A few weeks ago, while walking around in my rural central Pennsylvania neighborhood, I wondered where all the Harris/Walz yard signs had gone.

There were, at that point, almost none to be found near my house. This was surprising as I live in a university town in the midst of the American countryside, which means it is predictably a blue dot within a larger red part of the state.

I remember many Hillary signs in the neighborhood back in 2016, and plenty of Biden-Harris ones appearing four years ago. But the only Biden signs (this was a few weeks after he had been retired to the Delaware beach by the Democratic Party establishment) I found in walking distance from my home were collected in one yard, and they were papered over with what appeared homemade “Harris/Walz” printouts. Those did not weather the several vigorous thunderstorms we’d had since. Their ink had run disastrously and the tape that held on the homemade alterations was giving way. Despite myself, I actually felt a little sad looking at the poor things in the process of falling to pieces, though it seemed to me something of an accurate symbolic representation of the utter lack of substance in the blurry, substitute Harris campaign.

Now, though, the signage game on the left is heating up, and the messages imparted inadvertently reveal a lot about the nature of the “joy” we are angrily told their new candidate generates in them.

A more recent walk in the neighborhood included a few more of the paste-over Harris/Walz sheets on top of existing Biden/Harris signs, but also a few new, though yawningly plain, Harris/Walz signs. To be sure, the pro-Trump/Vance locals appear equally enthusiastic in recent weeks, judging from the sheer quantity of their front yard displays. A few local yards are drenched with signs bearing the dreaded “T” word. One home, a few blocks from mine, pairs three or four Trump/Vance yard signs with several more in the house’s front windows and an array of pro-Trump window stickers on the resident’s cars in the driveway.

But perhaps the most remarkable part of my most recent walk was the number of signs put up by my Woke neighbors who cannot content themselves with support of the Kamala Harris campaign but instead must express overt and virulent antagonism of the former president.

The COVID pandemic may be behind us, but the TDS pandemic rages on. It now appears to have achieved a kind of virulence unprecedented even in these rhetorically insane times.

One sign I saw announces: “STD 2024—Let’s stop the disease once and for all.” What is the STD this person is interested in stomping out? Well, the T is for “The” and the “D” is for “Donald.” I am rarely surprised by the extremities of TDS, but this one, in my quiet little neighborhood of quiet little middle-class professors and university administrators, struck me. I tried to imagine a yard sign that compared Kamala Harris to a sexually transmitted disease, and then I wondered how many hours it would stand before being torn down, the house and car in the driveway vandalized, and the residents identified and permanently canceled online.

Undoubtedly, in the wake of such an event a media campaign would follow showing how such yard signs were contributing to a climate of violence against Harris. I encourage you to go and look for any evidence that our news media is prepared to even briefly speculate that rhetoric such as this might be a not-insignificant element of the vile stew that has now produced two assassination attempts against President Trump in the last 65 days.

Another sign I saw reads: “Know your parasites.” There followed labeled images of a deer tick, a dog tick, and a “luna-tick” with a picture of the former chief executive of the United States. For a fun experiment, look around online for articles by leftist despisers of President Trump that angrily attack him for using “Hitlerian” political language that dehumanizes opponents and equates them with vermin and other hated animal or bacterial entities.  Now think of these same people putting the “luna-tick” sign in their yard without the slightest acknowledgment of contradiction or hypocrisy.

Another sign I found, in perhaps a half dozen yards around the neighborhood, was more subtle in assigning Trump Republicans to the side of abject evil in political life: “Vote for Democrats. We support choice, freedom, democracy.” Because, of course, the other side is for slavery, totalitarianism, and the total control of your life by … well, you know who.

In the driveway of one of the homes sporting one of the dehumanizing anti-Trump yard signs was an expensive new car, a highly upscale make and model. On the back window of this car was displayed a sticker: “You are actually mad at capitalism.” One wonders how much capitalism might have helped the owner of that expensive car in the process of obtaining a place for such a sticker.

Kamala Harris spoke repeatedly at the debate last week about how she is the candidate who will enable us to rise above division and achieve unity. She might perhaps want to contact the people making the signs that I saw and remind them of this.

Or, dare one suggest, perhaps she and they don’t really mean it?