White Dudes for Kamala. What Biden Can Do for Venezuela. Israel’s Hit on Haniyeh.

On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: Peter Savodnik on who Biden’s veep should pick as her veep, Matti Friedman on game-changing news out of Israel, our high school essay contest, and more. 

But first, the American left reacts to Venezuela. 

In recent days, Venezuelans have taken to the streets to protest a stolen election. Exasperated by a failed socialist system and cheated by Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime, they are tearing down statues of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, and risking their lives to declare their desire for liberty. The opposition has won more than 70% of the voting tallies. And the millions of people who cast those votes for change will not rest until Maduro is no longer in charge.

But parts of the American left see things very differently. In a now-deleted statement, the Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee congratulated Maduro on his election win and congratulated the Venezuelan people for “providing a model of what it is to struggle against the US empire while also building viable forms of socialism at home that are adapted to their own unique material conditions.” 

Another big Maduro fan is Jackson Hinkle. He’s the antisemite and “MAGA Communist” you read about in yesterday’s Front Page. He did his best Tucker Carlson impression this week, touring a Venezuelan supermarket and telling his followers it’s all good in Caracas. He has been raging against the anti-Maduro “fake news” on X since Sunday. 

Also riding with Nicolás: The People’s Forum, the pro-China propagandists who have been behind so many of the anti-Israel protests on the streets of American cities since October 7. They warn against attempts to “discredit Venezuela’s election” (translation: recognize the opposition as legitimate winners). Also on the list of sympathizers: Pink Floyd frontman and virulent “anti-Zionist” Roger Waters (the guy who dresses up as a Nazi at his concerts and insists it’s satire). Over the weekend, he called Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado a “snake in the grass” and endorsed Maduro. 

But there’s always been a lunatic fringe. Perhaps things are better on the center-left? And they are. A little. Take The New York Times. The Gray Lady isn’t insisting that Maduro won, thankfully. But a news story published Monday blamed the economic collapse of the country—once a successful example of democratic socialism—on “brutal capitalism.” That’s right, the problem with this far-left petrostate is an excess of economic freedom. You don’t need to be a top economist to know that’s total nonsense. Even so, top economist (and Marginal Revolution blogger) Alex Tabarrok says the Times, with this logic, has “lost touch with reality.” 

At The Free Press, we’re proud members of the reality-based community, and clear-eyed about the sad truth of Venezuela. We side with the country’s brave freedom fighters in the streets.

My colleague Eli Lake wanted to know what the U.S. should do to help ensure a democratic outcome for the Venezuelan people. So he called up former Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who gave him the answer: President Biden must acknowledge what tens of thousands of his countrymen are risking life and limb to proclaim—dictator Nicolás Maduro lost Sunday’s election in a landslide. 

In other words, tell the truth. 

Read (and please share) Eli’s column: “President Biden: Stand Up for the Venezuelan People.”

The trend for segregated fundraisers for the Democratic Party is really taking off. In the past week black women for Kamala, white women for Kamala, Latinas for Kamala, and other identity groups for Kamala have met on livestreams to encourage viewers to open their wallets for Harris’s presidential campaign.

On Monday evening, our own intrepid correspondent, River Page, logged on to a video call for “White Men for Harris.” Also on the three-hour call were Pete Buttigieg, “Big Lebowski” star Jeff Bridges, billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Hollywood bigwig J.J. Abrams, all of whom helped rake in a total $4 million in donations. Here is River’s unflinching account of what he saw:

Monday night, I watched the livestream of the “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser. Our host, a thirtysomething political operative with a man-bun and a beard, was upfront: some people didn’t feel comfortable with this event. But, he argued, white men feel lonely; they’re struggling in the new economy and feeling forgotten. MAGA has co-opted masculinity, he said, and the left has ceded white guys to the right-wing. 

“But,” he declared, “that stops tonight.”

He then introduced the first guest speaker: a black guy. 

If you’re wondering why the Harris campaign organized an event just for white guys—so am I. It’s weird. It was especially weird that the first guest on “White Dudes for Harris,” Maurice Mitchell, is demonstrably not a white dude; he’s not even a Democrat. He’s the head of the Working Families Party—a minority left-wing political party mostly active in New York. He celebrated policies that Kamala Harris has never voiced support for, like an arms embargo in Gaza. He encouraged the white guy audience to “get in formation,” which I assume is a reference to the Beyoncé song. 

The strange vibe abruptly shifted with the entrance of a vibed-out Jeff Bridges, best known for his portrayal of “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski. Recalling that he had just heard Kamala give a speech telling people to “fight,” Jeff said, cryptically: “I can’t relate. It’s a surrender to our higher thoughts and the way we want things to turn out.” 

Hell yeah, Jeff. 

Click here to read River’s full account of what he saw at “White Dudes for Harris.” And once you’ve done that, check out friend of The Free Press Mary Katharine Ham’s hilarious send-up of “White Women for Kamala” here. 

1. It’s hard to overstate how consequential the past 24 hours have been in the ongoing war between Israel and Iran’s proxies. On Tuesday, Israel killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most senior military commander, in Beirut. (That hit was Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s attack that killed 12 children in the north of the country on Sunday. Fuad Shukr was also wanted by the U.S. for his role in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, which killed 307 people.)

   Then, last night as we were closing these pages, news broke that Israel had also taken out Ismail Haniyeh—Hamas’s political leader—in Tehran. Just hours before, Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president, an event celebrated, naturally, with chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”
   The assassinations—Haniyeh was reportedly hit with a precision-guided missile in an apartment—are a reminder of Israel’s technological and military prowess. But Free Press columnist Matti Friedman argues that Israelis are living in a surreal, split-screen reality. While the military was carrying out stupendous military feats abroad, at home far-right mobs were breaking into two military bases and fighting with soldiers. Why? Matti explains in his must-read piece. And he argues that the threat of internal conflict is as dangerous as any external threat Israel faces. Read: Whiplash in Israel.

2. A dose of reality for Kamalot comes courtesy of our favorite statistician Nate Silver. He has relaunched his election model with the Democrats’ shiny new candidate—and it still shows Trump as the favorite to win in November. Nate puts Trump’s chances of winning at 61.3 percent, to Harris’s 38.1 percent. (Silver Bulletin) 

3. Better news for the Democratic candidate comes in the form of a new poll of swing states from Bloomberg. It shows Harris closing the gap with Trump, with the two candidates in a statistical dead heat in the battleground states. (Bloomberg) 

4.  An independent watchdog examined coverage of the Israel-Hamas war across seven major outlets, and found the worst offender for “abuse of anonymous sourcing” is The Washington Post. The paper was responsible for “72 percent of all the citations of Gaza-related unofficial anonymous sources—more than five times as many as both The New York Times and all the other major U.S. media platforms combined.” Could this have something to do with the fact that the WaPo foreign desk is stuffed with Al Jazeera vets? (Jewish Insider) 

5. Paul Dans, leader of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s now infamous policy blueprint for a second Trump term, stepped down from his role amid a scathing backlash from the Trump campaign, which said Tuesday that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.” Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, wrote on X that they are merely “sticking” to the original “timeline for the project to conclude.” We’re not so sure. (Newsweek) 

6. Crime is an important issue to voters. How does Kamala Harris’s record fare? On the one hand, she’s known as “Kamala the prosecutor.” But on the other hand, she’s “thoroughly excised” that reputation as part of the weak-on-crime “course Democrats have been on for more than a decade.” (City Journal) 

7. Kimberly Cheatle resigned as head of the Secret Service following the near-assassination of Donald Trump and her disastrous congressional hearing. She was succeeded by Ronald Rowe, an official who denied “additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former president Trump’s rallies and events” in the lead-up to the event. (RealClearPolitics) 

8. What’s white privilege? At a 2019 conference, Sarah Adkins from Ohio gave a personal example. After her husband murdered their two sons then killed himself, she was able to afford cleaners as well as “pay for a funeral for my children.” A shocked Zaid Jilani, who was at the conference, uses this anecdote to show how white privilege is a “dubious concept.” (The American Saga)

9. If you’re planning an overseas vacation, you may not be welcome. In Italy, Spain, Britain, and Greece, the natives are revolting against tourists. (Authorities in Japan have even put up a fence to spoil a popular vantage point of Mount Fuji.) And if you’re in Europe, watch out: some hot spots are even charging visitors higher taxes. (The Economist) 

10. Last week was “scorched earth war” in Silicon Valley. Billionaire investors Paul Graham and David Sacks got into a mudslinging contest on X. Graham told Sacks he was “the most evil person in Silicon Valley.” Sacks replied by calling Graham “a bully and maybe something much worse,” hinting at something beginning with “anti” and ending in “semite.” Sometimes it feels like everything from politics to media is mostly a subplot in some tech bro psychodrama. (Pirate Wires) 

Last year, we announced the first-ever Free Press essay contest, inviting high schoolers to “tell our readers about a problem facing American society—and, more importantly, how you would fix it.” We were blown away by the response. Over 400 young readers wrote in, and—though it was hard to choose—we published three of the best essays in our pages. 

So we’re excited to announce that the contest is back for another year, with a $2,000 cash prize up for grabs! If you’ll be starting ninth, tenth, eleventh, or twelfth grade in the fall, we want to hear from you before August 15. Click here for more details.

→ Who will Kamala Harris pick as her VP? The veep is about to announce her veep, and the question is: Which white man will it be? The assumption being that Kamala Harris, a black woman, requires a Caucasian male to balance things out.

According to Reuters, Harris will tour battleground states with her running mate as early as next week. And Bloomberg reports that Harris has narrowed her search down to a shortlist of just three: Arizona senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota governor Tim Walz. 

The case for both Kelly and Shapiro starts with their respective home states: Arizona and Pennsylvania are swing states, and tapping a popular senator or governor from one of them would presumably help Harris win. 

Kelly is a former astronaut and the son of two cops, and he’s a moderate—voting with President Joe Biden only 95 percent of the time. If that sounds like a joke, it’s not. In these hyperpartisan times, only a handful of Democratic senators vote with Biden less often. On top of that, he knows something about running against MAGA: in 2022, he took on Republican challenger Blake Masters, who had been endorsed by Donald Trump in the special election for his U.S. Senate race, and won.

Shapiro, for his part, has courted oil and gas companies since taking office last year—a point that could help counter (well-founded) criticisms that Harris is, or at least was at some point, anti-fracking. Plus, he gave a great speech after Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a campaign rally on July 13. He sounded human, decent, and likable as he paid tribute to 50-year-old former fire chief Corey Comperatore, who was murdered at the rally. The knock on Shapiro, though, is that he’s Jewish and supports Israel, and choosing him would alienate the progressive wing of the party. (Jewish Democrats, let that marinate.)

The irony of picking Kelly over Shapiro to avoid fracturing the base is Harris probably can’t win Arizona—Donald Trump leads by more than 4 points in the state—but she has a shot at Pennsylvania, and if she loses, that’s going to fracture the party.

How about Walz? His résumé is compelling. He comes from a small town. Served in the National Guard. Taught in an impoverished Indian community. And, as governor, he passed tax rebates for middle-class voters, marijuana legalization, and an abortion-rights bill. That’s the kind of sensible, popular stuff that cuts across race, gender, party, and geography lines. He could help Harris make the case that she’s a left-wing populist—a saner, less divisive response to Trump’s right-wing populism. He acquitted himself nicely in this recent interview, although I’m not sure that calling Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance “weird” when you’re the party of gender fluidity will connect with voters.

So which of these white male politicians should Harris pick?

Shapiro is the obvious running mate. He’s popular in Pennsylvania and might actually be able to deliver the state for her—a must-win for any Democrat. He’s smart and capable. And even though he might be thinking that Harris will likely lose and he’d prefer to run himself in 2028, no one gives up this kind of opportunity. No one says “I’d rather not be the second most powerful person on Earth.”
—Peter Savodnik

→ At least Jerome Powell is having a quiet summer: In a mind-melting summer of chaos and government dysfunction, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, is enjoying a welcome patch of quiet. The Fed has stayed out of the spotlight while one institution after another has deceived and blundered its way into disgrace. The lack of news and commentary about the Fed speaks to Powell’s greatest accomplishment.

Fed bashing is something of an American pastime. It’s the subject of wild conspiracy theories, denunciations from the libertarian right (Rand Paul), the progressive left (Elizabeth Warren), and frustrated White House pile ons.

But things are pretty chill these days for Powell, whose Fed has raised rates eleven times since March 2022 to quell the worst bout of inflation in 40 years. The Fed tightened credit without wrecking the labor market, pulling off the mythical soft landing many thought impossible. The unemployment rate remains historically low. Inflation has dropped from its scorching peak of 9.1 percent in June 2022 to 3 percent last month. Back in 2023, the consensus odds of a recession were 65 percent—but it never came. Not that everything is rosy, of course. The sharp rise in living costs has hit Americans hard, and voters remain mostly—and understandably—grumpy about the economy. 

The soft landing likely explains why Trump is no longer ranting about the Fed. After seething with rage at Powell in 2019, he now says he’ll let him serve out his term if he wins the election. 

Powell will pop back into the headlines briefly today, after the Fed wraps up its latest meeting. While no action is anticipated this time, all eyes will be on September, when it is widely thought that the Fed will start cutting rates.

A September rate cut will have a negligible impact on the economy before the election. But it could trigger a vibe shift, a feeling that better days lie ahead, with additional rate cuts, easier credit, and cheaper mortgages on the way. If that happens less than two months before the election, expect Trump to rip into the Fed for political meddling to favor Democrats. But it’s also possible the much-anticipated rate cut comes and goes without a voter mood change, in which case Powell can stay under the radar, happy to remain an afterthought during autumn, the nastiest political season. —Uri Berliner 

→ Simone Biles leads the “redemption tour”: In 2021, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team tragically fell short of the gold after Simone Biles sidelined herself because of a case of the twisties. It’s a silly name for a serious problem—check out my colleague Francesca Block’s dispatch on the dangers of gymnastics. But this year Biles and co. have righted themselves and won big. 

The team called Paris 2024 their “redemption tour,” and oh, what sweet redemption it is. At yesterday’s team finals, Biles became the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history while leading her squad to a hard-earned gold medal. After her win she said, “I’m doing what I love and enjoying it, that’s all that matters to me.”

But it’s not over for the gymnast G.O.A.T: she’ll have the chance to compete for another, individual gold medal in the individual all-around tomorrow.

The women aren’t the only ones on an epic gymnastics run. The U.S. men’s team earned their first medal since 2008, a bronze, and they had a ball doing it. Their secret weapon was Steven Nedoroscik, better known as “pommel horse guy,” who has become an American legend overnight.

What to watch today: Just after 3 p.m., Katy Ledecky will compete in the 1500 meter freestyle—her signature event. If she medals in that event and one more (she already picked up a bronze in the 400 meter freestyle), she will be the most decorated female swimmer of all time. —Evan Gardner

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

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