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Yeah it’s very obvious that the people doing/cheering on the “weird” counterattack have really bad intuitions about how ordinary people read situations like this. Like no you don’t beat weird accusations by posting a thousand anti-trans memes and calling Walz a cuck.
I've seen this claim a lot on Reddit, along with the celebration of Waltz's dig at the Vance couch rumors. I think it's either a disingenuous interpretation or a case of the Democrats getting high on their own supply. Here's how I interpret the Right's indignance at both of these attacks:
They are both completely manufactured by the powerful coordination of Democrat politicians, the media, and big tech. The individual claims are a trifle, but it's the ease by which both were able to propagate into culturally pervasive conventional wisdom in hours is pretty frightening. They're also completely transparent in their engineering, which goes like this: 1. Make some oddball claim that is either opinion or invented from whole cloth. 2. Follow quickly with a barrage stories about how wounding this claim has been to Republicans. It's dizzying. I would be that most Republicans hadn't even heard of these attacks until after the round of stories came out claiming how devastating these attacks have been.
It's also notable how inauthentic these two claims are in that the attacks therein are virtues within liberalism, where weirdness and sexual noncoformity are supposedly sacred. So it also exposes a deep hipocrisy within Democrats who will apparently say anything to win (I'm not exempting the GOP/Trumpism from this, BTW, just pointing out that the lack of concern for principles is rarely this brazen and happy to be this brazen).
I'm surrounded by Republicans who don't care about these attacks. They're laughable, absurd even. Except for how powerfully they've been executed.
This whole thing is very "fake it 'til you make it". It might even work, just like following the original saying often does, but I find it hard to believe anyone, especially on this site, actually believes the actual content of any of these claims.
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Neither. The claim that the attack worked really well is just the second prong of the attack. Vance himself seems to have moved on to attacking Walz.
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What it reflects is a radical moving on from focusing on existential fear for democracy to something much easier for those who struggle with abstracts to be a part of. Finally the Dems have realised that being self serious gives Trump an aura of incredible power that plays well for him. If he can genuinely threaten a hundreds-year old institution, there must be something formidable about him. Moving on from this rhetorical trap has obviously been hugely liberating for the Dems -- finally they can be the ones to mess around and enjoy making schoolyard attacks, Trump's domain for a decade.
Personally I think the new attacks represent something highly authentic though much like Trump's attacks are not to be taken literally.
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