Pollak: ‘Weird’ Insult Shows Democrats’ Contempt for Rural Working Class

Democrats have deployed “weird” as an insult to attack Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). The word is suddenly constant among left-wing pundits.

Apparently the insult is meant to appeal to young and female voters in particular, for whom “weird” is a catch-all term for everything bad, creepy, or threatening.

But there is nothing immediately “weird” or odd about Vance, save for his beard: there hasn’t been a bearded male on a presidential ticket since the late nineteenth century.

The only thing unusual about Vance is his biography. Raised in working-class Appalachia, he overcame the difficult circumstances of his family life. He joined the Marines, graduated from Ohio State, and went on to Yale Law School.

That’s not “weird”; that’s extraordinary. And it is a journey that the left celebrated before Vance decided to enter the political arena. But suddenly, the elements of that journey are being described as sinister, threatening, and strange.

What is most “weird” about Vance, apparently, is his Christian faith (he embraced Catholicism) and his working-class origins.

To this day, the country’s elite struggles to accept the fact that rural working-class voters choose Republicans; they describe it as an odd phenomenon, since they assume that the Democrats’ redistributionist policies are better for Vance’s constituents than the dignity of jobs in the mines and factories that the climate-change lobby wants to close.

To describe the rural, Christian working class as “weird” is to display a kind of contempt that has become increasingly blatant in the Democratic Party after the Bill Clinton era. It is a classist slur, one that suggests the bicoastal elites to whom “weird” is pitched have no idea who lives in flyover country, who built the heartland. “Weird” turns the rural working class into strangers in their own country.

That is why Trump will win their vote: Democrats deserve to lose it.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.