No Sift next week. The next batch of new articles will post on August 19.
I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
- Donald Trump
When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race.
- Frederick Douglass
This week's featured posts are "Where Did Inflation Come From?" and "The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans".
This week everybody was talking about getting prisoners out of Russia
Thursday, President Biden announced a multi-country swap of prisoners that brought home three Americans: WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Whelan had been held the longest, since 2018.
The swap relied heavily on US allies. Germany, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Norway, and the Maldive Islands released prisoners Russia wanted back. In his announcement, Biden underlined the importance of having allies, a backhanded slap at Trump's anti-NATO sentiments.
If Trumpers wonder why calling him "weird" is catching on, they should look at his first reaction to the prisoner swap, which he had said could not happen until he was reelected (apparently because he's Putin's pet).
So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash?
At some point, questioning the details of the swap is legitimate. But surely the first reaction of any non-weird American was to be happy for fellow Americans who are free now, and for the families who can welcome them home. Trump expressed none of this, but (without knowing any of the details) simply assumed the deal must be bad because it worked against his political interests. He doubled down during his Atlanta rally Saturday.
I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal.
Didn't every American other than Trump feel at least a little joy in their hearts for their freed countrymen? That's the kind of thing that makes him weird.
Of course there's speculation about what this means politically in the US. Back in May, Trump posted that he would get Evan Gershkovich released "almost immediately after the election", and that Putin "will do that for me, but not for anyone else". Some people at the time interpreted this as Putin's ransom demand: If you want to get Gershkovich back, elect Trump.
But after this week's deal was announced, Slate's Fred Kaplan speculated:
[L]ike most world leaders, Putin has no doubt been reading the polls, and he may have concluded that Trump is not going to win ... Therefore, Putin might have reasoned, it’s better to take a deal now so it looks as if he’s acting without an eye to our election.
However, I wonder if there's another angle: Maybe our allies were willing to sacrifice more for Biden, in order to make it less likely Trump will ever be restored to power.
and Trump's interview with Black journalists
That's the topic of one featured post. A few related things didn't make it into that article.
John McWhorter's analysis of why Trump mispronounces "Kamala" is interesting. He relates it to previous generations of American mainlanders calling the 50th state “Ha-WHY-a” and its capital "Honolula", or misnaming foreign foods "raviola" and "guacamala".
The Trumpian attitude toward Harris’s Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign word and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.
This willfully blasé attitude toward the word’s pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable — and therefore not who we are. It’s a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump’s false rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t American.
A subtle detail in a scene from the recent movie American Fiction sums up something important about race in America. The main character, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, is a Black author who doesn't want to be defined by his blackness. (He wants to write literature, not Black literature.)
Early in the movie, he is coming out of an airport while talking on the phone to his agent about his unwillingness to write the stereotypic "Black novel" the market wants from him. "You know," he says, "I don't even believe in race."
"Unfortunately," his agent replies, "other people do." And as he says that, a cab drives past Monk to pick up a White man.
A question White conservatives ask constantly is "Why do Blacks (or Democrats or liberals) make everything about race?" That scene is the answer: Black people may try to forget about race, but the world will remind them.
and the rising Iran/Israel friction
I don't claim to understand this, so I'll point you to The Economist's article.
and Venezuela
Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro allowed an election, appeared to lose it, and has announced victory. Now he's cracking down on protesters and opposition politicians.
and J. D. Vance continues to embarrass Republicans
Outrageous things Vance has said continue to surface. In a 2021 interview on the Dear Ohio podcast of Spectrum News 1, while he was running in the Ohio Republican primary for the Senate seat he now holds, Vance was asked "Should a woman be forced to carry a child to term, after she has been a victim of incest or rape?" He replied:
I think the question betrays a certain presumption that's wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.
In other words, a woman should be forced to carry her rapist's baby, but that's an inconvenience. It's not the important thing about the situation. Also, this requirement makes rape a viable reproductive strategy for men, but that's not important either.
I noticed something in that interview that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere: Vance repeatedly uses the word normal in a way that I find creepy. The first question is why he wanted to run for the Senate, and Vance says
I think normal people in this country, people who want to live a good life, who just want to raise their families, they deserve somebody who fights for them.
Normal comes up several times throughout the interview, and it always refers to people like Vance himself. I find myself wondering what percentage of the country Vance considers normal.
Another clip that has resurfaced was his opinion of Simone Biles after she withdrew from the 2020 Olympics for mental health reasons.
What I find so weird about this, and it reflects on the media more than it does on Simone Biles, is that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment — Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team — into this act of heroism. And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments
Peter Thiel is the tech billionaire who made Vance. The WaPo summarizes their relationship:
Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
An amazing clip is circulating on social media, in which Thiel compares present-day America to pre-Nazi Germany, but without any sense of alarm about it.
Liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window.
Before passing that on, I felt obligated to search for the context. I found it here: an hour-and-a-half dialog with Tyler Cohen, who I don't recognize. I haven't looked at the whole thing, but the immediate context of the quote is a little better than it sounds. They're discussing the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (who I also don't recognize). He accurately predicted the fall of democracy in Germany, but "things went very haywire" (according the Thiel) when he got "somewhat entangled with the Nazis". Thiel describes that entanglement as "bad judgment".
So Thiel's not openly espousing fascism in that quote, but I still can't be comfortable electing the protege of someone who suspects democracy is exhausted. And my overall feeling is: God save us from billionaires who want to raise questions "very far outside the Overton Window".
and the horse race
Who you think is ahead right now depends on which polling average you trust. They are all close, and they all show Harris gaining. RCP has Trump ahead 0.8% in a two-way race, down from 1.9% last week. In a five-way race (including RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornell West), Harris is ahead by 0.2%. Nate Silver's average has Harris up 1.4%; Trump was ahead by 0.4% a week ago. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Like everybody else, I'm wondering who Harris will pick as VP. But I don't see much point in writing about it, because I'm sure the decision is already made and we'll find out soon enough.
One striking thing about Donald Trump is that so many of the Trump administration veterans who know him best oppose his candidacy: Mike Pence, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and many others.
The same observation extends to his family. His niece Mary has long been a critic, and recently her brother Fred has told negative stories about Donald in a book. Here, Mary defends Fred against an attack by their cousin Eric.
and you also might be interested in ...
Being accused of being weird has gotten under MAGA skins in a way that fascist and racist never did. And yet they keep acting weird.
Normal Americans find inspiration in the Olympics, and cheer for the great athletes who represent us: Simone Biles, Katy Ledecky, LeBron James, and many others. But Trumpers have a weirder reason to pay attention to the Olympics: They need something to get outraged about.
Look at what has gone viral in MAGA-Land: Anger at female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated her Italian opponent in 46 seconds. Khelif was identified as female at birth and has never professed to be anything else, but she was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after the amount of testosterone in her blood exceeded some limit. The Olympics has different standards, which she fulfilled. She does not physically stand out from other women boxers, and is not the favorite to win the gold medal in her weight category.
But to Trump and his minions, Khelif is "trans". Trump posted a video of Khelif's bout with the comment:
I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!
In his Atlanta rally Saturday night (where the crowd was noticeably smaller and less energetic than the one Harris drew to the same arena a few days before), he lied outright about Khelif.
It was a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer.
If having more testosterone than the average woman makes you a man, then all those low-T men -- you must have seen the TV commercials for supplements -- are actually women.
More weirdness is the way that Trump cheers any bad news for America. Today, he's glorying in the stock market plunge -- even though the market is still much higher than when he left office. At the end of the day, check the value of your 401(k), and reflect on how happy Donald Trump is about your loss.
For reasons that defy explanation, Trump has been going after Georgia's popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp, both on Truth Social and during his Atlanta rally Saturday night. But here's the line that really slays me:
He should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution
Look back at my article on his convention speech, which was billed as a "unity" speech. The only unity Trump recognizes is submission to him.
It's too soon to tell yet how big a deal the Trump/Egypt bribe story will be.
and let's close with something tasty
I promise not to mix politics and the closing very often, but here's something I want to pass on. In one of the featured posts, I linked to a video from Kamala Harris' 2020 primary campaign where she made masala dosa with actress Mindy Kaling, who is also Indian-American.
It turns out that was a regular thing in her campaign, and not restricted to Indian people or Indian food: She'd go meet with supporters and cook something. "Cooking With Kamala" is a 7-video series on her YouTube channel. In this one, she visits the chair of her Iowa campaign and teaches her how to make apples with bacon. Kamala attributes the recipe to her mother, who must have picked it up after she came to America. (In the Mindy video, she says her grandmother was a strict vegetarian.)
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