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Coming from the left, I also find this intentional, cynical attempt to negatively label opponents as "weird" rather unfortunate. We've been celebrating weirdos and weirdness, using those exact words, for at least the past 3 decades, probably more. It was part of an explicit effort to raise the status of people who were denigrated by society for not being normal enough, by associating the term with positivity.
And now, it seems that a significant portion of the Democratic machine has turned on a dime to say weirdness is bad, actually, and it's the other guys who are weird, not us. It'd be one thing if these were just off-hand comments here and there, since "weird" still retained a colloquial negative meaning, but the way so many people coalesced around the term within an instant (I personally doubt there was any conscious intentional coordination around the term, which actually makes it worse) is something else. It's got the same energy as "I'm so grateful to the Party for raising our chocolate rations despite our ongoing war against Eurasia."
Not really. It appeared that way. But in fact, it wasn't. Instead, there were a bunch of shell games played with the words and the referents. Now "weird" no longer referred to "people denigrated by society for not being normal enough", but instead to "people celebrated by society". And the group of people who were actually denigrated by society changed, from e.g. homosexuals to conservative white men (referred to as "squares" in an earlier iteration). Some groups moved in and out, e.g. male "nerds" were first in, and then moved back out as the culture war progressed. Th left going back to the original label used by their longtime opponents looks strange, but it isn't a difference in kind.
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