Kamala Harris’s choice: Divisiveness, spiced up

PITTSBURGH — Vice President Kamala Harris’s decision to visit the Penzeys Spices store on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh's Strip District was not decided in a vacuum. Her advance team spent countless days in the city researching the business and thoroughly checking its owners' backgrounds, including their worldviews, social media posts, and who would be in the business.

Any halfway decent advance team knows exactly where it's placing its boss and has a rudimentary ability to use Google to type in “best places to go in Pittsburgh’s Strip District” and see Pennsylvania Macaroni, Wiggle Whiskey, and the Sen. John Heinz History Center come up first.

What never comes up is Penzeys Spices .

When candidates visit a city, they always go to a locally owned place, which often has nostalgic emotions attached to it and is a cultural touchstone that draws people together, such as Pennsylvania Macaroni, which has been in the same Sunseri family for several generations. The shop is a quintessential establishment for everyone who is from the area, no matter what their politics are. It sells just as many spices as the spice store across the street does, as well as epicurean mainstays in Italian (or want-to-be Italian) family homes.

A rudimentary Google of Penzeys Spices is all it takes to know a couple of things pretty quickly. The owner is a Democrat, which is fine and safe for the candidate. But upon reading further, things go south fast in terms of comportment — something Harris, Democrats, and almost every member of the media enjoy getting worked up when the comportment concerns that of former President Donald Trump.

The owner of Penzeys Spices is really, well, out there, which is not new information. In two successive emails to his customers a few years back, he sent out a “Republicans are Racist" weekend special for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

And for those not on the Penzeys Spices email list, he also posted it on its website to ensure everyone saw it. Days later, he ran another “All Republicans are Racists” special that begged the remaining loyal Penzeys Spices customers — the owner admitted in his Facebook post that the store had lost 40,000 of them — to buy gift cards.

Penzeys Spices’s retail X account also posted that Republicans are racists — many times. Then, it stopped posting altogether for over two years until it reposted a picture of Harris that was posted by her campaign X account, featuring the vice president in front of an oversized painting of the word “kind” in Bill Penzey Jr.’s Pittsburgh store.

So, if the advance team didn’t know how to use Google, perhaps a quick look at the Penzeys Spices's X feed might have given it a clue that Harris should not have visited the store and proclaimed: “It is time to turn the page on the divisiveness. It’s time to bring our country together, chart a new way forward.”

It has also been pointed out by several members of the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, where the deadliest massacre of Jews happened at the Tree of Life synagogue six years ago, that Penzeys Spices's owner has made antisemitic remarks. One such remark, which is currently circulating online but could not be independently confirmed, is pretty awful.

But the bottom line is Harris had a say in where she went in Pittsburgh. Her advance team had every reason to know, full well, that this was not a place where the page would be turned on divisiveness. This is a place where divisiveness is who they are. By going to Penzeys Spices, Harris showed every reporter covering her who she is. And yet no one, not a single person in that press pool, local or national, told the rest of the story.

It's almost guara nteed that if former Vice President Dick Cheney had visited a far-right equivalent of Penzeys Spices, every major publication would have led with it for three days. In fact, if any Republican had visited this hypothetical far-right spice store, it would have likely been the most anticipated question in a presidential debate. Think pieces would have droned on for days, and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough may have needed an inhaler to recover from his outrage.

Instead, a Washington Post reporter took to X to share their observation of Harris’s choice to go to Penzeys Spices.

“Kamala just went into Penzeys Spices and bought Creamy Peppercorn Dressing Base, Fox Point Seasoning, Trinidad Lemon-Garlic Marinade, Turkish Seasoning, and Tuscan Sunset Salt Free Italian Seasoning,” the reporter posted on X.

The Associated Press wrote a headline that read, “Harris turns to her favorite foods in effort to show a more private side and connect with voters.” Then it went on about collard greens in a tub, caramel cake, pancakes, bacon breakfasts, and how much of a devoted foodie Harris is.

But there was not a single curious thought about the divisiveness of her choices.

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Harris wasn’t trying to evoke her devotion to food by visiting Penzeys Spices.

In short, she showed people and the press who she is without answering a single question about her choices, and no one questioned it, likely because they share her values and see nothing divisive about hating Republicans.