The Front Page: Do the Childless Have a Stake in Our Future?

On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: The Iranian plot to assassinate Trump; Elon Musk goes to war against Big Advertising; a Fight Club on whether Kamala is a good drinking buddy; a look into what’s fueling the mental health crisis (hint: it’s all the talk of the mental health crisis). And more.

But first, our lead story. 

In 2021, J.D. Vance gave a now-notorious interview to Tucker Carlson in which he claimed that “the country is run by childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” 

He went on: “It’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”

After he was named Trump’s VP pick last month, Vance’s remarks were unearthed and went viral, causing the nation’s childless cat ladies to pounce. Some are having fun with it, like the woman Olivia Reingold caught up with outside a Philadelphia rally for Kamala Harris (who, for the record, has two stepkids, no cats). In full costume, she called herself “a childless cat lady that J.D. Vance wants to pick on,” while smiling and saying she’s not miserable but “very happy.”

But, beyond the barbs and the outrage, Vance raises a serious point: If you don’t have kids, do you have a stake in the future?

There’s no doubt that having children gives people a reason to care about the future. Parents don’t just want to ensure a happy and secure life for their kids; they want their kids to inherit a world of opportunity and optimism after they’re gone. 

The childless don’t have such pressing concerns. But, as Kat Rosenfield writes in her latest essay for The Free Press, that gives them an even greater reason to question their legacy. It’s a question she has asked herself as a married, childless woman: “What can I build with my own hands, in the span of my own lifetime, that will still be standing when I’m gone?”

She writes, “It strikes me that this question has always been a powerful force in the lives of those without children, who, despite Vance’s insistence to the contrary, have always played a vital role in bettering society for future generations. The history of human achievement is at least in part a history of childless people staking their lives on a dream bigger than themselves, and if some unknown number of those people ended up dying in very stupid ways as a result of their ambition, the ones who succeeded are the ones after whom brands and towns and even entire species are named.

“These are our explorers, our inventors, our pioneers: unencumbered by family responsibilities, emboldened to take the sort of risks that parents understandably can’t, or won’t, or don’t want to. Nikola Tesla had no children, nor did Florence Nightingale, Amelia Earhart, or the Wright brothers. The most daring expeditions during England’s Age of Exploration were often populated by gay men for whom the dangers of life at sea were preferable to the confines of heterosexual family life. Two of America’s founding fathers, Washington and Madison, did not have children of their own. Surely they would have been bewildered by the notion that they had no stake in the future of the nation they’d risked their lives to create.”

Read Kat’s thought-provoking essay, “What the Childless Among Us Leave Behind.” 

1. Two people were arrested ahead of Taylor Swift’s upcoming concerts in Vienna. They’d apparently been radicalized online—not to be Swifties, mind you—and one of them had pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State. Her three shows in that city have since been canceled. This is what globalizing the intifada looks like. (ABCNews) 

2. Squad stalwart Cori Bush is out, having lost her seat, Missouri’s First, to Wesley Bell, a prosecutor with more normal views on Israel. (He told his local public radio station, “We do have to stand by our allies.”) In a speech after her brutal loss, Bush had this to say to AIPAC, who supported Bell: “I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.” Certainly this type of measured rhetoric had nothing to do with her loss. (The Hill) 

3. Twenty-five bricks of cocaine, estimated to be worth over $1 million, washed up on a beach in the Florida Keys because of a Category 1 hurricane. Debby, you shouldn’t have! (New York Times) 

4. The sleepy town of Ridgefield, Connecticut (population 7,655) is “shaken” by the first murder to take place there in more than 20 years. A 31-year-old man is accused of stabbing his father to death and leaving his organs outside his body in what his defense attorney has called a “tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.” (New York Post) 

5. Tim and Gwen Walz do not own a single stock, bond, security, cryptocurrency—you name it. They don’t even have real estate, since they sold their house to move into the governor’s mansion. Shockingly, and refreshingly, the couple’s only investments are through state pensions. (Axios) 

6. Hunter Biden is in the hot seat again. DOJ prosecutors are now alleging the president’s son and two of his associates accepted payments of up to $3 million from a Romanian businessman who was “attempting to influence U.S. policy and public opinion.” The new detail emerged in a filing related to the younger Biden’s federal tax fraud case, where he faces up to three felonies and other misdemeanors for allegedly failing to pay his taxes. (ABC)

7. Many of the victims of the October 7 attack on Israel were ravers who were at the Nova Music Festival and under the influence of psychedelics when Hamas terrorists swooped in. It’s a horror movie, and our friends at Tablet went deep on how the survivors were carefully brought back into reality. (Tablet)

8. Trump’s campaign was scared that Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro might be picked as Kamala’s VP—since he’s a moderate, they saw him as more of a threat—and so they boosted leftists’ calls for Kamala to pass over “Genocide Josh.” (The Bulwark) 

9. You can tell a recession might be coming when everyone starts bickering about what exactly a recession is, and when we’ll know that we’re in one. Luckily, it seems that for now, we’re not there yet. (WSJ)

10. Airlines are running out of number combinations to assign to their flights. There are only 9,999 combinations, and American Airlines has operated more flights than that, when you factor in routes that are operated by other airlines. It’s only August and it seems we’re staring down the second Y2K of the year. (View from the Wing) 

Despite over a century of mental health awareness campaigns, an expansion in private and public investments in mental health, and record high utilization of online therapy, we’ve never been more sick in the head. Forty-two percent of Gen Z has a diagnosed mental health condition. What gives? River Page explores the rise in mental health care as a new movie, Thank You for Sharing, asks whether we’ve created our own crisis. As River himself admits below, overthinking about poor mental health almost convinced him he was suffering from it. 

When I was 23, my roommate, who worked in sales but had majored in psychology, caught me in the midst of an internet rabbit hole and told me she thought I was on the autism spectrum. I laughed, but she said that she was serious, and started ticking off my symptoms: I often didn’t make eye contact with people when I spoke to them, I had a nervous tic that caused me to twist my hair, I worried too much, and I had a tendency to develop niche interests. She gestured to the article I was reading about Uzbek cotton exports. 

I shrugged her off. I’d been working customer service jobs—at a grocery store, a museum, various restaurants—since I was 16, and was successful enough at them not to get fired. I went on dates, and I was doing pretty well in college. If I was on the autism spectrum, it wasn’t affecting my life in any negative way, so who cares? 

At least, that’s what I told my roommate. 

Secretly, the idea made me anxious. In the following days and weeks, I began to analyze my conversations. Was I being awkward? If I was, how would I know?

Keep reading “Are We Thinking Ourselves Sick?” by River Page. 

This is an election about vibes—God forbid we should have any understanding of where, say, Kamala Harris stands on anything; we just want to see her laugh to Beyoncé tunes. So the beer question—meaning, which candidate would you rather grab a beer with—is sort of the only one that seems to matter. In short, would you like to grab a glass of Chianti with Kamala? We asked Peter Savodnik and Francesca Block to face off on this all-important issue:

Peter Savodnik would like to have a strong drink. Just not with Harris. 

I wouldn’t waste a precious vodka martini on the presumptive Democratic nominee. I’d enjoy interviewing Kamala Harris, and then dissecting all her tortuous cackling platitudes and non sequiturs. But no, I don’t want to have a drink with her. 

That’s because she’s the least authentic pol on the American scene today; which is to say, there’s nothing interesting about her. No depth, no vulnerability, nothing to explore. She seems—to me, at least, and I’d be happy to be disproved—a perfect distillation of whatever she believes her audience wants to hear.

I have no idea what Harris believes about anything that extends beyond herself—cops, crime, Joe Biden, TikTok, Gaza. Has she articulated a coherent position on any of these things? She strikes me as an empty vessel, and isn’t the point of having a drink with someone to unwind, loosen up, push past the uptightness of the daily rigamarole, and establish a modicum of intimacy? To grow a little closer? To learn something about each other?

I have my doubts there’s anything to learn. 

To be clear: this is not, exactly, an indictment of Harris’s character or even her political efficacy. It’s that she seems mind-numbingly boring. Potential interviewees I would find much less boring: anyone else who has recently been elected to any office anywhere, the recently inaugurated president of Iran, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and actually, maybe more than anyone else, the sleek South Korean sharpshooter Kim Yeji, because she is undeniably amazing and mysterious. Now there’s someone who I’d like to have a drink with. 

Frannie Block, on the other hand, would happily throw back a cold one with the veep. 

Kamala Harris cackles. She loves Venn diagrams. She knows how to make a lemony roast chicken. Plus, she dances like a mom in her fifties when Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” comes on the loudspeakers at a bar mitzvah—dorky, yes, but also carefree. Like someone I’d definitely want to get drunk off a bottle of wine with. 

Kamala Harris gives funny, cool-mom vibes. And not in a cringey way, like Regina George’s mom, played by Amy Poehler in Mean Girls. She’s cool in the “Even though you’re my friend’s mom I’d still like to go to a Hamilton–themed SoulCycle class with you” kind of way. Kamala just seems fun. And young people like fun—especially when the fun can be slightly ironic, like when she busted a move to a hip-hop song at a party while surrounded by a bunch of stiff-looking D.C. elites, wearing the brightest top the South Lawn has ever seen. 

Like Peter, I’m not sure what her stances are on major political issues of our time—like the unfolding war in the Middle East or whether we should defund the police. But who wants to talk politics over a nice glass of wine? I grab a drink with someone to relax, not to relive the workday. 

Kamala Harris may have her strange one-liners that seem to come right out of the Veep writers’ room, but she has an odd charisma too. She marches to the beat of her own drum. She can laugh things off and not take herself too seriously. I have no idea whether those qualities make her a good president, but it’s clear that she and I would have a blast hanging out together, sipping a nice rosé on a patio somewhere, belly laughing about who knows what. 

Readers, what do you think? Could you cackle along with Kamala over a cocktail or do you prefer to stay at home and cuddle your cats? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

→ U.S. indicts man with Iran links for plotting to assassinate Trump: The Department of Justice put a face to Iranian terror inside the U.S.: a Pakistani émigré named Asif Raza Merchant. On Wednesday, a New York federal court unsealed an indictment charging Merchant, 46, with attempting to run a murder-for-hire operation targeting former members of the Trump administration, including potentially Donald Trump himself. The plot outlined in the complaint, Justice Department officials said, was in support of Tehran’s public pledge to retaliate against U.S. officials who participated in a January 2020 covert operation that killed Iran’s most powerful military commander, Major General Qasem Soleimani, of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC.

Merchant’s indictment is the second from the Justice Department relating to alleged Iranian plots against former Trump administration officials. In 2022, the U.S. indicted an Iran-based IRGC member for allegedly attempting to assassinate Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, in and around Washington D.C.

“The Justice Department will spare no resource to disrupt and hold accountable those who would seek to carry out Iran’s lethal plotting against American citizens,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement announcing Merchant’s arrest.

American law enforcement officials have said in recent weeks that they heightened security around Trump in response to the suspected Iranian plots. This added protection, however, didn’t prevent a 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, from nearly assassinating the Republican presidential candidate at a rally last month in Pennsylvania. The FBI said Crooks isn’t tied to any of these alleged Iranian operations.

According to the indictment, Merchant arrived in New York in April to begin recruiting hitmen to kill unnamed targets and, specifically, a “political person.” The FBI became aware of Merchant’s plotting after one of his contacts agreed to become an informant. Merchant told his recruits that they would receive his instructions on who to target either during the last week of August or first week of September, after he’d left the U.S. The Justice Department said they arrested Merchant on July 12 as he was preparing to fly out of New York. A Pakistani national, Merchant has a wife and children in Iran and regularly travels to Syria and Iraq. —Jay Solomon

→ X takes on Big Advertising: It’s not exactly breaking news that big advertisers flee from controversial content—and when it comes to social media, no content is more controversial than that on X, which Elon Musk bought in 2022 for $44 billion. Sure enough, as X embraced once-banned content—like, you know, Covid skepticism or criticisms of DEI—and as Musk himself has become an increasingly divisive figure, many advertisers have concluded they no longer want to be associated with the company once known as Twitter.

The numbers are astonishing. According to Bloomberg, the platform’s ad revenue was down by at least 60 percent in the U.S. as of December 2023, putting the company $5 billion behind where it had expected to be prior to the Musk takeover. His efforts to woo advertisers back have gotten, as he put it, “nothing but empty words.” This being America, he took the obvious next step: he filed a lawsuit. “Now it is war,” Musk posted Tuesday on X.

The suit alleges that the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), whose members include 150 of the world’s largest advertisers, along with big-name corporations like Unilever, Mars, and CVS, have conspired to boycott X after Musk bought it, claiming that the site failed to meet the association’s “brand safety standards” for internet content. 

He has a point. Advertisers still flock to competing social media companies like Facebook and Instagram even though they have their share of unsavory content. What’s more, according to the lawsuit, X now has brand safety standards—giving advertisers control of the placement of their ads, just like Facebook and Instagram—that “meet or exceed” the standards of WFA and its social media initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). 

So why is the boycott continuing? The answer, believes Musk, is that the WFA disagrees with X’s political content. And he’s not the only one who thinks that. The House Judiciary Committee conducted an investigation of the boycott and concluded, “The information uncovered to date of WFA and GARM’s collusive conduct to demonetize disfavored content is alarming.”

Still, Musk’s lawsuit is the longest of long shots. There is nothing illegal about companies pulling their advertising from shows or sites they no longer favor. As Unilever’s president Herrish Patel claimed in a statement given at a recent House Judiciary committee hearing, “No platform has a right to our advertising dollar.” 

A second problem for Musk is that the practice of associations setting industry standards is common, which courts are unlikely to take seriously as an antitrust violation. “What GARM has been doing is absolutely consistent with what trade associations have historically done for decades and decades and decades,” Randall Rothenberg, the former CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told The Free Press.

As for why advertisers shy away from controversial content, Rothenberg said it just makes business sense. “Because if you do that, then you might not bring as many people in, drive as many people into the stores.” Companies could care less whether their ad dollars help or hurt free speech.

So long as Musk sticks to his principles, he’ll always be able to maintain a platform that is truly dedicated to free speech, whether controversial or not. But unless his suit gets some traction, he’ll have to do it without as much advertising.
—Francesca Block

→ Name games: Comedian Tim Dillon has one major gripe against the Olympics: the names just aren’t cool enough anymore. In the days of Picabo Street, he found himself glued to the television. Nowadays, he questions whether “adults even watch the Olympics anymore.”

There’s good news this year for fans like Tim: unbelievable names are back. In dressage—that’s the one where the horse dances—there’s Jagerbomb, a 10-year-old horse who weighs in at 1,600 pounds, who performs to “Sex Bomb” by Tom Jones. In table tennis, the bronze went to a Frenchman named Lebrun; who knew LeBron could be translated! I’ve even become a fan of Norwegian swimming because of the Muffin Man, a 27-year-old viral phenomenon named Henrik Christiansen who hoards chocolate muffins in his bedroom to hit his daily goal of 7,000 calories.

And then there’s the king of names: Armand “Mondo” Duplantis, the Louisiana-born pole vaulter competing for Sweden has been deemed the Timothée Chalamet of track and field—a heartthrob with a mop of hair and a very tall pole. But Duplantis is more than just an awesome name and a pretty face. On Monday night, he won the gold medal in his sport, breaking the world record for the ninth time in his career. In other words: if you look up the top 10 pole vaulters, he’s nine of them. After making history again, the pole vault playboy sprinted straight to kiss his model girlfriend, and partied so hard that he showed up to his interview the next morning visibly hungover. We salute Mondo Duplantis. We just wish he competed for his home country.

What to watch today: At 2:30 p.m., Noah Lyles faces off against his countryman “Kung Fu” Kenny Bednarek in the 200-meter final. At 3:00 p.m., the U.S. has a rematch against Serbia for the men’s basketball semifinal. And at 3:25 p.m., Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone meets reigning world champion Femke Bol in a highly anticipated women’s 400-meter hurdle final. —Evan Gardner

Oh, one more thing!

Tune into “The Free Press Live” tonight at 7 p.m. EST on YouTube or X. Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon will host the stream, with appearances from special guests. You won’t want to miss it.

Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Read her recent piece on gold and follow her on X @SnoozyWeiss.

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