Van Orden’s Capitol Tantrum: How One U.S. Congressman Weaponised Outrage for the Whole Planet

Derrick Van Orden and the Global Art of Weaponised Outrage
By our correspondent in the cheap seats, watching democracy do its interpretive dance

Representative Derrick Van Orden has, in the grand tradition of American populists, perfected the art of turning a minor kerfuffle into a week-long international seminar on manners. The Wisconsin Republican’s recent decision to upbraid teenage Senate pages for lounging on the Capitol steps—followed by the inevitable fundraising email titled “I REFUSE TO APOLOGIZE”—is less a parochial spat than a masterclass in how 21st-century politics now exports indignation the way 19th-century Manchester exported cloth. From Berlin cafés to Manila call centers, people recognise the product: a two-minute hate, shrink-wrapped for global consumption.

For foreign observers, Van Orden’s résumé reads like a Netflix algorithm gone feral: Navy SEAL-turned-actor (he had a cameo in “Act of Valor,” which is how the rest of the world first saw his jawline), then wine-shop owner, then congressman who keeps a jar of “liberal tears” on his desk. It’s the sort of career arc that European parliaments—still staffed by people who studied ENA or PPE—regard with the same horrified fascination they reserve for deep-fried butter at state fairs. Yet the template is spreading. Brazil’s Bolsonaristas, Italy’s League, even South Korea’s PPP have all adopted the Van Orden formula: swaggering persona, theatrical umbrage, and a direct-to-camera grievance that travels faster than any trade delegation.

The international significance lies precisely in its banality. While China builds ports in Sri Lanka and the EU fine-tunes its carbon border tax, the U.S. House of Representatives spends floor time on whether a freshman lawmaker was rude to adolescents. This is not dysfunction; it is diplomacy by other means. Every time Van Orden trends on X (formerly Twitter, now the global town square run by the world’s richest sleep-deprived South African), foreign ministries update their risk matrices. Canada quietly adds another row to the “American political volatility” column; Taiwan’s TSMC recalculates how many chips it can hide under a congressional subpoena.

More darkly, the episode illustrates how outrage has become America’s most reliable soft-power export. French farmers may torch hay bales, but they rarely monetise the arson. Van Orden’s campaign reportedly raked in $150,000 within 48 hours of the page incident—small change by Pentagon standards, but enough to bankroll a challenger in Tegucigalpa. NGOs in Nairobi now study U.S. digital fundraising the way they once studied Soviet grain purchases. Meanwhile, Russian Telegram channels splice the Capitol-steps video with captions like “America eats its young,” a propaganda twofer that requires zero translation.

The broader lesson for the planet is that performative anger scales better than policy ever could. When Britain’s House of Commons tried a similar stunt—MPs scolding schoolchildren during a climate protest—viewership barely dented the BBC’s gardening hour. Van Orden’s clip, by contrast, trended in 14 countries and inspired a K-pop fancam set to “God Bless the U.S.A.” Somewhere in a Manila content farm, an underpaid moderator tags the video “wholesome military discipline,” proving that irony, too, is a commodity with futures contracts.

Of course, the joke is on all of us who watched. While the world debated the etiquette of Capitol steps, Wisconsin’s 3rd District quietly lost another dairy farm to Mexican-owned cheese conglomerates—a real economic casualty drowned out by the white noise of digital umbrage. Van Orden will return to Washington in January, older, louder, and better funded. The pages will age into student debt. And the rest of the globe will keep refreshing, half-horrified, half-entertained, waiting for the next morality play to drop like a TikTok trend with nuclear launch codes.

In the end, Van Orden isn’t just a congressman; he’s a weather vane made of grievance, spinning wildly enough for the entire planet to gauge which way the American wind is blowing. Spoiler: it smells faintly of cheese, gunpowder, and whatever Musk is smoking this week. Buckle up, Earth. The show’s just getting started.