Top Dem Slams Harris for Using ‘Egregiously Weird’ Words

Democratic rising star Brian Schatz has slammed Kamala Harris and other members of his party for being “egregiously weird sounding.”

In an interview with Politico, the Hawaii senator warned that using terms from the academic world is a surefire way to alienate the average American–and suggested it was done to satisfy noisy “advocacy” groups rather than go after voters.

Instead, he said, Democrats have to say things in the most popular way they can to reach the maximum number of voters.

The intervention is one of an increasing number of calls for self-reflection for Democrats in the wake of Harris' defeat by Donald Trump and the latest to focus on how Democrats communicate. Other party bigs have attacked pronoun obsession and land acknowledgments as out of touch with normal lives–and an electoral liability.

In his attack on “weird,” Schatz highlighted how Harris had used the word “center” as a verb.

“I think Kamala did a really good job on focusing on middle-class concerns,” he said. “But I remember her saying, ‘I’m going to center the needs of the working class.’ And I thought to myself, I don’t know anyone in the world who says ‘center.’

“I know people in politics who say ‘center,’” Schatz continued. “I know people in academia. I know people in advocacy who say ‘center.’ But centering the needs, or making space for, or all of that, is a clear indication that you are not normal.”

He also referred to “Latinx”—which has been ridiculed for being a “gender-neutral” alternative to “Latino” and “Latina.” Spanish is a gendered language.

But Schatz warned that the entire way Democrats speak is at the heart of their problems. “The point is we have a whole language that’s maybe not offensive, or irritating,” he told Politico. “But definitely unfamiliar to regular people.”

He called the Democrats “egregiously weird sounding” and admitted he had been guilty himself.

“I remember saying I was for ‘a cessation of hostilities’ in Israel and Palestine,” he said. “And people said why don’t you say ‘ceasefire?’ I’m thinking, that’s literally the same thing. I remember saying I was for a big, bold climate bill. And someone said why don’t you say ‘Green New Deal?’”

He blamed “purity tests” set by ultra-progressive advocacy groups, saying he wanted to attack “this idea that there are magic words that we must be forced to say defines progressivism and political courage by essentially saying whatever a bunch of activists want us to say, as opposed to doing the thing.”

“I think that there are a bunch of people who see what we’re doing as performative, for that exact reason,” he added.

The battle over “weirdness” was an undercurrent of the latest presidential election cycle.

In August, Harris’ running mate Tim Walz had declared that Donald Trump and JD Vance the weird ones, to which Trump fired back: “Between his movement and her laugh, there’s a lot of craziness, I’d say a step further than ‘weird.’ ‘Weird’ is a nice word in comparison.”

A poll from YouGov found that hardly any Americans use terms like “safe space,” “implicit bias,” “microagression,” “cisgender,” and “lived experience,” although Democrats are more likely to than Republicans, according to Semafor.

While Democrats have long been associated with the use of “politically correct” or “woke” language, internal calls for the party to loosen up its speech—and loosen up in general—have seemed to reach a new peak in the wake of Harris' loss.

Last month, journalist Mike Pesca wrote in the Atlantic comparing the Democratic Party to a human resources department for its insistence on “norms, procedure, bureaucracy, DEI initiatives, rule following, language policing, and compliance.”

Philippe Reines, a former aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, told New York magazine earlier this month, “We can’t be the party of pronouns and land acknowledgments.”

“We are bleeding people right now, and we are not going to get them back with the branding that we have—and it really is just a branding issue," he added. “It’s not like every day you run into people changing their genders on the government’s dime; it is not as if every Democrat is telling you their pronouns.”