the ticket, Walz referenced the meme about Vance’s supposed lust for living-room furniture. 

“I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Walz smirked. “See what I did there?” (Vance was widely regarded as the winner of their debate.)

It was an early sign that the second-term governor might not have been as wholesome as depicted. As the country acquainted itself with Walz, the signs became impossible to miss. In retrospect, it’s remarkable the Harris campaign ever took a gamble on a man with Walz’s record — though unsurprising in the context of the Democrats’ Biden-era hubris. 

On paper, Walz had characteristics that made the consultant class swoon. He was a teacher, a veteran, a football coach, a gun owner, a father of two from the Upper Midwest. Like the uncle you catch up with every Thanksgiving, Walz was affable and balding and fluent in sports. 

Vibes aside, Walz had also pursued a progressive agenda in a rural state. This made him an enormously attractive pick for Harris, who was herself a perfect embodiment of the party’s rudderless direction in 2024. Democrats needed to maintain the Biden coalition by appealing to suburban voters and winning back some of the white working class that Hillary Clinton lost, while also keeping young voters and activists energized.

Walz was slightly less popular than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris’s other option for the ticket, but a 54% majority of registered voters in Minnesota approved of his job as governor. As Walz ascended to the top of the ticket, multiple outlets profiled his shift Left-ward since serving in Congress. “How Tim Walz Went From ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ to Progressive Champion,” ran a headline from National Public Radio.

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CNN enumerated the items in Walz’s progressive agenda: “codified protections for abortion access; restored voting rights for felons who’ve completed their sentences; driver’s licenses for people regardless of their legal status; a state child-tax credit; free public college for families making less than $80,000 annually; protections for gender-affirming care; and a paid family and medical leave program.” Most Democrats couldn’t pull that off with a 54% approval rating, so national Democrats saw in Walz a relatable “prairie populist” who could sell the Harris campaign’s cultural progressivism to middle America. 

Enter “Tampon Tim.” Trump World immediately neutralized Walz’s efficacy as a critic of “weirdness” by calling attention to a bill Walz signed that required public schools to provide tampons and pads “to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students.” In other words, Walz put tampons in boys’ bathrooms; Trump knew just how to brand him. 

A closer examination revealed other obvious red flags. Despite being heralded as a white-working-class whisperer, the governor did poorly outside Minnesota’s deep-blue urban centers in both his 2018 and 2022 races, losing most rural counties handily. Pundits and consultants may not fully realize how wealthy and how progressive the Minneapolis suburbs have become. A re-election landslide in Hennepin County won’t translate to support from swing voters in the Rust Belt. 

Walz’s record included a burgeoning fraud scandal of massive proportions among the state’s Somali community; 70 people had already been indicted in the Somali fraud ring by the time Harris tapped him. The record also included Walz’s memorably horrific response to the George Floyd riots of 2020 that permitted the state to burn rather than allowing police to intervene; inconsistencies in his military record; and a deeply strange affinity for China (he made a whopping 30 trips to China over the course of three decades, including on his own honeymoon). 

If anything, Harris may have caused a net drag on her campaign by adding Walz — and that wasn’t an easy thing to pull off, since few people’s votes are influenced by veep picks. As Republicans battered Harris with “Kamala is for they/them” ads, it didn’t help Democrats that “Tampon Tim” attacks only reinforced some voters’ impression of the ticket as being out of touch.

When Trump mounted the comeback of a lifetime and easily defeated Harris, Walz went back to Minneapolis with a bruised ego but also with national name recognition and clout in elite spaces. He slimmed down and dressed up. Yet by November, just one year after Walz was at the top of national politics, everything started to crumble. 

Conservative media had for years sought to draw national attention to swelling fraud allegations among Minnesota’s sizable Somali community. During the pandemic years, Somali scofflaws in Minnesota escaped scrutiny by weaponizing identity politics, fraudulently accepting millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that were supposed to be distributed to children and other vulnerable Minnesotans. As governor, Walz presided over the bureaucracy that allowed this to happen despite clear warning signs. 

Federal investigators, for example, uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services, as well as federal child-welfare and autism programs. Indicted and convicted conspirators, for example, would recruit Somali children into autism therapy services — even if a child didn’t have a diagnosis — facilitating fraudulent claims. Parents reportedly received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child, with some allegedly threatening to go to other fraud networks unless their rates were increased.

After City Journal and County Highway published exposes around Thanksgiving, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation of its own into the scandal. The headline was devastating: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch.” 

From there, the story took on a life of its own, both in mainstream media and Right-wing social media. Walz responded by taking responsibility and claiming to have cracked down on fraud while also putting up identitarian deflections: he talked about “white men” and said the Somali community was not to blame, even as some Somalis disagreed. 

The war of words between Trump and Walz heated up. As the scandal broke into mainstream spaces, Republicans saw an opportunity for high-profile immigration enforcement in a sanctuary city with clear-cut immigration problems. Trump launched “Operation Metro Surge,” dispatching thousands of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area and pledging to arrest “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens” in the area. 

The Associated Press notes that Trump “has repeatedly linked his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to fraud cases involving federal nutrition and pandemic-aid programs, many of which have involved defendants with roots in Somalia.”

The eyes of the country have been focused on Minnesota since the fraud story led to the ICE surge. While polling is hardly going in Trump’s favor, the picture emerging of Minnesota is one of a state in chaos — not unlike what unfolded in the summer of 2020 under Walz’s supervision. 

On Jan. 5, Walz shocked the political world by suddenly — and angrily — dropping his re-election bid, connecting his decision directly to the attacks he’d sustained, starting with the recent wave of fraud coverage. According to Axios, it was actually “fellow Democrats” who applied the “mounting pressure” that forced the governor’s hand. 

Just two days later, Renée Good died in her car, shot by an ICE officer on duty as part of Trump’s crackdown. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti died during an interaction with Customs and Border Patrol. Between the incidents, organized activists disrupted a Baptist worship service, drawing more criticism that Walz and his allies were inciting raucous disruptions that left ordinary Minnesotans vulnerable. 

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Walz, for his part, has practically begged anti-ICE rioters to remain peaceful — to no avail. While it’s clear the public is not cheering on Trump, anti-ICE disruptors are also causing property damage and creating a sense of general bedlam, producing viral moments on a near nightly basis in clashes with federal officers. 

After Pretti’s killing stirred up days of escalating confrontations, Trump and Walz tried to smooth tensions. Both sides claimed victory. Trump yanked Gregory Bovino, the face of the operation, out of Minneapolis. A MAGA pundit claimed that “Tim Walz and Jacob Frey bent the knee and local law enforcement is doing their job” as police made arrests shortly after Walz and Trump spoke. 

For Walz — whose fame rested on the idea that he could be the adult in the room, a normal Midwestern Democrat fed up with MAGA’s bullshit — the turn of events must sting painfully. 

Perhaps the most devastating rebuke of Walz’s career came on Monday from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After Pretti’s death, Walz lectured in a Sunday news conference: “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody is gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

The Holocaust Museum called this deeply offensive, releasing a statement the following day that read: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as anti-Semitism surges.” 

Walz, the embodiment of “Minnesota nice,” the man so relatable he could supposedly sell a progressive culture war to the white working class, was finally revealed to be reckless, divisive, and incompetent. The party’s over. The Walz balloon is now a sad piece of plastic lying on the floor. 

America, by contrast, is much wilder — with its mountains, deserts, hurricanes, bears and rattlesnakes. Unlike in the orderly UK, it’s easy to feel here as if the state has all but disappeared. Surely America’s vast landscape must play some role in shaping political life?

Certainly, following Donald Trump’s victory, it is impossible not to notice the profound contrast between the two countries. Over the last few years British politics has had a decidedly sad, small-country energy. Boris Johnson and “cash for curtains”, Liz Truss and the lettuce, Rishi Sunak in the rain, Keir Starmer snaffling free Taylor Swift concert tickets. In the US, on the other hand, we have an epic political drama that people will be writing about centuries from now. In the last three months, multiple assassins attempted to kill one candidate while plutocrats defenestrated a senile emperor so they could continue to exercise power through a talentless cypher. In a late plot twist, the plutocrats were thwarted, and now their nemesis is preparing to return to the seat of power. Clearly, this level of drama can only happen in a big country where people carve the faces of their greatest leaders into a mountain.

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By Daniel Kalder

The physical environment shapes politics in other ways too. Consider the perpetual debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment, for instance. This is extremely perplexing to outsiders, partly because they do not understand the sacred role of the Constitution. But there is also a pragmatic reason for gun ownership, which I learned from my father-in-law, who grew up in the Texas panhandle. Out there, he told me, the counties are huge, and police are few and far between. Dial 911 and you might be waiting a long time for help to arrive. In a wilderness full of coyotes, snakes, and bears, you need to be able to protect yourself.

You see this sentiment reflected in American attitudes to hunting. When I was growing up in the UK, the image of a hunter was a toff in a red coat, perched on a horse, setting his dogs on a fox. In the US, there is still an element of man against nature, of waiting for hours to shoot dinner, or perhaps to take out a feral hog with razor-sharp tusks charging at you at 25 miles per hour. This is also why the Democrats sent their bumbling vice presidential candidate Tim Walz into a field with a gun: to demonstrate that he was worthy of the male vote, he had to inflict violence upon nature. When he was filmed struggling to load his weapon, he was mercilessly ridiculed, and instantly lost credibility.

Another way the landscape has shaped American politics is by its sheer scale. A large nation forges a different type of politician: to play the game of power in such an immense country, you must become big yourself. In Britain we have a vestigial memory of this; anyone who reads history cannot help but be struck by the fact that our imperial elites, fighting uprisings across the globe while translating Thucydides for amusement, seem like an alien species. Small island Britain no longer has need of such grandiose figures, and for decades has only produced mediocrities and nonentities. Americans, by contrast, have the confidence of a people who have conquered an epic landscape. Trump made his money by developing the land and erecting garish hotels on what was once wilderness. But he is only one rich man among many. America’s rulers know that there is much left to exploit, but you cannot do that if you go small, so the land forges grandiose liars, monumental crooks, and titanic phonies.

America’s landscape is abundant in resources, and this, too, plays out in political debates. In the UK, the case for renewable energy is bolstered by an understanding that resources are finite: one day the oil will run out, and that will be that. In America, though, there are deserts, forests, mountains, glaciers, swamps. How can a land so huge and diverse not feed itself, make its own cars, and produce its own energy? If you exhaust one area, you could just look elsewhere, or dig deeper, “drill baby drill”. This vastness also fuels a greater confidence in renewables. When I see a lone wind turbine in a field in the UK, I imagine it might just about provide enough power for a toaster. When I see the endless rows of turbines rotating slowly in the deserts of West Texas, I am struck by the transformative potential of the wind.

This sense of abundance also defines attitudes towards immigration. Economists may argue that mass immigration is necessary for growth, especially in the face of declining populations, but in Europe the emotional case is centred on inherited guilt: migrants should be welcomed as recompense for historical crimes of racism and imperialism. In America, the emotional case is more positive: it emphasises generosity, that there’s enough for everyone. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” goes the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed in bronze inside the Statue of Liberty. Pro-immigration arguments always point to the fact that America is a nation of immigrants, and that they should extend the good fortune their ancestors enjoyed to newcomers. Indeed, Matt Yglesias’s book One Billion Americans is predicated on America’s great abundance: not only could the land house one billion people, he argued, but this would lead to still greater riches. You could never make this argument on a small, crowded island such as the UK — nor in any European country, for that matter.

But just as America is blessed with great natural wealth, so it must regularly suffer the Wrath of God in the form of recurring natural disasters, such as hurricanes, forest fires and periodic earthquakes. These, too, have a direct impact on politics, although the extent of the political fallout of a disaster depends on which party is in power at the time. For instance, following Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s administration was pilloried for weeks and then months; the inadequate disaster response was clear evidence of Republican perfidiousness and racism. Following Hurricane Helene, however, there was infinitely less coverage, as the Democrat’s media stenographers feared harming Kamala Harris’s chances of success in the election. Perhaps, now that she has been soundly defeated, they will develop a curiosity about what is happening in the affected regions.

These disasters also provide regional politicians with opportunities to demonstrate that they are effective in a crisis — if they fail, then their foes make hay. The ice storm that struck Texas in 2021, causing major power outages across the state, was still being used in political attack ads against Governor Greg Abbott two years later. When Kamala Harris argued that Ron DeSantis was refusing her calls and using the crisis to play political games, Joe Biden, perhaps bitter from his ousting, took the opportunity to undermine her by calling DeSantis “gracious”.

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Yet when all is said and done, I think that the American landscape’s ultimate contribution to US politics is something that is at the core of the American character: optimism. The belief that better days are ahead has been central to American politics for as long as I have been alive, from Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” to Barack Obama’s “Hope” to Kamala’s “Joy” and even Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. No matter how polarised American politics becomes, both Republicans and Democrats agree that a new dawn is always right around the corner. And as traumatised as the Democrats may currently be by their crushing defeat, I am confident that they too will soon lift their gaze from the smouldering ruins of the Kamala campaign and once again find hope.

Those who view America from the outside may find this optimism baffling. The same goes for those who live in coastal metropolises and spend far too much time online, succumbing to feverish fantasies that a new civil war is looming. Yet step outside the dysfunctional cities, leave behind the demented discourse and actually enter the landscape and you will find that a sense of renewal is never far away. It’s everywhere: on the edge of a great lake, in the desert, on top of a mountain, or simply driving past immense fields, teeming with crops. This land — diverse, abundant, wild — is still young. And this is why, for all the talk of the end of America, and despite the corrupt media and devious politicians, optimism keeps breaking through.

Call it the Y2k debate, after the supposed “Y2k” computer bug that people feared would cause computers to crash when the clock struck midnight on the last night of 1999, causing widespread chaos and destruction. In the event, it was just another New Year. It was supposed to showcase pugilism and fireworks as the two embodiments of the countries’ enmities and divisions finally met face to face and lunged at each other for the glory of the respective tops of their tickets. But the match was so anticlimactic that Walz lightly scratching his nose — an old Method-acting technique — took on the proportions of a political event.

And, indeed, the seemingly spontaneous bit of being human was a refreshing break from Walz sticking so closely to what he had been told to say that he didn’t seem to have had time to work through and fully comprehend what he was saying. Repeating his oft-told account of meeting with the parents of children who had been killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, Walz said, “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters. I’ve seen it.” He didn’t come across as a huggable Midwestern dad so much as someone, like Kamala Harris herself, who had been caught in one of the most improbable rip tides in American history and swept out into water far over his head. Again and again, as Vance talked, Walz stared at him in a kind of panic over how he was going to respond. And when he did respond, he seemed astonished at the fact that he was actually speaking himself.

For all Vance’s porcelain poise, in contrast to Walz’s near hysteria, Vance stumbled in the opposite direction, toward a sort of Ivy-League passive-aggressive self-consciousness about his manners. He suddenly turned ingratiating toward his opponent, whom he had been maligning on the campaign trail for months. Walz: “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here.” Vance: “Me too, man.”

The sudden lurch from campaign-hustings vitriol to two playground adversaries making nice in the principal’s office should not have been a surprise. What used to be called “woke”, and now is a treacly national style, is really nothing more than a super-Darwinian society adapting to ever more virulent forms of competition and one-upmanship by turning the display of virtue — in this case, a fireworks display of reasonableness and respect — into a lethal social weapon.

Or to couch it in psychological terms, it is the political form of narcissistic mirroring. That occurs when someone who is unable to relate to another person on an intuitive, emotional level simply reflects back to the other person the latter’s own identity. Since such mirroring is the result of calculation rather than connection, it usually masks intense hostility, even hatred. This is why, in America for the past couple of decades, “empathy” has become sort of a celebrity emotion, as opposed to sympathy. If you feel sympathy toward someone, you both understand them and feel concern for them. Being empathetic is merely knowing how to impersonate someone. Last night, Walz and Vance oozed toxic empathy.

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And yet, such a mental process might well represent a glimmer of hope for a divided country. Politicians on each side live a double life. They feed their egos by roaring out to their followers just what they want to hear. But once on the national stage, the moment their opponent’s position becomes more popular than theirs, they assimilate it, no matter how much at odds it is with the sentiments they display to the faithful. After all, the faithful will understand. They do the same thing every day themselves. And there was Vance, right after the debate ended, rushing over to shake Walz’s hand just as Harris had rushed over to Trump to shake his hand right before their debate had started, thus establishing her dominance and authority.

Both candidates said they had much in common with each other so many times that you wondered whether the country was divided at all. Since running mates are famously assigned the role of Shakespearean assassin — you know what to do, just don’t tell me you did it — you wondered if this was simply a failure of nerve on the part of both men, a sudden surrender to the pious illusions of self-effacing harmony that seem to be the only glue, sanctimonious as it is, holding American society together.

But the phoney bonhomie was really a strategy shared, oddly, by both campaigns. Not in recent memory has the country been offered a choice between, in Harris, a vapid mediocrity, and in Trump, an unbalanced malignity. And not in recent memory have the running mates of the two presidential candidates been clearly more qualified than the latter — though barely so — to sit in the White House  The only difference between them is that Vance lies and gets away with it and Walz lies and gets caught. A bravura performance by either man would have only put the profoundly flawed tops of their tickets into greater relief.

One thing is for sure. If it turns out that Walz was telling another lie when he said that his son witnessed a shooting at a community center — Vance’s ears perked up at a possible opportunity before he quickly faked caring and concern — then he is finished as a viable vice-presidential candidate. Yet it would hardly matter. The debate began with a question posed by the moderators: Iran is two weeks away from making a nuclear bomb. Would you support an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear reactors? Neither Walz nor Vance answered the question. The tragedy in the pathetic comedy of last night was this anti-debate’s revelation of the vacuum at the heart of American power, and of the country’s growing helplessness to protect itself as history rushes to fill it.

A few weeks later and another line from the English canon sprang to mind. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the TV audience watched Gus Walz, Tim Walz’s 17-year-old son, who has a non-verbal learning disorder, turn frantically around, overstimulated, anxiety and uncertainty on his face. Tears ran down his cheeks as he clearly mouthed the words “That’s my Dad!” to his father, who stood on the stage accepting the nomination as Kamala Harris’s running mate. I have an experience of people with non-verbal learning disorders. Involuntarily, out of the depths, Milton’s immortal line from “Lycidas” came into my mind: “Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.” Politicians are fond of quoting Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature”, especially Obama, whose almost obsessive identification with Lincoln is provocative, to put it mildly. But the angel America needs is not an admonitory angel. It is an angel whose gaze starts from the mortal core of being human, groupless, as it were, and irreducibly particular, and guides society from that place.

The media distracted itself with some vicious MAGA types, who mocked Gus Walz’s display of vulnerability. Right-wing agitator Ann Coulter posted a picture of Gus with the comment: “Talk about weird.” It was good to expose these social atrocities, if only to give a glimpse of the moral atmosphere that will prevail should Trump clamber once again to the top.

Other people have written about their own experiences with children who, as Tina Brown movingly put it in The New York Times, “struggle with being different”. Brown did not use the term “neurodivergent”. That was admirable. “Neurodivergent” is a precious replacement for some blind, ugly slur. At the same time, why should people who are unquantifiably different be quantified with a clinical term that establishes their “difference” irrefutably, narrowly, scientifically, for all time and on every occasion? Brown ended by gratifyingly calling for national attention to be paid to human beings like her son.

There was also another way to regard the revelation of Tim Walz’s son. He is what progressives have desperately needed. Gus was not vulnerable because he belonged to a racial, or biological, or sexual group; he wasn’t vulnerable because the planet is in jeopardy; he wasn’t vulnerable because history had been unfair to people like him. He was vulnerable because he was entirely, specifically, uniquely human. Cyril Connolly once quipped that imprisoned in every fat man is a thin one wildly signaling to be let out. Well, imprisoned in every supposedly “normal” person is a person like Gus. Mortality and circumstance guarantee that inner person’s eventual emergence.

At the heart of the “caring” society put forward by Harris is a long tradition of moral imagination, beginning with Christ’s injunction to do unto others what you would have them do unto you. That runs through Kant’s precept of acting as though what you did everyone should do, to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. Rawls’s concept is a thought experiment in which you imagine that you know nothing about yourself: your abilities, your class, your race, your sex, your nationality, even your taste. What you do know is that all those qualities are distributed unequally in the hard, brutal world. The experiment requires you to create a society based on your ignorance of your situation, and on your knowledge of the cold, cruel world. Of course, any rational person would create a society based both on Christ’s injunction, and Kant’s precept.

It’s a thought experiment that the MAGA tough guys, the sophisticated conservative liberal-eye-pokers, and the hillbilly elegists would do well to perform. They should not fear the onset of national weakness as a result. On the contrary, the protection of that figure of Gus deep within every person requires a powerful, protective state that seeks rational, peaceful authority among the world of nations in order to guarantee the safety of its citizens. A strong, stable society builds itself out from the image of Gus Walz, along the lines of a million strategies, some soft, some hard.

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The progressive practitioners of piety politics would benefit from performing the experiment as well. Maybe the next time they hold a convention, they’ll discourage splintering the human experience into a thousand tales told by a thousand different identities.

“Caring” is a big word in America today, overtaking “empathy” as the concept du jour. But societies often publicly emphasise the very qualities they lack. The ancient Greeks, who were given to rages of unreason, celebrated the Golden Rule. “Indians” were sentimentalised as noble savages just as Native Americans were being exterminated. The state where I live, New Jersey, hit on the official moniker “Garden State” for itself at the very moment sufficient space for garbage disposal had become a crisis. “Caring” has become a war-cry just when people, withdrawn into screens, emotionally numbed by psychiatric drugs and carapaced in rebarbative ideologies, seem to care less about other people than ever before.

The fact is that in America, both Left and Right has forgotten how to care. Therefore, let both sides gaze upon Gus Walz’s face at the convention, reflect on his exclamation, “That’s my Dad!” and melt with ruth. In a time where God is absent, we are all, whether we know it or not, searching for that moment of grace.

Much of the force of the new “weird” insult is directed at Vance but threatens to become contagious. Contrary to popular belief, guilt-by-association is not really a thing: attributions of guilt only make sense in terms of what an individual does, not who he stands next to. In contrast, weirdness-by-association is absolutely real. As every child in the playground instinctively knows, making friends with the weirdo who has just arrived in class can make you vulnerable to unflattering reappraisal.

Not helped by his awkward attempts at a statesmanlike public persona, Vance has been caught out by old comments of his, such as riffing about “childless cat ladies” running the Democrats. What presumably came across to Fox News fans at the time as edgy pugilism now appears to the wider world as an unnecessarily mean and aggressive attempt to sow division. The incident encapsulates the general PR problem of the popular conservative echo chamber, which for years has gloried in transgressive puerility and irony-soaked radical-posturing as a counter to the po-faced pieties of the Left — but now looks psychopathic to those normies not in on the “joke”.

Indeed, a true irony of the current situation is that the coarsening of discourse allowed by Trump and the online Right is arguably what has allowed Walz and co. to lean so heavily into cheap insults and get away with it. Even so, the sight of leading progressives enthusiastically bandying around jibes like “weird” and “creepy” is still somewhat disorienting. The robust language has a transgressive ring of danger about it, compared with the past oversensitive decade strewn with dog whistles and fig leaves everywhere they looked.

In fact, it must be highly galling for those who have built careers policing language, condemning “othering”, and deconstructing the concept of normality in the name of progress, to see their party of choice revalidating mainstream instincts and the scapegoating of social outliers in such a big way. It’s also a blow to anyone with remaining fantasies of a new enlightened political discourse on the Left: “weird” is more an instinctive expression of distaste than a rational analysis, which is partly why it works so well. Judgements of what is weird and creepy come from the gut not the brains.

A lot of scrambling is now taking place in internet circles, trying to convince the general public that the Democrats are the real weirdos. The X account Libs of Tiktok, for instance, has pronounced of Walz’s time as Governor of Minnesota: “This is the guy who signed laws requiring tampons in boys bathrooms, allows kids to get their body parts chopped off, and wants p**n in schools.” Conservative activist Christopher Rufo elaborated further: “He’s hip to ‘Gender Queer’. He loves non-binary children. He knows that graphic depictions of vibrators, blowjobs, and strap-on dildos belong in every classroom.”

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These strategies might play well to the like-minded, but in terms of convincing neutral onlookers that Republicans are not weird — which surely should be the goal — they look monumentally self-defeating. Far too much backstory is required to explain the provenance of the supposed gotchas to the casual observer, and without it the accusations look paranoid and prurient, only proving the initial point.

And whatever the results of Walz’s liberalised policies in practice, nobody who wasn’t already viciously opposed to him could think it was a fair description of his mindset that he positively “wants” porn in schools, or intentionally aims to get pictures of vibrators “in every classroom”. Rather, insofar as the man thinks about sexually explicit books in school libraries at all, he presumably frames them as equipping young minds with tools to reduce shame and help them deal with a complicated modern world. It may be a lazy and wrongheaded take, but it scarcely makes him a modern day Marquis de Sade.

This overreach on the part of his critics smacks of desperation, and is part of what generates an impression of loss of perspective amongst those doing it. It’s a fair criticism of the Left that they often only see the world they would like, and do not notice the one we actually have. But equally, those conservatives caught up in exaggerated, febrile visions of a progressive-ruled world seem unable to notice salient aspects of reality too. Things may be bad in lots of ways but they are not as bad as some apparently would wish, for the purposes of self-vindication if nothing else.

And it is not just US Right-wing commentators who suffer from this affliction. Their British counterparts are also having a moment in response to the riots of the past days, with reactions that look increasingly bizarre to those who don’t already agree with them on the basics. Here too we find an online commentariat whose dystopian prognostications and telling ellipses seem to reveal more about their own psyches than about the riots. Given the originating subject matter, there are fewer hints of suppressed sexual excitement in this case — but then again, arousal comes in many forms.

For instance, one day after rioters tried to burn down a hotel full of asylum seekers, leaving the shell covered in explicitly racist slogans, academic Matthew Goodwin published a blog implying that the Labour Party wanted you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”, Orwell-style; yet he himself had no mention of this specific incident as he railed against comparatively more peaceful pro-Palestinian marches as evidence of supposedly two-tier policing. (In a previous blog, for what it’s worth, he conceded that “violence against police is never justified”.)

Bundling the Southport crime, committed by a British-born citizen for as yet unknown motives, together with past grooming gang scandals and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, he accused Labour of “doing all they can to distract us from asking for the real reasons why our children have been blown up at pop concerts, murdered at dance classes, and subjected to industrial-scale, anti-White rape across dozens of English towns” — though fastidiously avoided spelling out the “real reasons” himself. Meanwhile over on X, Laurence Fox has been continuing his public nervous breakdown by writing cringeworthy free verse about the “Sun god cult”, and Kellie Jay-Keen (aka Posie Parker) has implied that the British public has only two real choices — the National Front or the Paedophile Information Exchange. As Donald Trump said on a different occasion, they aren’t sending their best.

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By Kathleen Stock

Nonetheless, it remains reasonable for people on both Left and Right to complain about the way mass immigration is habitually managed in this country, and to insist that not all protestors are violent rioters. They are correct to point out that the Establishment too often designates such complaints as “far-Right”, and that some institutions, including judicial ones, are making what look like unacceptably unfair decisions based on ethnic factors.

Yet when even Tommy Robinson is attempting to distance himself from the excesses of “lads in balaclavas wearing black”, talking heads who continue to sentimentalise or excuse the worst culprits over the past few days most definitely have a PR problem. Attempting to cast opportunistic recreational violence by bored dickheads as some kind of noble quest on behalf of the working classes only seems plausible if you are already desperate for it to be true.

And here too, as in the case of US commentators, the fact that most people don’t keep up with the intricacies of online political wars, and don’t have time to read endless Substacks, means they have no real idea what or who you are railing against as you churn out your hot takes. You may imagine you are bravely fighting dragons in public to widespread applause, but all they can see is you wrestling with your own shadow — and you look really weird doing it.

A quicker way of saying all this is that keyboard warriors coyly hinting at ethnonationalist sympathies still look like unsavoury losers to most UK onlookers — and thank God for that. Perhaps the figures involved don’t care — after all, as one points out, they can make a lot of money out of it — but more mainstream politicians on the Right probably should. Whatever the motives, their associates are a reputational liability. The impression they leave for neutrals of embarrassing, unpleasant weirdness is likely to be contagious, unless distancing measures are swiftly brought in.