Weekly Review
“We’re clearly at a very dangerous juncture in an already dangerous ever-escalating situation—probably the most dangerous—for the whole of this region,” said a British correspondent after 12 children playing soccer were killed by a rocket, which Israel attributed to Hezbollah and which Hezbollah claimed was an Israeli anti-rocket interceptor projectile, in Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights with a “shouting hill” where residents communicated through megaphones with family members across the valley in Syria after the Six Day War; “it could ignite a wider conflagration that would engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief,” two United Nations envoys warned.1 2 3 4 Israeli, Egyptian, Qatari, and American negotiators met in Rome to resume ceasefire talks, where several Israeli officials indicated that Israel’s hardened stance was attributable to the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu, who flew home earlier than planned after a weeklong trip to the United States, where he delivered an address to a joint session of Congress that roughly half of Democrats boycotted or were absent from, called protesters “useful idiots” acting on behalf of Israel’s enemies, and gifted Trump a framed photo of a child captured by Hamas; “by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States,” Nancy Pelosi posted on social media after Netanyahu’s speech.5 6 7 8 9 10 Kamala Harris pledged that she would “not be silent” about the human toll of the war, while Trump claimed that he had “always had a very good relationship” with Netanyahu, about whom he had said in 2020: “Fuck him.”11 12 13
Vote.org registered 100,000 new voters since Biden dropped out of the presidential race, 84 percent of whom were younger than 35.14 The Harris campaign received $200 million in donations after Biden’s endorsement, two-thirds of which came from first-time donors; 100,000 people signed up to volunteer and 2,000 applied for campaign jobs.15 16 Supporters at Harris fundraisers toted “CocoNUTS for Kamala” and “Cat Ladies for Kamala” signs, the latter referencing a resurfaced interview from 2021 in which J.D. Vance, the least popular post-convention vice presidential nominee since 1980, quipped that the country was being governed by “childless cat ladies”; “the armageddon is coming for him,” one person posted on social media, observing that Taylor Swift belonged to this demographic.17 18 19 20 21 Trump headlined the Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, where Southern televangelists, ministry heads, and pastors congregated; he promised his “beautiful Christians” that in four years’ time they wouldn’t “have to do it anymore, it’ll be fixed,” “it” referring to voting.22 23 “You know, David was a pretty slimy guy, too, in the Bible—I mean, murder, and adultery, and deceit. And yet, God said he’s a man after my own heart,” the former housing secretary Ben Carson offered at the same event in defense of Trump’s character.24 “Hello, Bitcoiners,” Trump said the next afternoon in a greeting to thousands of blockchain enthusiasts at the Music City Center in Nashville, whom he flattered as “high IQ individuals”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was also present, pledged to become the first Bitcoin president.25 26 “These are weird people on the other side,” said Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, about Republicans; “Trump is fundamentally weird,” said Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz.27 28 A National Republican Senatorial Committee memo advising candidates on how to go on the offensive against Harris contained a section titled “Weird” with bullet points reading: “Kamala Harris loves Venn diagrams”; “Kamala Harris recently discovered that electricity doesn’t smell”; “Kamala Harris loves electric school busses [sic] because she went to school on a school bus”; and “Kamala Harris has a habit of laughing at inappropriate moments.”29 Trump, who has not committed to debating Harris despite having agreed to another debate against Biden before he dropped out of the race, complained that the media was “trying to make [Kamala Harris] into a Margaret Thatcher.… Margaret Thatcher didn’t laugh like that. Did she?”30 The New York Times removed quotes from an online article featuring a voter who changed her mind about being a Democrat upon learning of the voter’s conviction in a 2005 extortion scheme in which she fraudulently claimed that she had bitten into a cooked severed finger, acquired from her husband’s coworker, that she planted in a bowl of Wendy’s chili.31
The Paris 2024 Olympics began.32 The opening ceremony featured a scene evoking Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper with drag queens, a transgender model, and a singer dressed up as the Greek god of wine; organizers said their Dionysian interpretation was an attempt to raise awareness “of the absurdity of violence between human beings” and apologized to Christians after an Italian bishops’ conference opined that the celebration of French culture had taken an “unexpectedly negative turn” into “a parade of banal errors, accompanied by trite and predictable ideologies.”33 34 The International Olympic Committee apologized for introducing South Korea’s athletes as being from North Korea as the delegation sailed down the Seine; Seoul said that it would file “a strong government-level complaint” against France.35 “We must, and will, get to the bottom of this,” Canada’s sport minister said after the women’s soccer team’s head coach apologized for using drones to spy on opponents during closed practices.36 The French government sponsored an all-expenses-paid trip for an elite unit of explosive-sniffing NYPD dogs to patrol the Olympics, NBC will attach heart-rate monitors to the parents of Olympians and put their results on screen as they watch their children compete, and six Olympic swimmers admitted to the Wall Street Journal that peeing in pools was ubiquitous at the highest levels of the sport.37 38 39 —Jasmine Liu
