During the early days of Kamala Harris’s candidacy for president of the United States, Tim Walz—then the governor of Minnesota and not yet her running mate—dropped a casual, offhand remark that had a sudden and dramatic impact on the American political landscape. You probably heard it: during a brief appearance on the MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when discussing Donald Trump and his VP selection, JD Vance, Walz declared that “these guys are just weird.” A full suite of politicians, activists, columnists, podcasters, pundits, and more reacted as though a spell had been broken. After decades of allowing Republicans to own the lane of representing the mainstream, middle America that’s into tractor pulls and Applebee’s, Walz’s five-word manifesto gave Democrats a rallying cry they could use to go on offense. Overnight, the Democratic Party declared itself the one that represents voters who shop at Target, drink Bud Light, watch the NFL, and go to Disney World, while some in the GOP boycott those brands for reasons that barely make sense to many Americans.
But of course there’s a flip side to all of this. If Democrats’ position is now that the GOP is “weird,” what does that make hippie-dippie Austin—the blueberry in the tomato soup that is Texas politics—whose longtime slogan is “Keep Austin Weird”? Is there room among progressives for “weird” (derogatory) and “weird” (complimentary)?
Locals adopted “Keep Austin Weird” as an unofficial slogan in 2000, when Red Wassenich, then a librarian at Austin Community College, called in to a pledge drive for the community radio station KOOP. Wassenich, asked on the air about why he was supporting the station, struggled to articulate the reason. “I don’t know,” he said. “It helps keep Austin weird.” In a mirror of what happened when Walz dropped the W-bomb on Morning Joe, a movement was birthed. It was the spider biting young Peter Parker on the hand, Luke Skywalker meeting Han Solo in the cantina. It was one small step for weird, one giant leap for weird-kind.
It rang true. Boys who painted their fingernails or girls who were really into trains, or those who otherwise deviated from whatever “normal” meant where they were from, moved to a city where the fingernail painters or train obsessives had a strong community, and “weird” transformed from a schoolyard insult to a badge of honor.
But what exactly “weird” means, even in the context of Austin, has long been a matter of debate. “I don’t believe Austin was ever a weird city. I think it was an affordable city, which meant that artists, creative people, and quirky people could live there affordably,” Alex Hannaford, author of the forthcoming book Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City, told me. “It attracted people who want to live outside the box and remain misfits and not be ostracized for being different.” That’s changed, according to Hannaford, as the city has gotten more expensive. If he’s right, what’s been lost might be not just cheap rent but also the sense of solidarity that comes with sharing a city with your fellow oddballs.
Austin was the first city to proudly declare itself “weird,” on bumper stickers, keychains, T-shirts, and pretty much any other piece of merchandise you can slap a slogan on—but Wassenich’s weird kin in other cities quickly saw that three simple words could be adapted for their own hometowns. An incomplete list of places whose residents have adopted the slogan for themselves includes Asheville, North Carolina; Boulder, Colorado; Edmonton, Alberta; Erie, Pennsylvania (“Keep Erie Eerie” was right there!); Kutztown, Pennsylvania; Louisville, Kentucky; Madison, Wisconsin; Missoula, Montana; Portland, Oregon; Santa Cruz, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Seattle, Washington; and the entire state of Vermont. Are these true calls to arms to support each city’s unique local identity or simple marketing slogans? After all, if everyone’s weird, is anyone weird?
I put that question to Joshua Long, a professor at Southwestern University in Georgetown and the author of a 2010 book about Austin, Weird City. He had a different read on the “keep [wherever] weird” movement.
“Cities, often in red states, used ‘weird’ to define themselves against the rest of the state culture. There’s a political power struggle over identity that makes this something like solidarity,” Long said. “These places identify as weird so that people coming there know they can expect a different cultural reaction to gender, political views, race, things like that. There is a marketing and branding element, but it’s like, ‘You can move to Austin because Austin’s a safe space.’ ”
That’s a wildly different take on “weird” than the one Walz has espoused. Part of that, Long said, is because of the Minnesota governor’s inherent Midwesternness—his being from a region where, despite the efforts of Madisonites to reclaim the word, the connotation of “weird” is still decidedly negative. “Midwesterners,—you know what they mean when they say it,” Long told me, dropping into a Fargo-style accent. “‘You know, I don’t know, he’s kind of weird. He’s a weird guy, you stay away from him.’ ”
I wanted to get a better sense of the distinction between the two weirds when I learned that someone was already trying to wall off the Tim Walz brand of weird from Austin’s. Travis Higdon, a longtime Austinite in the tech industry who now resides in San Antonio, was one of the first to grasp that the “weird” worm may have turned in a way that was unflattering to his former home—or, at least, he was one of the first to monetize it. He began selling T-shirts this month that read “Keep Austin Not Weird.”
Higdon and his wife, Janet, were listening to an episode of the progressive political podcast Pod Save America in which the hosts were talking about how “weird” was going viral when Janet observed that Austin might want to update its tagline. He texted an artist friend in the city with his idea, got back a logo by the end of the day, and then quickly had a plan to make T-shirts. Higdon isn’t looking to personally profit from the tension between the two kinds of weird—he’s working with the Democratic funding platform to ensure that the proceeds from the shirts go to the Harris campaign and other Democratic candidates—but he is invested in ensuring that his preferred brand of weird wins out.
“Austin has, like, eccentric weird, esoteric weird, uniquely yourself weird, and those are all good things,” Higdon said. “Walz is using it to highlight icky weird.”
So what happens to the misfits for whom “weird” was a badge of honor when it turns back into an epithet? I asked Long how it plays at Southwestern, a university that has more than its fair share of students with idiosyncratic interests and purple hair. He said there’s not much of a struggle at all. “For the students that I talk to about this, it’s two totally different things. They embrace their ‘weird’ on campus, but when they talk about ‘weird’ for JD Vance or Donald Trump, that’s a different thing,” Long told me. “So far, nobody’s been able to articulate what that difference is, but they immediately know it when they hear it.”
