Stop trying to make ‘weird’ happen

Where American left-liberal rhetoric leads, British left-liberal rhetoric invariably follows. Hate speech, reparations, decolonisation, white fragility; there is no intellectual fad so inane that it will not be enthusiastically mimicked, with childlike credulity, by journalists, academics, civil servants and broadcasters, regardless of whether it even makes sense in a British context. The impression you get is of status-conscious provincials seizing, herd-like, on the latest fashions and conventional wisdom from the imperial centre. 

So it is that barely a month after the Democrats and their allies in the US media adopted ‘weird’ as their attack line on Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, some on this side of the pond are trying their best to make it a term of derision in British politics. The Guardian reports research by the think tank More in Common which allegedly shows that some voters are beginning to regard the Tories as ‘weird’.