Netanyahu Addresses a Joint Session of Congress

Happy Thursday! The International Olympic Committee announced Wednesday that Salt Lake City, Utah, will host the 2034 Winter Olympics. If they’re looking for somebody to lead the planning committee, we happen to know of a Utahn with lots of experience organizing the Winter Olympics in Utah’s capital city who will have some free time come January.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday night to discuss his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. “I revere this office. But I love my country more,” Biden said in the 11-minute remarks, his first since announcing his decision on Sunday. “You know, there is a time and a place for long years of experience in public life. There’s also a time and a place for new voices—fresh voices, yes, younger voices—and that time is now.” He framed the coming choice in November—almost assuredly between Donald Trump and his Vice President Kamala Harris—in existential terms, saying the country is at an “inflection point” that will “determine our fate of our nation and the world for decades to come.”
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, emphasizing the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship to win what he framed as a battle between “barbarism and civilizations” and the shared threat of Iran. During the remarks—which more than 100 congressional Democrats boycotted—Netanyahu offered his thanks to both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The Israeli leader plans to meet with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in separate meetings on Thursday, and then with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Friday.
• U.S. Capitol Police on Tuesday arrested close to 200 people inside the Cannon House Office Building who were protesting U.S. arms sales to Israel. The protest, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, previewed a much larger protest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel’s address to Congress, which saw several thousand protesters and rioters descend on Washington. Protesters gathered a few blocks from the Capitol holding signs calling for the arrest of Netanyahu, burning American flags and effigies of Netanyahu, spray painting statues and buildings, and chanting a variety of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans and antisemitic phrases. An additional six protesters were arrested inside the Capitol for disrupting Netanyahu’s address, while others who crossed the Capitol Police’s barricades were pepper sprayed.
• FBI Christopher Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday at a hearing focused on the July 13 attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Wray revealed new details gleaned from the gunman’s electronic devices, home, and car, including that the shooter searched “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy” on July 6, a week before the attack. Wray also disclosed that the FBI recovered three explosive devices from the gunman’s car and home but that the trigger the gunman had on his person would not have caused the explosives in his car to detonate. Wray told the committee that the FBI recovered eight cartridges from spent bullets on the roof from which the gunman shot at Trump and confirmed that the shooter did use a drone to survey the location for the rally just hours before he conducted his attack.
• At least one North Korean balloon carrying trash landed in the South Korean presidential compound on Wednesday, though it’s not clear the compound was directly targeted, nor that North Korea would have the capacity to accurately strike a target in that way. Another balloon landed on a U.S. military base in South Korea on Wednesday as part of the launch that saw hundreds of balloons come across the border. South Korean security officials said the balloons did not contain hazardous materials and that no one was hurt in the incident. More than 3,000 such trash balloons from North Korea have fallen in the South since May as retaliation for ongoing efforts by South Koreans and North Korean defectors to send materials critical of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un and K-Pop songs north of the border using their own balloons.
• The Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike—the company responsible for last week’s worldwide IT outage—announced Wednesday that a bug in an update was the source of the problem that crashed 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices last Friday. Specifically, the bug was in its “Content Validator”—the system responsible for checking potential coding mistakes—which allowed the faulty code to roll out and be deployed onto devices around the globe. “This unexpected exception could not be gracefully handled, resulting in a Windows operating system crash,” CrowdStrike said in a statement. Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian issued an apology to customers on Wednesday for the flight cancellations and delays caused by the IT outage, and stated he expects the airline to be “fully recovered and operating” by Thursday.
• A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Tuesday ruled against several business groups who had sued to block the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s ban on non-compete agreements. Business groups quickly filed the lawsuit in April after the FTC commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of the rule. In her decision, Judge Kelley Brisbon Hodge, nominated by President Joe Biden, held that those suing the FTC failed to show how they were harmed by the non-compete ban, and that their argument—that the FTC’s decision is unconstitutional—is unlikely to “succeed on the merits.” The business groups that filed the case have yet to say whether they will appeal.
• Wildfires have raged across the Western United States this week—in Oregon, California, and Washington—causing thousands of people to evacuate as flames consumed nearly 100,000 acres in total. The largest fire in Oregon, the Durkee Fire, is 0 percent contained. Smoke from the wildfires prompted air quality alerts in many regions nearby—including parts of Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming—and is expected to persist as the blazes continue.

‘A Clash Between Barbarism and Civilization’

WASHINGTON—In his historic address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preached a vision of U.S.-Israeli unity to a mostly friendly crowd.

Less than a mile away, down the hill at D.C.’s Union Station, anti-Netanyahu and anti-Israel protesters were wreaking havoc.

There, rioters burned Netanyahu in effigy, paraded down the street with a papier-mâché, 10-foot-tall puppet of President Joe Biden with bloody hands and devil horns, graffitied the statue at the center of Columbus Circle with the words “Hamas is comin,” waved the terrorist group’s flag, assaulted police officers, and pulled down the American flag on the pole outside the station and replaced it with the Palestinian flag.

As a crowd of protesters wrapped in keffiyehs—the piece of fabric that has come to symbolize the protests—looked on, chanting, “Burn that s—,” a man lit the American flag on fire. Onlookers shouted “Allahu Akbar” and cursed America while flames engulfed the flag.

Just minutes earlier—in one of the biggest applause lines for Republicans and most divisive moments for Democrats in his hour-long speech—Netanyahu had called such protesters the Iranian regime’s “useful idiots.” A White House spokesman condemned the flag burning and other activities at the protest—labeling such activities “disgraceful”—but the Harris campaign did not respond last night to TMD’s request for comment on the chaos.

Wednesday was a day of disorienting contrasts. A triumphant Netanyahu delivered an address that painted the U.S. and Israel as co-combatants in lockstep in a war against Iran—while more than 100 congressional Democrats and at least one Republican boycotted the speech and tens of thousands of protesters gathered outside and some burned him in effigy. And though Biden and Netanyahu are set to …

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Worth Your Time

• As protesters once again descended on Washington for Netanyahu’s address to Congress, Marc Fisher remembered another time when destructive protests roiled the nation’s capital—in 1968. In an article for the Washington Post, he remembers Larry Rosen, who owned Smith’s Pharmacy on 14th Street until it was burned down in a riot. “The city’s population plummeted by 17 percent in the 20 years after the riots,” Fisher wrote. “You’d hardly know it given today’s boulevard of pricey restaurants and multimillion-dollar condos, but the empty spaces on 14th Street lingered for decades, symbols of a lost community. …‘I’ve been told many times by friends that I should forget that day,’ [Rosen] once told me, ‘but I find it hard to do.’ That year—like this one threatens to be—was a moment when the American center did not hold, when the foundation cracked in ways that still threaten the stability of our common home. We tend to remember that year as a furnace of conflict and division, as well as a moment of innovation and cultural ferment. But Larry insisted we also remember it as personal trauma, a smoldering violation of our basic social compact. The scar of ’68 is still raw today.”
• For his Governing Right Substack, Andy Smarick wondered whether we’re ever going to talk about policy again. “Polarization has convinced many voters that the particulars of governing don’t matter so much,” he wrote. “What matters is that the other party’s choice not win. Discussions about governing become superfluous. As a result, I’m not sure—even though this is his third time heading the GOP ticket—what [former President Donald] Trump thinks of federalism or civil society. I don’t know whether he believes in deficit reduction. I’m not sure how he’d pick judges were he re-elected. I don’t know what he thinks about criminal justice reform or a host of family policies. And now it appears that [Vice President Kamala] Harris will become her party’s nominee without any discussion of the budget, China, crime, child tax credits, free speech, immigration, K-12 education, student-loan forgiveness, taxes, workforce participation rates, or anything else.”

Presented Without Comment

Washington Post: Maggots, Crickets Released at Watergate Hotel in Protest of Netanyahu Visit

Also Presented Without Comment

BBC: Sharks Off Brazil Coast Test Positive for Cocaine

In the Zeitgeist 

“Come gather ‘round people.” Timothée Chalamet will portray folk rock artist Bob Dylan in the upcoming film A Complete Unknown. The trailer for the film—scheduled to hit theaters in December—gives us the first look at Chalamet’s Dylan, and we have to say, he has the slouch down. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team reported on the newfound enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris within the Democratic Party, Scott explained why (🔒) the political volatility of the past few weeks hasn’t led to much market volatility, Jonah argued (🔒) that media organizations aren’t supposed to carry water for political parties, and Nick gamed out (🔒) what a potential Kamala Harris administration might look like.
• On the podcasts: Steve joins Jonah on The Remnant for some non-emergency rank punditry, and Sarah and David are joined on Advisory Opinions by Notre Dame professor Derek Muller to discuss the legal ins and outs of the Biden-Harris switcheroo.
• On the site: Drucker checks in on Kamala Harris’ chances with Jewish voters.