The Only Good Sydney Sweeney Take

This essay was reprinted from Brian Beutler's Off Message site. Subscribe here .

Most Democrats don't know how to fight culture wars, let alone win them. Their instinct when confronted with a culture-war provocation is to either change the topic or disengage altogether.

But the social web is still bursting with reminders that, for a brief moment, just about a year ago, they almost figured it out. The evidence is in this picture, and the millions of variations that have been generated since.

The baby-faced JD Vance memes that float across your screens, and that may have prompted customs officials to detain and remove a Norwegian tourist earlier this year , have origins in this Twitter thread , which included the prompt “For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby.” JD Vance Babyface evolved into canonical form after the politician's debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz but became ubiquitous only after Vance ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, demanding he thank the United States for past military aid. With a bit of comedic license, “thank you” became “pwease and tank you,” and a meme was born.

Why did internet jokers think to transform Vance into a giant baby? It's hard to peer inside their minds, but just a couple of months before baby JD was born, grown-up JD had become the object of a crude satire, in which he'd supposedly (not actually) confessed to a sexual fetish for sofa cushions .

And that gag had its origins in something real: a successful but fleeting Democratic effort, brought mainstream by Walz, to depict right-wing Republicans and their social and cultural fixations as “weird.”

It turned out Vance had left a lengthy trail of bizarre, unofficial comments about, well, a lot of things, but particularly female fertility and childlessness. He referred to childless women as “a bunch of … cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”

During the “weird” boomlet, all of progressivism became hyper-attuned to the bizarre conduct of the professional right. It made an impression on one of the most popular people in the world, who signed her Harris–Walz endorsing “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” And it fed fleeting but intensive mainstream scrutiny of rightist views on abortion and female subservience.

I say “fleeting” because Democrats quickly spooked. That August, Kamala Harris' pollster Geoff Garin reportedly advised the candidate to stop saying “We're not going back,” because he didn't look to the future, and advised Walz to “lay off all the 'weird' talk—too negative.”

The duo briefly resisted Garin's advice, but by the next month they'd been tamed.

Vance's snipe at “cat ladies” wasn't Swift's introduction to right-wing weirdness. It was more like a capstone.

One right-wing reactionary daydreamed that if Swift were to marry and procreate with her partner Travis Kelce—a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs—it would prefigure “the greatest spike in marriages in American history,” as “mimetic desire [grips] the hearts and minds of millions of millennial women,” yielding “a tsunami of heterosexual romantic happy endings” and, thus, a baby boom.

In November 2023, the Vance-aligned New York Times columnist Ross Douthat half-endorsed the fantasy , writing, “It would be delightful, for them and for us, if the burgeoning Swift–Kelce courtship went the distance, giving us a celebrity wedding and perhaps a royal baby.”

Other rightists, offended by Swift's basic decency, and Kelce's pro-vaccine advocacy, took aim at the couple. They theorized that the relationship was an act, part of a put-up job that would culminate in a joint anti-Trump presidential endorsement. They even mused conspiratorially that Kelce's all-star performance and the Chiefs' victory in that year's Super Bowl were rigged.

This stuff, too, was incredibly weird.

It's weird to be paranoid or to feign paranoia as part of an elaborate performance to manipulate rubes. Harboring concerns, even religiously inflected ones, about the population of the country is one thing; opining on what other people's reproductive organs owe the world is back-away-slowly cringe.

A more mission-oriented progressive media apparatus, with help from elected Democrats, would have homed in on all of these interventions. On Douthat and the tradcon movement and their deep ties to Vance, and on how the pseudo-Darwinistic tech right embraced their ideas, infusing them with delusions about the gift of high-IQ semen.

In September 2024, Elon Musk offered to impregnate Swift with perhaps his ^100th offspring. But by then the weird wave had crested. You can thank the pollsters.

There's more to the right and its weirdness than its fixation on other people's sex lives.

There's the overlapping world of incels, and the world of fascists and groypers and neo-Nazis, which overlaps with that.

Turning these people into stand-ins for elected Republicans, and making Republicans answer for them, isn't beyond the capability of Democrats and progressives. Their failure to do it is mostly a matter of missing conviction. The necessary elements—nitpicking, performance of anger—make them feel icky, and in any case they assume in advance that their efforts would fail or backfire.