Days after the attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s life, the Republican party has announced vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. In 2016, Vance called Trump “reprehensible”, said his defeat was inevitable and hoped it would lead to a serious reckoning within the Republican party (he has since expressed regret for voicing these opinions). In 2024, Vance is performing a delicate pas de deux: one where he is both the new blood the Republican party needs, and also a less elitist, more populist version of Trump.
Vance’s comments on domestic and foreign policy are now the subject of endless scrutiny (as they should be). He has described the UK as “the world’s first Islamist nation to have nuclear weapons”, he is against the U.S. aid to Ukraine, and thinks Israel hasn’t received enough support from the Biden administration. He supports large scale deportations and building of a wall on the U.S.’s southern border. He also wants the police to be able to track women who cross state lines to have abortions.
But Vance’s real value for the Republican Party lies not in his earnest representation of white, working class Americans (as his book Hillbilly Elegy suggests) but in his deep ties to Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel. In recent weeks, tech leaders (many of whom once supported the Biden administration) have increasingly come out in support of Trump and the Republican party, describing Vance, a former venture capitalist, as “uniquely capable” and “a true American patriot”.
Russian behavioral norms are on the syllabus for migrant workers from Central Asia looking for work. Russia’s Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs (FADN) has developed a four-part lecture series which includes information on Russia’s migration and labor laws as well as how to interact with the opposite sex. This includes refraining from touching, pinching, hugging or grabbing unfamiliar women and men or making sounds like whistling or hissing at them. Also unacceptable: addressing anyone who is not a member of one’s immediate family as “brother” or “sister”, reports Kommersant.
Robert Fico survived an assassination attempt before Trump and much like Trump, blamed the opposition for stoking hateful sentiment amongst the population. What can Americans learn from what happened in Slovakia? Read Emily Tamkin’s sharp warning against this kind of distracting rhetoric here.
The cryptocurrency industry has spent more on the 2024 US elections than the entire energy sector put together, writes Molly White, whose new project Follow the Crypto will look at the ways in which cryptocurrency is bankrolling committees whose single-point agenda is installing crypto-friendly politicians. Read her analysis here.
A delicious review of a confusing book: “Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening. This massive new collective burden was piled on a society already stumbling under the weight of organized abandonment, environmental racism, for-profit health care, and mass incarceration. Vance, in the end, cannot abide the idea that what he suffered has to do with any of that disabling stuff. He will torture the rest of us until we agree to make him President to prove that there is nothing wrong with him.” Gabriel Winant is searing in this essay on J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
A fresh take on a misunderstood subject: : “Before colonization, India was not a space of sexual rigidity but a transgressive and shifting space where people from across the socio-economic spectrum explored and expressed their gender and sexuality in myriad ways. But I didn’t always know this. Growing up as a queer teenager in India, I thought sexual freedom and gender fluidity were contemporary constructs of the West. Like they were alien to the Indian subcontinent. I was so wrong. A look into the colonial archives show that we think this way because of “postcolonial amnesia.” Read Sindhu Rajasekaran’s piece on decolonizing sexuality here.
A familiar story with an unexpected twist: Andrea Jaeger became a professional tennis player at age 14. By sixteen, she was the No. 2 ranked female tennis player in the world. But a spate of horrific incidents involving bullying and sexual harassment eventually led her to quit the sport for good — she is now a nun. “I keep getting the robes stuck in buses and escalators. Once I jumped in a cab and left half of it outside the door. The first week I wore it, at a huge global conference in New York City. A bird went to the bathroom on me. “I thought that was God’s way of saying, ‘Maybe it’s OK to be a little muddy on the edges – you’re the one who used to dive for balls on the tennis court.’”
Read her extraordinary story here.