What Happened Today: June 8, 2023

Stabbing in France; Cuban Spying Crisis ahead; Younger Republicans want gun control

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The Big Story

Four preschool-aged children in France suffered life-threatening wounds on Thursday after they were targeted in a stabbing rampage by a 31-year-old Syrian national. The attack took place in a playground in Annecy, a lakeside village in France 20 miles south of the Swiss border. An elderly man and woman were also stabbed and remain in critical condition. In videos of the incident circulating online, a man in the park appears to try to use his backpack to thwart the attacker who circles around a shrieking woman, lunging with his weapon at the two children in her stroller. Police soon arrived and detained the assailant, taking him into custody. “He clearly targeted the babies,” one witness told BFM TV. 

In Paris, lawmakers interrupted a debate as news broke of the attack, holding a moment of silence for the victims. Speaking to reporters, President Emmanuel Macron called it “an attack of absolute cowardice.” 

Investigators say they do not believe the attacker, a Syrian refugee who appears to have had no criminal record, had a terrorist motive. Granted refugee status in Sweden a decade prior, he was in France legally and held Swedish identity documents. He had previously sought but been denied asylum in France.

The attack will intensify the ongoing debate on the issues of immigration reform and asylum laws that has been at the center of French politics of late. Macron’s opposition, who’ve long been critical of what they say is his lax approach to law and order, pointed to the Annecy stabbing as proof. “Our entire immigration policy, and a certain number of European rules, must be called into question,” Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National Party, wrote on Twitter. 

Read More: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65841666

In the Back Pages: Do You Remember 2005?

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The Rest

→ Cash-strapped Cuba has inked a deal worth several billion dollars with China to allow the Asian country to build what The Wall Street Journal describes as a “electronic eavesdropping facility on the island,” citing unnamed American officials familiar with the deal. Sitting about 100 miles from Florida, Cuba is so close to the United States that this new structure will be able to “scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic.” While U.S. officials could attempt to thwart the project from moving ahead, the facility, as well as the leak of the story to the press, adds new complications to ongoing diplomatic tensions between Washington, D.C., and Beijing, which might explain why White House National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby was telling MSNBC on Thursday that the WSJ report “was not accurate,” though he declined to elaborate further, adding only, “We’re watching this very, very closely.”

→ Beijing officials, however, might have some quibbles with the White House’s methods to quell their diplomatic differences after reports on Thursday that U.S. defense contractor General Atomics will ship four naval spy drones to Taiwan in 2025, with the intent of allowing U.S., Taiwan, and Japan officials to share real-time surveillance data from the devices. The move will bulk up American capacity to coordinate with Taiwan should China attack the island, but integrating Taiwan more fully into existing military communications between the United States and its allies will only irk China, which has claimed the island as its territory and repeatedly threatened to take over the nation by force. On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the United States should “stop creating military tensions and causing trouble for stability in the Taiwan Strait.”

1. The average rate for a summer night in the Hampton’s is $970, a drop from 2022’s all-time high of $1,080.

2. Manhattan median apartment rents, meanwhile, hit a third straight month of record highs: $4,395.

3. Unanticipated tax revenue from new legalized electronic gambling will allow Minnesota Vikings to pay off $377 million in stadium debt 23 years early.

4. College enrollment is down about 15% compared to 10 years prior.

5. Roughly half of all debt in the United States is from medical bills, with an estimated 100 million Americans carrying medical debt currently.

6. In 2023, for the first time, three Major League Soccer teams joined European giants on the Forbes list of world’s most valuable soccer clubs.

7. Italy’s 1.24 babies per woman is one of Europe’s lowest fertility rates and the lowest in the nation since 1861.

8. Italy officials say they’re on the verge of a “crisis scenario” as Italy’s 59 million population could drop to 48 million by 2070.

9. After streaming services ordered 210 original scripted series in 2009, platform wars led to a peak of 599 series ordered in 2022.

10. Movie theaters have doubled the number of summer releases compared to last year, but box office revenue is still 25% below pre-COVID numbers.

→ GOP candidates might soon have to walk a tightrope as recent polling continues to suggest a generational divide on support for gun reform legislation, with younger conservatives moving further away from older voters. A clear majority of young GOP voters said in a recent Harvard poll that they backed mandatory psychological screening for gun buyers, and a March YouGov survey found younger GOPers wanted tougher gun rules from lawmakers. “There are some concerns [about gun violence] from Gen Z voters specifically, mainly because they’ve had to deal with it more growing up—it’s become more rampant in society,” Joacim Hernandez, the elected chairman of the Texas Young Republican Federation, told Politico.

→ Sarah Idan, a former Miss Universe Iraq contestant who drew headlines for sharing a selfie with Miss Israel during the 2017 competition, is throwing her hat into the ring for the 2024 U.S. House race in California’s 30th district. Once a translator for the U.S. armed forces, Idan left Iran with her family after receiving death threats because of the controversy kicked up by the selfie. Visiting with then Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman, in 2018, Idan said, “I don’t think Iraq and Israel are enemies. I think maybe the governments are enemies with each other.” Now leading an organization that seeks to build “bridges among Muslims and Jews in order to surpass borders and promote reconciliation,” Idan will be running for the role of Democratic nominee against what she says is a party that’s “been hijacked by loud voices of far-left socialists,” she told reporters this week. “I don’t think they represent many of the people with liberal views.”

→ After turning down a reportedly $400 million offer from Saudi Arabian team AL Hilal SC earlier this week, soccer star and recent World Cup champion Lionel Messi has signed on with Inter Miami CF for a less lucrative deal after being courted by former pro David Beckham, a minority owner of the Florida Major League Soccer team. While Messi becomes the fourth recent high-profile soccer player to eschew lucrative offers from Saudi Arabia’s squad, his deal with Miami is unusual in that it includes incentives with Adidas and Apple, which would provide him a cut of all new subscriptions to Apple’s new MLS Season Pass. Last year, Apple dropped $2.5 billion to be the exclusive broadcaster of MLS games for the next decade.

→ Signet Jewelers says it has had to drop its revenue forecasts for the year as fewer customers are buying engagement rings. It reduced expected sales by about $500 million to $7.3 billion. The parent company of Kay Jewelers makes about half its money from the engagement rings that it says are less in demand because of inflation and budding couples going on fewer dates since the COVID-19 pandemic.

→ On Thursday, the Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision upheld a lower court ruling, saying that nursing homes that violate someone’s civil rights can be sued by private individuals. The case stemmed from a dispute between the family of a man and the Indiana nursing home that had chemically restrained him and attempted to relocate him to another facility without their knowledge.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Summer of Yiddish Songs by Rokhl Kafrissen

From opera to cabaret to electronic music and, yes, klezmer

Moscow Conceptualism Lives! by Vladislav Davidzon

The passing of Ilya Kabakov, 1933-2023, reminds us how the movement he pioneered under totalitarian rule paved the way for post-Soviet Russian art

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Do You Remember 2005?

Twenty years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained his views about vaccines on The Daily Show—and was met with respect and interest. In the years since, what’s changed?

By Liel Leibovitz

Now that Succession is over, I’ve got something else to binge on. It’s only seven minutes and two seconds long, but it’s arguably less predictable and more dramatic. It’s an interview on The Daily Show—the original one, with Jon Stewart, before it soured into a mess so rancid it can’t even find a permanent host—from July 20, 2005. The guest? Robert F. Kennedy Jr., there to talk about thiomersal, the mercury compound used as a preservative in some vaccines and which Kennedy believes is the likely cause of various neurological disorders as well as the reason for the spike in autism in the U.S.

RFK Jr.’s message is the same one he delivers today. “It’s not all vaccinations,” he told Stewart, just the ones that use the substance he deems unsafe. Stewart pushes back, at one point asking why the government would conspire to suppress his arguments, even at the price of public health. RFK, Jr. responds. And so on and so forth. Which is to say: The entire interview is driven by curiosity and good faith and ends with respect: “It’s a remarkable story,” Stewart says. “I wish we had more time, but I appreciate you getting the word out and I know parents of kids with autism truly appreciate it. I know it’s a very difficult thing for them to be dealing with, so I’m sure they appreciate the help and support.”

That was 18 years ago.

Back then, the very same ideas, expressed the very same way, earned RFK Jr. a friendly, measured spot on the nation’s hottest television program. Today, it brings him smug condescension and often vicious contempt, from The New York Times announcement of his run for president informing readers that his campaign would be “built on re-litigating Covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans’ faith in science” to the Center for Countering Digital Hate placing him on its “Disinformation Dozen” list and demanding that his social media accounts be blocked. “He’s a crazy conspiracy theorist,” Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo shot back at someone on Twitter who dared to wonder why RFK Jr. might deserve attention, the smear rolling off Manjoo’s keyboard with the ease of someone receiving talking points from the Politburo instead of doing the work of having thoughts of his own.

What changed?

It’s a vitally important question for anyone wishing to understand our current collective lunacy, so let’s take the scientific approach. We know RFK Jr. is saying the same things he did in 2005, so he’s the constant in this equation. Could it be, then, that the years that passed since his Daily Show appearance brought with them a deluge of new facts and findings that make the same statements sound so much more odious? That, after all, is how science—the real deal, not the hashtag sort—works, constantly reviewing new information to test old hypotheses.

But the science concerning thiomersal has been largely settled since… 2001. Four years earlier, in 1997, the FDA revamped procedures and standards, and asked pharmaceutical companies to report on the thiomersal content in their drugs. The data came in mid-1999 and left the experts appointed to review it split. Here’s how Dr. Paul A. Offit, co-inventor of the RotaTeq vaccine, put it in that hotbed of radicalism, the New England Journal of Medicine: “Several attendees left the meeting concerned that infants might be receiving too much mercury from vaccines,” he wrote. “On July 9, 1999, after much wrangling, the CDC and AAP [American Academy of Pediatrics] decided to exercise the precautionary principle. They asked pharmaceutical companies to remove thimerosal from vaccines as quickly as possible; in the interim, they asked doctors to delay the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine in children who weren't at risk for hepatitis.”

A concern emerged that messaging the decision improperly would lead to reluctance to vaccinate children, which prompted the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine to issue another report two years later. Here’s its conclusion (bold in the original text): “Based on this body of evidence, the committee concludes that the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.”

In the 2005 interview, Stewart brings much of this to the fore, and has a nuanced, interested, and thought-provoking conversation with RFK Jr., who fully acknowledges the concerns well-meaning public health officials may have about the ways the general population might misjudge risks and benefits if given information it doesn’t fully understand. Which is why, RFK Jr. concluded bluntly, the best policy is simply to tell the messy and complicated truth and trust that people are smart enough to make their own informed decisions.

If you’ve paid any attention during COVID, you know that RFK Jr.’s counsel went unheeded. There are too many examples of this to choose from, but my favorite one is CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky stating, in a White House press conference four months after the vaccines were first distributed, that her agency recommends that pregnant women get the shot. The agency’s own website, however, made it clear that the agency simply didn’t have enough data to make any sweeping guarantees, as pregnancies last nine months and as vaccines simply hadn’t been around long enough for anyone to say with any certainty that they would have no effect on fetal development.

And so, QED: Eighteen years after his Daily Show appearance, RFK Jr. is the same RFK Jr., and the science is the same science. That’s more than we can say for those who call themselves “liberal” or “progressive” or “left wing” and still fancy themselves smart or educated. Once upon a time, these cats were able to do as Jon Stewart had done all those years ago: ask probing questions, listen politely, and acknowledge that a person making an argument you dislike—even one you believe is wrong—is not necessarily a peril to be eliminated or a threat to be silenced but a voice to be engaged.

These formerly smart people also used to understand that “science” wasn’t an article of faith—as in Fauci’s “I am the science” or the COVID-era mantra “trust the science”—but a disinterested method involving constantly arguing about facts, even those that seem settled. No more: In 2018, for example, a senior Columbia University climate scientist, writing in Scientific American, thundered that she would no longer debate climate science. “Once you put the established facts about the world up for argument,” she wrote, “you’ve already lost.” Which is more or less what the Roman Inquisition said once Galileo suggested that the earth revolved around the sun.

As Kennedy continues his presidential bid, it’s likely that we’ll hear more terms like “anti-vaxxer” or “conspiracy theory” or “disinformation” thrown about with cloying, sanctimonious gravitas. But if you want some real insight into the folks wildly brandishing these terms, just watch how they treated RFK Jr. not too long ago. He hasn’t changed a bit, but they, alas, have.