Keep America Weird. Plus. . .

On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: The Pennsylvania governor is the veepstakes favorite. But is he too pro-Israel for the Democrats? The fastest man in the world is an American. And more.

But first, our lead story. 

“Threat to democracy” is out. Now, the GOP ticket is being hit with a new line of attack: They’re “weird.”

Kamala Harris first tried out the salvo at a July 27 fundraiser in Massachusetts. 

“You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record. And some of what he and his running mate are saying, it’s just plain weird,” Harris said. “I mean, that’s the box you put that in, right?” 

A few days later, a pro-Harris Super PAC took the cue and blasted out an ad titled, “These Guys Are Just Weird.” And suddenly, everyone from wannabe running mates to sympathetic cable news commentators couldn’t get the W-word out of their mouths. 

Weirdly, Trump appears to have been wounded by the “weird” attack, going on various interviews to say Harris is, in fact, the strange one.

“You know who’s plain weird?” he said on The Ingraham Angle. Harris “is plain weird. She is a weird person.” 

“Nobody’s ever called me weird,” Trump later insisted on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. “I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.”

The result was an edifying news cycle, with Republicans claiming that Democrats are “the real weirdos” and sometimes using a picture of a purple-haired lefty with a septum piercing and ambiguous gender identity to prove their point. 

The assumption on all sides was clear: it’s bad to be weird. 

But today in The Free Press, one Republican takes a different view. Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says weirdness is actually a good thing. More than that: it’s deeply American.

In fact, he writes, it’s what distinguished America’s Founding Fathers, and it’s what his immigrant parents taught him to celebrate. It’s the thing that makes America great: this country grants us the freedom to be weird.  

Here’s Vivek. . . 

When I grew up in southwest Ohio in the 1990s, my immigrant parents always reminded me: if you’re going to stand out, you might as well be outstanding. They said it with a thick Indian accent, but I view their advice as quintessentially American.

It’s what distinguished America’s Founding Fathers. The Old World was one that aspired to a certain form of normalcy—one where people stayed in their respective lanes. An inventor was an inventor, a lord was a lord, a philosopher was a philosopher. Much of this was determined at birth.

But our Founders were different. They didn’t believe in those boundaries. 

Benjamin Franklin was not only a co-author of the Declaration of Independence but also founded hospitals and universities; dabbled in medicine; created a musical instrument that went on to be used by Mozart and Beethoven; designed the lightning rod, bifocal spectacles, and the Franklin stove. Robert Livingston designed the steamship as a side project while serving as an ambassador to France. Roger Sherman was a self-taught attorney who never had any formal education. Thomas Jefferson was fluent in four languages; wrote nineteen thousand letters by hand; and invented prototypes of the polygraph and the swivel chair. Oh, and he designed the architecture of the Virginia State Capitol building.

They were weird. Often the ones who said the weirdest things adopted some of the weirdest viewpoints by the standards of their day. John Adams was an abolitionist during an age when slavery was the norm the world over. He was also a self-taught scholar of Hindu scripture and wrote letters to Thomas Jefferson about the Bhagavad Gita. 

Click to read more from Vivek Ramaswamy on why weird is wonderful.

1. Iran has ignored calls for restraint in its response to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week. Israel is braced for an imminent response after the Iranian regime told Arab diplomats it didn’t care if its response triggered a wider war. (Wall Street Journal)   

2. After six days of anti-immigrant unrest in the UK, a mob tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers on Sunday in Yorkshire. The prime minister has vowed to crack down on “far right thuggery,” which right now shows no signs of letting up. Aris Roussinos argues that the genie is out of the bottle and that British leaders must acknowledge the problem they have allowed to fester: interethnic conflict between mostly working class whites and Muslim communities. (UnHerd) 

3. Nancy Pelosi called Joe Biden a “Mount Rushmore kind of President” in an interview Sunday. CBS’s Lesley Stahl asked if the Speaker Emerita was being serious: “Are you really saying that he belongs up there on Mount Rushmore? Lincoln and Joe Biden?” Pelosi stuck to her guns: “Well, you got Teddy Roosevelt up there, and he’s wonderful. I don’t say take him down. But you can add Biden.” (CBS) 

4. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is replacing Biden loyalists with former Barack Obama advisers including David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter. But the Democratic candidate has a long, long way to go if she is going to rebuild the coalition that won Obama two terms, argues Ruy Teixeira. (The Liberal Patriot)   

5. One person recruited to help do so: Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The star of Veep will reportedly be “extra-involved” in Harris’s campaign and will appear at the DNC. In other words: a real-world hapless vice president running for president is getting help from the fictional hapless veep who became president on TV. Got it. (Deadline) 

6. Speaking of strange campaign strategies, Donald Trump reignited his 2020 feud with the popular Republican governor of a crucial swing state over the weekend. Trump called Georgia governor Brian Kemp a “bad guy” at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday after firing off some hostile social media posts earlier in the day. Between this and his attack on Harris as not really black, the ex-president is running a real winner of a campaign. (Politico) 

7. Poor RFK Jr. He recently slipped out of the limelight during the craziest four weeks in political memory. And polls show that Democrats who had been planning on voting for the kooky scion of Camelot are now swinging Harris’s way. In what could be a ploy to get back in the news, RFK admitted Sunday, in a totally normal recorded conversation with Roseanne Barr, that he once left a dead bear in Central Park. (X) 

8. A humiliated and furious Nicolás Maduro has locked up 2,000 Venezuelans in a fierce crackdown during his fight to remain in power after a rigged election. On Saturday, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado risked arrest to address a rally. And on Sunday, Maduro blamed “international Zionism” for the social unrest. Aha. (Bloomberg)  

9. What do J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha, and Instagram influencer Ballerina Farm have in common? Both are conservative women being denied their individuality. Just because you’re conservative, it doesn’t mean you’re oppressed, writes Elizabeth Nolan Brown. (Reason)

10. Sometimes the riskiest way to live is by avoiding all risk. Playing it safe is what doomed companies like Blockbuster and Sears. And it can end entire cultures and societies, writes Ted Gioia in this unsettling account of today’s algorithm-driven creative rot. (The Honest Broker) 

→ Josh Shapiro looks like he won the veepstakes: Kamala Harris is widely expected to name Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro her vice presidential pick at a Tuesday rally in Philadelphia. If that happens—and Polymarket has it as a 66 percent possibility—it won’t be much of a surprise. The Harris-Shapiro ticket was announced on X Friday by Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker in what may have been a strategic leak. 

There are many good reasons for Harris to choose Shapiro over other candidates, such as Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, Arizona senator Mark Kelly, and Minnesota governor Tim Walz. He is a popular governor in possibly the most important battleground state in the country. Joe Biden, who was born in the Keystone State, only squeaked out a win there against Trump in 2020, helping him clinch the Electoral College. A Fox News poll last month found Shapiro has a 61 percent favorability rating in Pennsylvania. 

Shapiro is also a political talent. With poise, oratory skills, and relative youth (he’s 51), he could be a Jewish version of the 44th president—a Baruch Obama, if you will. You can see the echoes of Obama in his throaty stage whispers, folksy demeanor, and ease with which he connects to non–college-educated voters who have fled the party for Donald Trump’s GOP. One of his first acts as governor was to remove the college degree requirement for thousands of state government jobs. 

So far, so good.

But Shapiro is also a longtime Israel supporter who once volunteered in a non-military role for the IDF. He has been outspoken about the pro-Palestinian protests that have roiled campuses since Hamas invaded the Jewish state, killing 1,200 on October 7. After three college presidents gave disastrous congressional testimony about the antisemitism on their campuses, he condemned the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill for her “failure of leadership.” 

In normal times, this would all be to Shapiro’s advantage—especially when paired with Harris’s leftist leanings on the topic. But these aren’t normal times, and Shapiro’s candor is a handicap for the Democrats, as some of the party’s left wing have become vocal activists against Israel’s war in Gaza. Last month, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan protested Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress by holding up a sign calling him a “war criminal.” 

On Friday, an op-ed Shapiro wrote when he was a 20-year-old junior at the University of Rochester surfaced, causing discomfort for the governor. In it, he argued that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to accept a two-state solution in Israel, adding that they “will not coexist peacefully.” At a rally, Shapiro said his views had since evolved. 

But that wasn’t good enough for former MSNBC presenter Mehdi Hassan, who spoke for many left-wing Dems when he posted on X: “The idea that Harris would undermine all the momentum she’s built up with younger, progressive, non-white voters, by picking the guy who compared antiwar students to the KKK & volunteered on an Israeli military base, while Walz, Beshear & Prizker [sic] are right there, is insane to me.” (Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker has also been mentioned as a possible Harris running mate.) 

Still, choosing Shapiro as her veep would give Harris a chance to score big political points, given that her own views on Israel have been all over the map. “If she picks him, it gives her an opportunity to show that she is not beholden to the progressive extreme left and she stands up for moderates in the party,” said Abe Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “And she has the guts to stand up for someone who is being attacked.” According to a Pew survey from March, 58 percent of Americans believe Israel had valid reasons for fighting the war in Gaza. 

Bottom line: Harris may end up losing some of the fringe voters with Shapiro, but she stands to gain the support of Americans who don’t trust a political party that includes flag burners and antisemites. —Eli Lake

→ Maybe it is the economy, stupid: Last week I wrote about how the Fed was enjoying a quiet summer, blissfully out of the headlines, having faced down a blistering surge of inflation while managing to delicately guide the economy into a relatively benign soft landing. Well, the Fed’s quiet days of summer are over. A surprisingly poor jobs report on Friday spooked financial markets, made the Fed’s job more difficult, and could even upend the presidential race. 

We learned that job growth in July was meager—with just 114,000 new jobs—and the unemployment rate spiked to its highest level since the pandemic fears of 2021. Words like “panic,” “jittery,” and “freaking out” suddenly appeared in the business pages. The so-called “fear index,” a measure of market volatility, jumped to its highest level since the days following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023. And Asian markets fell sharply on Monday morning. 

There are other notable signs of a slowing economy. McDonald’s sales tumbled for the first time since the pandemic. Applications for unemployment benefits are up. Investors are betting that the Fed will need to move aggressively to stave off trouble. Initially, a rate cut of a quarter of a point had already been considered a certainty. But now traders believe there’s at least a 70 percent chance the Fed goes bigger, cutting rates by half a point at its September meeting. 

The economy has recently been overshadowed by other matters during this election season—pushed aside by more important issues like who’s weird, “brat,” overly attached to cats, or a supposed threat to democracy. That’s likely because the economy has been decent—not strong enough for Democrats to really boast about, but not weak enough for Trump to make it the centerpiece of his campaign. But if the job market truly deteriorates and there’s talk everywhere of recession, the economy will suddenly be front and center, ahead even of cats and couches. —Uri Berliner

→ Our man in the Arena: Free Press readers will recognize the name Max Meyer. He’s written for us about why SpaceX is a man-made miracle, why Lake of the Ozarks is the MAGA Hamptons and why he, at 23, bought a farm. Not content writing for us, Max has launched a magazine of his own. 

Arena is, as Max and his colleagues put it in their launch issue, “on the side of the future and the people building it,” and promises to “tell stories about entrepreneurship, technology, and capitalism without the drive-by shots and insults; to document the story of progress and prosperity in America; and to make it okay to dream in public again.” Arena will publish four 100-page issues per year—and if issue one is anything to go by, it’ll be a visual treat as well as a rewarding read. 

Arena’s motto is “The new needs friends.” And the new kid on the block has a friend in The Free Press. Free Pressers can get 25 percent off a subscription to Arena if they use the promo code FREEPRESS. Click to subscribe. —OW

→ Meet your new fastest man in the world: It came down to five-thousandths of a second, but he did it. Noah Lyles, the 27-year-old American sprinter, won the 100 meter dash, beating out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson for the gold and the title of “Fastest Man in the World.” The gold hasn’t gone to an American since 2004. 

Lyles is hard to miss. Most athletes show up to race in an Adidas sweatsuit; he arrived at the Olympic team trials in a Gucci suit made in collaboration with Adidas, as Snoop Dogg carried his uniform and a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards in a silver briefcase. He wears a flashy chain and nail polish, and says in interviews that he’s working to “transcend” the sport. Oh, and he has a tattoo on his abs that reads “icon.”

None of this spells subtlety, but at Sunday’s race, Lyles put his money where his legs are. He finished the contest with a time of 9.79 seconds. He’s also expected to take gold in the men’s 200 meter race this Thursday. 

But it wasn’t all star-spangled banners for American sprinters this weekend. After a 2021 THC suspension barred her from Tokyo’s games, Sha’Carri Richardson broke the women’s 100 record at 2023’s World Championships, sending her to Paris—and giving her momentum to go with her vendetta. But despite being the favorite for Saturday’s 100 meter final, the Texan track star fell short of her Olympic redemption, finishing second behind Julien Alfred of St. Lucia. Richardson will still have a shot at gold in the women’s relay, and something tells me we’ll be seeing more of her in Los Angeles in 2028. Richardson’s silver and Lyles’s gold added to a big medal haul for Team USA over the weekend. We’re now where we belong: at the top of the table. 

What to watch today: This morning Simone Biles will compete in her final two medal events: catch her on the beam at 6:35 ET, and in the floor final at 8:20. And if you’re looking for something to read between matchups, check out The Wall Street Journal on why the New York Knicks and France’s national team suffer from the same Les Blues on the basketball court. —Evan Gardner 

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. 

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