The Front Page: The President and the Protesters at the DNC

Good morning. It’s Tuesday, August 20, and this is The Front Page, your daily portal into the world of The Free Press. Today: Olivia Reingold reports from the protests outside the DNC; Madeleine Kearns on Democrats trying—and failing—to be normal; Kat Rosenfield on why Grok is not a threat to democracy; and much more. 

But first, our lead story, from Peter Savodnik in Chicago, on the president the country has all but forgotten. 

CHICAGO — It was well past 11 p.m. on the East Coast by the time President Joe Biden took the stage Monday at Chicago’s United Center, where the Democratic Convention is taking place this week, to declare: 

“Folks, let me ask you, are you ready to vote for freedom? Are you ready to vote for democracy and for America? Let me ask you, are you ready to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?” 

It was a reminder that Joe Biden, 81, is still the president of the United States. In case you forgot.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to powerful people erasing or tinkering with the past in the service of the present.

Now, in an even more surreal twist, we have been made to forget the present, to forget President Biden is still President Biden. He is being memory-holed in real time. Until last night, when, suddenly, there he was! Delivering a speech in front of the sprawling crowd of 50,000 delegates and honorary guests and journalists, engulfed by flashing lights and massive video screens. Click for Peter’s full dispatch on the brief reappearance of a vanishing president.

On Monday afternoon in Chicago, my colleague Olivia Reingold was interviewing Hatem Abudayyeh, one of the lead organizers of the anti-Israel protests outside the DNC, when he noticed a pro-Israel Democrat in the crowd. 

“You’re at the wrong event,” Abudayyeh, the executive director of the Arab American Action Network, told the self-described “pro-Zionist,” who said he was there to prove that the likes of Abudayyeh were not in the majority in the Democratic Party. 

“You think pig, racist Zionists are the majority?” asked Abudayyeh, who then warned that a counterprotester could “get pummeled” for being at the event. 

Olivia, who knows a thing or two about reporting at a hostile protest, asked Abudayyeh if that was a threat. He did not enjoy her line of questioning: “If you’re going to ask a racist question, you can take your microphone and take off,” he told her. 

Free Press readers may remember Abudayyeh—whose home was raided by the FBI in 2010 as part of an investigation “concerning the material support of terrorism”—from a piece Olivia wrote back in April, about a Chicago convention where activists were planning to disrupt the DNC. When it was announced that Iran had launched a strike against Israel, Abudayyeh was at the podium cheering on the audience, who chanted in unison, “Hands Off Iran!” On Monday, he helped lead thousands of protesters, some of whom wielded Hamas flags, as they tried to break through the barrier at the DNC.

Watch Olivia’s interview below—including the tense exchange between Abudayyeh and a pro-Israel Democrat. 

→ Kat Rosenfield: Why Grok’s AI deepfakes are nothing to worry about. Earlier this year we saw the absurd results of what happens when you try to train AI not to offend. Google’s Gemini served up a comically ahistorical cast of black Nazis, female popes, and Asian Vikings.

Enter Grok, X’s image-generating AI that, unlike Gemini, has no filter, leading some on the internet to freak out. With the election around the corner, critics say, there is major concern about threats to democracy like. . . AI-produced images of Kamala Harris “suggestively eating fruit.” Or this weird image of Trump and Harris expecting a child. (I’ve seen it, and so now you must too. Sorry.) 

It’s all absurd, writes Kat Rosenfield. And absolutely nothing to worry about. Read her full defense of Grok’s AI deepfakes here. 

→ Madeleine Kearns asks, “Dems, why can’t you be normal?” The same people who have been calling their opponents “weird” can’t figure out how to be normal. That’s one of the takeaways from the first day of the DNC. 

The Democrats have made “reproductive rights” a central tenet of their campaign. And on Monday, one Democratic affiliate group made that loud and clear by erecting an 18-foot inflatable IUD, named “Freeda Womb,” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood parked a mobile clinic near the event space, offering all attendees free abortions and vasectomies. Sterilizing your most motivated political activists doesn’t exactly scream We are the future. 

And then there’s the first page of the 2024 DNC platform, which began not with a letter of gratitude to Joe Biden or a welcome from Kamala Harris or a summary of the Democratic platform, but with a land acknowledgment that pays respects “to the millions of Indigenous people throughout history who have protected our lands, waters, and animals.” Honored tribes included the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten as well as “the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.” 

Also decidedly not-normal: DNC chair Jamie Harrison’s view of presidential history. He tweeted a photo of himself on day one of the convention with Biden, calling him “the most consequential president in American history.” Right. The most consequential president in American history, who was denied a second term. 

All a little. . . weird. 

The Free Press will be broadcasting live from the DNC on X later this week. Follow us here and stay tuned for more details. 

1. Writes liberal columnist Jonathan Chait of the protesters outside the DNC: “When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.” “This,” he adds, “is blood-and-soil nationalism for the left.” (New York)

2. Retired federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig has endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, whose candidacy he describes as an existential threat to U.S. democracy. Luttig, a prominent conservative legal scholar who has served in two Republican administrations, says that “in voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her public policy views are vastly different from my own, but I am indifferent in this election as to her policy views on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law.” (CNN) 

3. Tim Walz once praised Chinese communism as a system under which “everyone is the same and everyone shares.” Walz, who honeymooned in China, made the comments to a local Nebraska paper in 1991. (Washington Free Beacon) 

4. A majority of California voters support Proposition 36, a measure on the ballot this November that would impose tougher sentences for offenses relating to fentanyl and repetitive theft. Prop. 36 is designed to overhaul parts of Proposition 47, which voters backed a decade ago and which downgraded many criminal offenses to misdemeanors. (L.A. Times) 

5. Vladimir Putin signed a decree Monday allowing foreign citizens to apply for temporary residency in Russia if they share “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” and oppose the “destructive neoliberal ideological agenda” in their home country. (Moscow Times) Read Peter Savodnik’s recent feature for The Free Press: “The American Men Seeking the American Dream—In Russia.” 

6. Eighteen of the 22 students arrested for occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall this spring remain in good standing with the school, a new House report has found. The university had previously stated it would expel those who were part of the mob who stormed the building. (National Review) 

7. Kamala Harris’s candidacy may have been met with a surge of enthusiasm from loyal Democrats, but many Democratic-leaning voters remain undecided: “Many voters said that they needed to hear more—to fill in the considerable gaps in their understanding of how she would lead. Among the issues they mentioned were inflation, immigration and school vouchers.” (New York Times) 

8. America’s CEOs reportedly see “little upside and a lot of risk” in the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Top executives, they’re just like us! (Financial Times) 

9. Yale’s “Integrity Project” is attacking the UK’s landmark review of “gender-affirming care” for minors—which found there is “remarkably weak evidence” to support youth gender medicine. Yale’s paper purports to reveal major flaws in the Cass Review, but it is little more than politically motivated misinformation, Jesse Singal reports on his Substack. (Singal-Minded)

10. Missing from Disney’s recent fan convention: young people. Can the entertainment giant win over the Zoomers, or is it stuck catering to an aging (and insufferable) cohort of millennial die-hard Disney adults? (The Guardian) 

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

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