anti-theatricality in politics (the theatre kid trope) (the bling king)

Sometimes you get a bonanza - and so it with this Atlantic piece about the the new right-wing insult-trope of "theatre kid""The White House assistant press secretary, Davis Ingle, recently dismissed Senator Jon Ossoff as a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” The taunt was hardly novel. Theater kid has become a curious little term of abuse on the right. Another Trump White House spokesperson castigated Senator Alex Padilla for pulling an “immature, theater-kid stunt” after he was forcibly removed from a news conference last year for asking then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question. Spencer Pratt recently branded New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a “theater-kid commie.” Conservative pundits have decried progressives for engineering a “theater-kid-occupied government.”The elastic insult is meant to belittle the target as inauthentic, attention-hungry, unserious, and unmanly. In adding feminine, Ingle handily made the subtext text.But as writer Erik Forrest Jackson shows,…