Yesterday former President Donald Trump made a series of racist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, challenging her biracial identity. I try to bite my tongue on the latest controversy of the day (and often fail), but this is just nuts.
It’s really wild (and kind of gross) to watch people struggle with race and not understand being biracial or mixed race in 2024. You can have more than one identity, and that’s not inconsistent. Claiming one of those identities does not negate the other.
White people claim multiple European roots and celebrate both—for St. Patrick’s Day it’s “I’m Irish!” and for Oktoberfest it’s “I’m German!”
Using my father’s last name does not mean I disowned my mother’s family. I can claim both.
So it’s been a long week. Yeah, there was that whole political tsunami on Sunday. Feels like an eon since then. (And the energy… feels like it’s only ramped up since then, for what it’s worth.) But I’m more talking about locally and my reporting with West St. Paul Reader.
This week we ran seven stories in five days.
Multiple stories that we broke and some exclusives. It’s big stuff like a long-time restaurant leaving and a 115-year-old historic mansion torn down, and what should have been simpler stories like a library renovation—that some how drew the ire of anti-library trolls (BTW, did an update on that story Friday night, because book nerds love library plans!).
Sometimes a blog like this works best as a time capsule. What did I think at the time? Our perspective tends to distort over time, so capturing an honest assessment in the moment is important for the sake of accuracy. With politics and history, doubly so. Everything seems inevitable in hindsight. But at the time it often didn’t feel that way.
And politics in the last month? Oof. From President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, to Biden withdrawing from the election and Vice President Kamala Harris taking the mantle—it’s been wild.
I could write about this for days, but nobody wants to read that. So I’m going to try to capture my thoughts in short, quick bursts. Here goes nothing…
Haven’t had a good Star Wars rant in a while. About time, huh? So the Acolyte just finished its first season on Disney+. Pretty much every new Star Wars thing lately gets panned, no exception here, and as usual they’re wrong. Acolyte is intense and fun. Screw the haters—here’s why.
If you don’t remember Kinzinger, he’s one of two Republicans in Congress who served on the January 6 Committee and one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump. I profiled him in my 2020 book Better Politics Please.
It’s an interesting book, perhaps not as polished and slick as some political memoirs (and he gives us the mercy of not rehashing his entire life in excruciating detail like most political memoirs), but a solid snapshot of politics from the Tea Party to the Insurrection.
It’s been an incredibly busy spring season. I’m just now catching my breath at the end of June. I’ve had a few milestones—including 20 years of business, five years of local news, and a kid graduating high school—that make me a little introspective.
That first post really epitomizes the work we do: It’s narrowly focused on what happens in our first-ring suburb. It celebrates what’s happening in the community. It serves as an archive to mark what happened, when, and why. I just spent some time reflecting on that first post five years later.
Reflecting on Five Years
We’re doing a whole five-year anniversary member drive with an audacious goal of 50 members to mark five years by 5/25. But more than flogging a member drive and trying to bring in new members, today I’m trying to reflect on five years of this work.
Abby and I went on a kid-free vacation to Bentonville, Arkansas to see the 2024 total solar eclipse and do some biking.
No kids?: If leaving the kids behind seems mean, I did invite them and they shrugged. They’ve seen a solar eclipse before—meh.
Why Arkansas?: There were closer locations to see totality, but Indiana isn’t a very exciting place to visit. I wouldn’t think Arkansas is either, but Bentonville is billed as the mountain biking capital of the world. I’ve been thinking about taking a trip there anyway. The eclipse being two and a half hours away made it a perfect location.
Four years ago the world shut down. We’re at the anniversary of that traumatic time, and the other night it made me reflect on how that experience changed me. How has my behavior changed since a global pandemic and lockdown?
In the summer of 2020 I published a book, Better Politics Please, yearning for a better way. Six months later January 6 happened and it felt like we were further than ever from coming together as Americans.
That book was written in hope, and I’ve felt awfully hopeless since.
Today I finished reading Barack Obama’s 2006 memoir, The Audacity of Hope. You have to read any political memoir, especially one released in the build up to a presidential run, with a grain of salt. There’s a lot of humble optimism and positive framing of life experience.
