On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: Suzy Weiss reviews class-war movie “Coup!”, the “MAGA communists” start their own party, and much more.
But first, our lead story.
On Monday, angry Venezuelans started pulling down statues of Hugo Chávez. It was one day after an election in which, if the exit polls were even close to correct, they had elected a new president in a landslide—Edmundo González Urrutia. And yet their dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has claimed victory.
Behind Urrutia is the Iron Lady of Venezuela, who has long resisted the regime. María Corina Machado is a slight, 56-year-old Yale grad born to a wealthy family. Perhaps that’s why Maduro and his people underestimated her. They considered her too white and too rich to win the majority’s support.
But after decades of inflation, starvation, corruption, and a refugee crisis that has impacted every single country in the Americas, including the United States, Venezuelans began to see María Corina as our only hope, writes Jonathan Jakubowicz, a native Venezuelan now living in the U.S. Her slogan is “hasta el final,” which translates to “until the end.” As Jonathan writes, she “knows the regime is capable of anything to stay in power,” but “unlike the opposition leaders that came before her, she will keep on fighting”—as her people will in the coming days. Read his full piece “In Venezuela, Fighting for Freedom ‘Until the End.’ ”
The Biden administration thinks the risk of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah is “exaggerated,” according to White House spokesman John Kirby. Given the administration’s foreign policy track record, I’m starting to wonder if we’re understating the risk of a major conflict. (Axios)
Last weekend, Russian strikes killed five civilians and wounded 15 more in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine; at least eight more were injured in Nikopol and another eight civilians were wounded in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province. (VOA)
Americans are divided over whether the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine: 48 percent believe it does, and 49 percent believe it does not. Among Republicans, the majority (62 percent) believe the U.S. does not have a responsibility to help; among Democrats, the majority (63 percent) says that it does. The partisan split is clear—though perhaps not as big as some headlines suggest. (Pew)
When Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman announced he’d be backing Kamala Harris last week, he said he wanted to see her shift in a pro-business direction. Matt Stoller argues that how Harris responds “will determine whether she leads a broad coalition for economic reform” or is a “Hillary rerun.” (Compact)
The Houthis control Yemen and have written a chilling new curriculum designed to raise a generation ready for jihad. First graders practice their writing by copying the sentence “The Jews are the enemies of God.” I remember writing “The cat sat on the mat” in grade school, but different strokes, I guess. (New Lines Magazine)
A new poll suggests Squad member Cori Bush is heading for defeat in her primary next week. Moderate challenger Wesley Bell leads Bush by six points ahead of a primary, meaning she is on track to follow in Jamaal Bowman’s footsteps—another Israel critic and squad member who was successfully primaried last month. (KSDK)
“I closed my eyes. All I saw was the back of my eyelids.” Blocked and Reported co-host (and occasional TGIF pinch hitter) Katie Herzog recently discovered that she has aphantasia, meaning she has no mind’s eye. She writes about that discovery, and her quest to teach herself the ability to visualize. (Blocked and Reported)
Republican senators aren’t holding back in their attacks on Kamala Harris the presidential candidate, but they have mostly fond memories of Kamala Harris the senator and call her “smart,” “engaging,” and “personable.” In today’s no-holds-barred politics, old-fashioned Senate chumminess is strangely reassuring. (NOTUS)
A new blood test for Alzheimer’s catches 90 percent of early dementia cases, a study has found. That’s a big improvement on the 73 percent accuracy at which neurologists and other specialists correctly diagnose the disease. The new tests could “change the game in the speed in which we can conduct Alzheimer’s trials and get to the next medication.” (CNN)
UK-based Sheikh Yasser al-Habib is an Islamist leader known for extreme rhetoric and “military-style” boot camps. He and his followers are in “advanced talks” to buy Torsa, a remote isle off the west coast of Scotland. The locals’ concern about their community being transformed into a sectarian outpost is a study in British understatement. “I’ve spent much of my life working in Muslim countries so have no issues whatsoever with that community, but this group do seem alarming from what I’ve just seen now,” says one. (Daily Mail)
From Saltburn to Knives Out, manor movies are having a moment. The latest, Coup!—out this week—is less artistic and weird than the former, writes Suzy Weiss, but more serious and topical than the latter. A zippy romp, Coup! is set during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, stars Billy Magnussen and Peter Sarsgaard, and is all about how pandemics can cause an inversion of power and privilege, as blue-collar workers abruptly get labeled “essential” while the rich sit uselessly at home. Who needs escapism? Click to read Suzy’s full review of “Coup!”
→ Biden’s Supreme Court confusion: On Monday, President Biden proposed two reforms to the Supreme Court—term limits for justices and a binding ethics code—along with a constitutional amendment to its recent presidential-immunity decision. Making his case in a Washington Post op-ed, the president claimed broad support and specifically thanked “the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the [SCOTUS] for its insightful analysis, which informed some of these proposals.”
But there’s a problem with Biden trying to use the commission to give his proposals legitimacy. Adam White, who served as a member of that commission, tells The Free Press that “nothing in our report actually recommended anything” that the president is now proposing.
Imposing term limits by statute would be unconstitutional, says White, a legal scholar for the American Enterprise Institute who was one of 34 experts who delivered a report on Supreme Court reforms to Biden in 2021.
“The Constitution explicitly guarantees that justices hold their office in good behavior, which means until impeachment or death or retirement, that’s always been understood as life tenure,” he explains.
Trying to get around this by “slicing and dicing the Supreme Court into subgroups”—granting justices 18 years of “active service,” after which they no longer participate in their ordinary duties—“opens the door to Congress playing total mischief with the court,” warns White. Biden is yet to explain the details of his proposals, but any legislation he brings to Congress is likely to be dead on arrival. In fact, House Speaker Mike Johnson said as much yesterday.
White adds that it’s “incredibly important” to have high ethical standards for justices, but “any proposal by Congress to assume for itself the power to micromanage the ability of justices to decide on their own code of ethics would be an enormous breach of the Constitution’s separation of powers.”
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with Biden’s proposals—beyond, you know, being unconstitutional. —Madeleine Kearns
→ “MAGA Communism” gets its own party: The communists are arguing with one another. On July 21, a group of activists announced the launch of the American Communist Party and declared the Communist Party USA “defunct, and usurped by interests contrary to its historical existence.” The new organization boasts the support of more than thirty CPUSA clubs and cells across the country.
But there is more to this story than crusty commies splitting hairs. The vanguard of this new group is not old-school far-left types, but far-right influencers. The American Communist Party Plenary Committee is, per its long-winded “declaration,” composed of ten men. The most famous of them is 24-year-old Jackson Hinkle, a proud Hamas supporter and Putin fan with 2.7 million followers on X. He vows to liberate “America from the control of the warmongers and the corporate elite” via his leadership in the ACP. Comparing the U.S. and Russia, Hinkle posted on X that “The US celebrates ‘Pride Month’ on June 1st. America is run by pedophiles,” whereas “Russia celebrates International Day for the Protection of Children on June 1st.”
The other aspiring proletarian leaders include pro-Stalin Haz Al-Din, whose pinned X thread explains “Why Marxism is not woke”; Rev Laskaris, who proudly supports Assad and wrote that “Russia is the true defender of freedom and sovereignty”; and Eddie “Liger” Smith, a wrestler who denies that Stalin murdered millions of his own people.
The ACP is the extreme proof-of-concept for a new branch of the radical right that sticks ideas from the left and the right into a blender and comes out with something very weird—and dark. Hinkle formerly called himself a “MAGA Communist,” which he describes as “a certain level of class consciousness that is upset with the way our country’s headed.”
MAGA Communists’ policy wishlist, per an infographic shared by Hinkle, includes ending foreign wars, banning “ANTIFA Street Terrorism,” “patriotic education,” subsidized gyms, and pardoning the January 6 protesters—not to mention a goal to “Deport Bush Family, Clinton Family, Obama, Pompeo, Bolton to ICC.”
Perhaps above all else, this crowd of influencers emphasizes that they are an alternative to the mainstream political parties that serve “ZIONISTS & WARMONGERS.”
This strange new species of communist is best understood as a descendant of the “tankie”: authoritarian communists who idolized the USSR and other bloodthirsty communist projects. But the ACP’s support of Islamist terrorists and brutal dictators suggests that 2024 communism has a. . . broader coalition.
The ACP has a sleek website and strange promotional video rife with industrial motifs like trains, ships, and welders and set to techno, totalitarian-core music. All they need to do now is replace their red MAGA hats with ushankas. —Julia Steinberg
→ On a roll: After winning gold in women’s street skating Sunday, Japan just keeps rolling its competition: Monday morning, the skater Yuto Horigome cruised to his second straight gold; here he is winning Tokyo in 2021. Just a couple hours later, Japan also won gold in men’s team gymnastics. The U.S. won bronze in that event, breaking a 16-year drought on the men’s side. But Japan’s day of dominance came to a close with a crushing defeat in women’s basketball, falling to the Americans 102–76.
→ Water under the Pont Neuf: An emerging theme of Paris 2024? Burying the hatchet. Dawn Staley, coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team and sitting member of the U.S. women’s basketball selection committee, said that if selections were today, she’d consider letting Caitlin Clark onto the team. The omission of Clark was big news—and in the eyes of some, a big own goal for the sport. “If we had to do it all over again, the way that she’s playing, she would be in really high consideration of making the team,” said Staley. This is four months after Staley’s team wiped the floor with Clark’s team, the Iowa Hawkeyes, in the National Championship.
Snoop Dogg, the rapper turned NBC correspondent, is also squashing his beef in Paris. While interviewing Simone Biles’ family, her mother confronted him about shrugging off a photo request in Times Square in 2010. Snoop laughed it off and offered the D.O.G.G. equivalent to an apology, pointing to an infant in Biles’ entourage: “Shout-out to the baby that’s frowning at me.”
What to watch today: At 7 a.m. EST, the U.S. men’s volleyball team, led by influencer-in-chief Erik Shoji, takes on Germany; at 12:15 p.m., Biles and co. will shoot for gold in the women’s gymnastics team final. And at 9:30 p.m., the final matchup of men’s surfing will go down in Tahiti.
And for some commercial-break reading: Get into the mathematics behind swimming, take a view on the outcry over the new, less skimpy volleyball uniforms, and read this profile of “the grand duchess of Luxembourg table tennis,” 61-year old Ni Xia Lian.
—Evan Gardner
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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