The Middle East on the Brink. Plus. . .

On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: NYU students embrace “armed struggle.” J.D. Vance’s very own basket of deplorables. Suzy Weiss on why the French—not Christians—should be offended by the Olympics opening ceremony. Cat ladies pounce! And much more. 

But first, our lead story. The Free Press’s Jerusalem correspondent, Matti Friedman, on the latest from Israel: a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children in Israel’s north this weekend. The country—pounded by Iranian proxies from all directions—now faces one of the most perilous moments in recent history. 

On Saturday evening a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children on a soccer field in the town of Majdal Shams, on the Golan Heights in northern Israel.

For many months it has been said that Israel is “on the brink” of all-out war with Hezbollah. It’s been repeated so often that the phrase has lost its urgency. I wrote it myself here in January after spending time in the eerily depopulated swath of the country just north of my parents’ town, Nahariya, in easy rocket range near the Lebanon border.

But with the deaths of the children playing soccer—their mass funeral is underway as I write these lines—and the wounding of more than 30 others, “the brink” was either finally reached or actually crossed.

Click for more for Matti’s full report on the rocket attack that has fundamentally changed the war that’s been raging since October 7.

1. Polling shows Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck. Still, Harris faces some disadvantages. One is authenticity: Only 30 percent of voters think Harris says what she believes, compared with 46 percent for Trump. Another is her role in the cover-up of Biden’s unfitness for office. A majority of registered voters say there was a cover-up, 68 percent of whom say Harris is implicated. (YouGov)

2. One of the many twists in the 2024 presidential race is that both Trump and Harris have seen big jumps in their favorability ratings in recent weeks. First, Trump’s brush with death brought an approval-ratings bump. Now, Harris’s elevation to the top of the ticket has done the same for her. A new ABC/Ipsos poll finds her approval rating at 43 percent, up from 35 percent just a week ago. (ABC)

3. Exit polls in Venezuela showed the opposition beating Nicolás Maduro by a wide margin last night. Opposition candidate Edmundo González also saw high turnout as a positive sign, estimating that, by 4 p.m., 11.7 million Venezuelans had voted, a participation rate of more than 54 percent. (Washington Post)

4. “Do I think Kamala Harris is the answer to all our problems?” asks anti-Trump conservative Matt Labash, working through his thoughts on the presidential race. “Based on her past performance, I’d venture a ‘hell, no.’ ” But “give me a woman I can disagree with while still settling matters at the ballot box over a wannabe tyrant who declares the ballot box illegitimate if it doesn’t contain enough votes for him.” (Slack Tide)

5. A recent virtual fundraiser was billed as a chance for “white women” to “answer the call” and “show up” for Kamala Harris. And show up they did, with more than 100,000 participants raising more than $1.8 million. The intrepid Elizabeth Nolan Brown dialed into this “Karens for Kamala” event in which participants were told: “White women, we have 100 days to save the world!” Way to make it all about yourselves, ladies. (Reason) 

6. Allan Ripp always felt safe as a Jew in New York. That changed on July 20. While walking his daughter’s dog in Central Park, a man riding a Citi Bike aggressively shoved him. Ripp protested. The man dismounted, pushed Ripp, spat on him, and shouted, “You fucking Jew pig. I’m going to kill you and your animal.” NYPD asked how the assailant knew Ripp was Jewish. “He didn’t.” Perhaps in his twisted view anyone who crossed him “was a despicable Jew to be set upon and attacked.” (WSJ) 

7. “We know that doctors and nurses are raising euthanasia with patients unsolicited, often repeatedly,” warns anti-euthanasia campaigner Amanda Achtman, in a Substack called Things I Wrote Down. For more on Canada’s legal assisted suicide program, read Rupa Subramanya’s reporting for The Free Press. 

8. Danean MacAndrews went to jail after taking part in protests inside the Capitol on January 6. Her experience behind bars has turned her into an advocate for criminal justice reform, reports Zaid Jilani on his new Substack, which is worth subscribing to. (The American Saga) 

9. A specter has haunted Kamala Harris—the specter of Veep. Dave Weigel talks to the showrunner of the Washington, D.C., sitcom that now seems painfully close to the truth. “I was not sitting around thinking ‘this’ll be Veep,’ ” he says of the period before Biden dropped out. “I was too worried for the country.” (Semafor) 

10. A 2,000-year-old dispute over the flute is the key to understanding our culture today, argues Ted Gioia. Plato—whose philosophy is “so hostile to music and poets”—spent his final hours listening to a Thracian slave play the flute, and that tells us something about the true value of culture, argues Gioia. (The Honest Broker) 

For the latest on the sporting action from Paris, scroll down and read Evan Gardner’s roundup. But first, here’s Suzy Weiss with her take on the opening ceremony so bad officials were apologizing for it by Sunday. 

The Olympic opening ceremony is an opportunity to showcase the best of the host country: their inventions and innovations, their proudest achievements and their physical prowess. Back in Beijing in 2008, China subbed in a cuter 7-year old girl to lip-synch a song that was really being sung behind the curtain by a more talented 9-year-old because the older girl had crooked teeth. And you’re telling me the best France has to offer is a man with a beard twerking in a bustier?

Thomas Jolly, the choreographer responsible for this slopfest, told the AP, “My wish isn’t to be subversive, nor to mock or to shock. Most of all, I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide.”

But inclusion is not the point of the Olympics. Quite the opposite. Excellence is the point. Click for Suzy’s full take on the opening ceremony that missed the point. 

→ J.D. Vance’s ‘basket of deplorables’: It’s been less than two weeks since the 39-year-old Ohio senator was picked as Trump’s running mate, and it already seems like every single one of his past utterances has been picked apart for damaging details. 

This includes some painfully earnest blog posts from 2010, which, I regret to inform you, include discussion of Zach Braff’s 2004 film Garden State. (We are, only now, coming to realize what it really means to have a millennial on a presidential ticket.) 

It also includes some of Vance’s private messages sent to a transgender friend at Yale Law School from 2014 to 2017. Sofia Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit who is no longer friends with Vance, shared the emails with The New York Times “in the hopes the emails will inform the opinion of voters” about his campaign. (The two apparently fell out in 2021 after Vance backed an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors.) The story presents Vance as a once empathetic and thoughtful guy who sold his soul to Donald Trump. And they do contain one or two embarrassing lines. Saying “I hate the police,” after Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, for example.

We are supposed to come away thinking that Vance betrayed his friend. But read it and ask yourself who comes across worse. The person who was honest with his friend about their political differences and brought Nelson baked goods after surgery, or the person who went to The New York Times with emails from a former friend?   

Vance’s most self-destructive comments, so far, come from a resurrected 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson. During this exchange, he described prominent Democrats—including Kamala Harris—as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” and who want to “make the rest of the country miserable too.” 

“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?” he added.

As soon as this swipe emerged last week, female feline-lovers of the internet pounced. The hashtag #childlesscatladies became an Instagram meme, complete with merch, and even Jennifer Aniston weighed in, saying, “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.” 

Suddenly, Vance was guilty of the same campaign don’t Hillary Clinton committed in 2016. When she called half of Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” at a fundraising event, his base heard the slight and turned it into a badge of honor, putting it on t-shirts, mugs, and hats.

On Friday, Vance had a chance to walk back his remarks in an interview with Megyn Kelly. And while he dismissed them as “sarcastic” and said he’s “got nothing against cats,” he didn’t back down. “The substance of what I said, Megyn—I’m sorry, it’s true,” he said. “This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-children.” In other words, Vance wants us to take him seriously, not literally, when it comes to the cat ladies. (When it comes to “the substance,” Noah Millman notes that George Washington didn’t have any kids. Did that make him a bad president?) —OW 

→ And about that baby bust: It wasn’t only women without kids who were displeased by Vance’s “childless cat lady” remarks. It was also pro-natalists: people who don’t resort to name-calling but are also worried about the growing number of women choosing not to have children. 

The U.S. fertility rate is at a historic low of 1.6 births per woman, well below replacement level. A recent study shows that it’s Americans having no babies at all—rather than people having fewer babies—who account for over two-thirds of the drop in births between 2012 and 2022. Though the question of why people don’t have children can be sensitive, declining fertility rates pose serious long-term problems—from worker shortages and pension shortfalls to national security. 

Last week—in the midst of cat-lady-gate—Pew published new research examining why young adults say they’re “unlikely” to have kids. Top answers include prioritizing careers and hobbies, insufficient funds, concerns about the state of the world, and climate change. But the number-one reason, particularly among women: they “just don’t want to.” Pew also found that between 2018 and 2023, the share of U.S. adults under 50 who say they are “unlikely to ever have kids” rose 10 percentage points, from 37 percent to 47 percent. 

Should politicians incentivize baby-making for the sake of civilization? Vance thinks so. He has argued for greater tax benefits for those with children and has even suggested that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their children before they turn eighteen.

But incentivizing child-rearing, be it through tax cuts or votes, can go only so far. “Where the drama is,” says Catherine Pakaluk, an economist, mother of eight children and six stepchildren, and the author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, “is whether men and women, couples, households, want a child.” 

While she favors “removing obstacles to both marriage and childbearing whenever we find them,” Pakaluk says she’s “skeptical that straightening all those things out will change the fundamental desire that people have to be married and to have children.” Those things, she says, come “from deeper places.”

“If you would like to promote a culture of childbearing,” says Pakaluk, “then you need to focus on. . . what drives people’s desires and expectations for life.”
—Madeleine Kearns  

→ Anti-Israel activists at NYU embrace ‘armed struggle’: Don’t expect the anti-Israel protests that roiled college campuses earlier this year to disappear for good. In fact, recent moves from one university group suggest they might get far worse when school starts back in the fall. 

Last week, NYU’s Palestine Solidarity Committee rebranded as the People’s Solidarity Coalition and announced a new mission hinting that they are prepared to use violence in their fight to “dismantle” the college’s “involvement in settler-colonial occupation, genocide and imperial wars.” 

The group went on to state that they “recognize and welcome the diversity of tactics that lead to victory,” including “armed struggle, non-violent direct action, cultural production, and world building.” The group declared it will “not condemn the brave actions of our allies nor will we limit ourselves to resistance through organizational means.” 

It is unclear how many students are represented by the new coalition, which binds together 44 different NYU-affiliated organizations ranging from the Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine and Jews Against Zionism to cultural and academic groups like the NYU Consortium Medievalists, the Climate Care Collective, and the Stonewall Policy Alliance. The People’s Solidarity Coalition states that it rejects “bigotry of all forms,” and while it is “strictly anti-Zionist,” it is also “de/anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchy, non-hierarchical, abolitionist, and disability justice–oriented.” 

And while the group’s mission is still centered around its “struggle for the end of the Zionist Entity”—which it also dubs “apartheid ‘Israel’  ”—the new statement expands beyond the Middle East. “When we take up the struggle against the Zionist entity,” it proclaims, “we take on the global fight against U.S. imperialism and its violences.”

The group accuses NYU’s Washington Square campus of “land theft and displacement everywhere it goes,” adding that it “invests in death” through its relationship with global financial company BlackRock. (BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, who is Jewish, sits on NYU’s board.) It also claims that NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus is an example of “neo-imperialism” that “seeps its hands in blood in Sudan” and that the school’s campus in Tel Aviv, Israel, is “a physical manifestation of its crimes against the Palestinian people.” 

Per its new statement, the People’s Solidarity Coalition is bound together by a set of “shared principles,” which include “the right to resist,” “the right to self determination,” the assertion that Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine, and the endorsement of Palestinian refugees’ “right of return.” 

On July 25, NYU spokesperson John Beckman denounced the group’s statement, which he called “a deplorable ‘embrace’ of ‘armed struggle’ as a valid ‘tactic’ in achieving its aims on campus.” Beckman called on the group to “immediately retract their statement and repudiate it, as well as related conduct, such as vandalism, destruction of property, and threats and intimidation.” 

After Beckman’s condemnation, the coalition briefly took down its statement, although it has been reuploaded as a link in its Instagram bio as of Sunday afternoon. —Francesca Block

And they’re off! The first weekend of the Olympics is in the books. Here’s the latest from Evan Gardner as well as what’s coming up today. 

→ You win some, you lose some: The U.S. got off to a bit of a slow start this weekend, after China took home the first gold of the year in riflery Saturday morning. I try not to be an alarmist when it comes to China, but if America is losing the gun-shooting event, maybe we really are falling behind.

But nothing can stop America’s gymnasts. Simone Biles cemented her triumphant return, albeit with an injured calf, by qualifying for the medal round in every single event. She’ll be joined in the final by her teammate Suni Lee—who won the all-around gold in 2020—making Thursday the first time two former champs from the same squad will compete with each other in the all-around final. 

Other winners: Phoenix Suns’ superstar Kevin Durant led the U.S. men’s basketball team in a 26-point blowout over Serbia. Female fencers Lauren Scruggs and Lee Kiefer competed in an all-American final with Kiefer taking home the gold. And after placing second in the qualifiers, 31-year-old swimming sensation and full-time engineer Nic Fink tied for second in a thrilling 100-meter breaststroke final, winning his long-overdue first Olympic medal and coming two-hundredths of a second away from gold.

→ City of Love: In big off-field news, Argentina’s Pablo Simonet, who plays handball, and Pilar Campoy, a hockey player, got engaged in the Olympic Village, surrounded by their teammates. But unlike the RNC, the Paris Olympics is firmly anti–hookup culture: the dating app Grindr disabled its location services in the Olympic village, citing safety concerns for LGBTQ athletes. Sensing a gap in the market, some of the more entrepreneurial athletes have set up a booming OnlyFans economy.

What to watch today: At 9:35 a.m. EST, join Flavor Flav in watching USA vs. Spain in women’s water polo; at 10 a.m., watch ex-NBA player Chase Budinger continue his epic beach volleyball run against France; and at 3 p.m., the American women’s basketball team (minus Caitlin Clark) get their Olympics underway against Japan. —Evan Gardner

And finally. . . for those in Silicon Valley who don’t want the rest of us to believe the system is rigged, could you maybe take a look at whatever code means that a recent, kind of high-profile assassination attempt isn’t on this list?

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

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