The way he was advertised in the campaign was as a military veteran and doctor who saved lives during the Iraq War. And that is true:

I’m Dr. Adam Hamawy. I’m a father, a husband, a humanitarian, a surgeon, a veteran, and a small business owner. I’ve dedicated my life to serving others, and I’m running for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th District to build a government that works for you, not special interests.

Just a great guy, right? He goes on to criticize ICE in typical Democrat fashion, and then segues to some Obama-esque “let’s all get together” pablum:

This is not about Republicans or Democrats. Both parties have failed to address the problems facing our families – affordability, healthcare, education, and so much more. Congress has the power to solve our problems instead of making them worse, but only if we elect Members with the courage to fight for us.

I’m stepping up now to fight for you because the people of New Jersey’s 12th district deserve a leader that puts our interests first, not billionaires and special interests.

Here’s a slightly more detailed bio that he offers. But nowhere does he seem to mention – much less try to explain – what even Politico calls his “controversial past” [my emphasis]:

Hamawy, who lives in South Brunswick and runs a plastic surgery practice in Princeton, entered the race as a political unknown. His campaign quickly gained traction as progressives simmered over Israel and its war with Hamas in Gaza. Hamawy’s work volunteering at a Gaza hospital during the war earned him support. …

Hamawy, 56, led the Democratic field in fundraising even before a new super PAC called American Priorities, founded as a pro-Palestinian counterweight to the pro-Israel AIPAC, spent $2 million on his behalf. …

Hamawy’s campaign planks are unabashedly progressive, including “Medicare For All” and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which his campaign website says is “full of neo-Nazis at all ranks”) and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security.

So we have a Hamas-friendly, Egyptian-born, MD who is extremely to the left and considers ICE ‘neo-Nazis.” So far, that’s unfortunately not all that atypical for today’s Democrat Party.

But then we also have this:

But the heroic picture portrayed by Hamawy’s campaign and allies met a stark contrast when a publication tied to an anti-Islamic group resurfaced news reports of his 1995 testimony in defense of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh”who was convicted on terrorism and seditious conspiracy charges, and whose followers conducted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Hamawy, then a medical student in his 20s, had four years earlier accompanied Abdel-Rahman on a trip from New Jersey to Michigan, where Abdel-Rahman spoke at a conference and talked of “conquering the land of the infidels.” Even after the World Trade Center bombing, Hamawy acknowledged translating a document for Abdel-Rahman for a press conference.

Hamawy said on the campaign trail that he disavowed Abdel-Rahman’s calls for violence and called the critiques against him as “guilt-by-association attacks on Muslim and Arab candidates.”

He’s the victim, of course.

And his opponents among the Democrats were in the odd position of being reluctant to mention it, probably because of the danger of being accused of Islamophobia or the like. So I wonder how many of Hamawy’s voters even knew of his past:

While the Abdel-Rahman controversy got significant media attention and criticism from the right, most of Hamawy’s rivals declined to touch it. Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, an exception, called Hamawy a “radical extremist.”

Hamawy in November faces Republican Gregg Mele, who has run unsuccessfully for several offices in New Jersey as a Republican and libertarian.

That’s not the only thing in Hamawy’s background that’s “controversial.” I’ve cued up just a couple of minutes of the Ruthless podcast discussing some of the rest, which includes an al Qaeda connection:

[NOTE: See also this article on the general theme of the radicalism of the current Democrats.]

The post Hamawy of New Jersey: worse than Platner? appeared first on The New Neo.

In reality, I don’t think it’s either. Trump is as much a reflection and result of opinions on the right as he is a shaper of those opinions. For example, I’ve been seeing significant complaints about Cornyn for quite a while online, Trump tapped into that and also probably escalated it, but it already existed.

Ken Paxton's victory in Texas has, I think, interesting implications for the national political scene.

Coming on top of a string of similar events, this is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force.

I'm not MAGA – I'm…

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) May 27, 2026

Longer excerpt from the tweet:

Coming on top of a string of similar events, [Paxton’s win] is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force. …

There have been a lot of very determined attempts to fragment the MAGA base and attempt to drive a wedge between them and the Trumpster. I see this on X and other social media – lots of indignant blithering about Israel and the Iran war that seems very light on substance and very heavy on attempting to fracture the Republican coalition.

I don’t think it’s working. [Last night] is evidence that Trump’s endorsement matters, and the base is not kindly disposed towards any Republican pol who’s perceived as not being on his team.

Again, I think the emphasis is wrong there. Yes, there are people who don’t like GOP office-holders who are disloyal to Trump himself, and who consider Team Trump the important thing. But I think the majority of voters support Trump because of what he has done and what he plans to do – that is, his policies – rather than thinking his policies are good because they’re his. Of course,Trump’s personality isn’t separate from his actions, but it’s the latter that most MAGA people emphasize and if he started doing things that were perceived as out of line with those policies he’d be losing their support.

And yes, there are people who want to take over the MAGA movement for various nefarious reasons, including Israel-hatred and Jew-hatred. But there are others who are turning on Trump merely because they are isolationists who perceived him as promising no more wars forever, not just “no forever wars.” But I think that most people on the right understood Trump to be a Jacksonian rather than an isolationist, and see the Iran war as a Jacksonian conflict that is not only necessary but long overdue. In line with that, though, if he ends the Iran war with a bad deal, one perceived as giving away too much to Iran, many of those who have stuck with him so far may become at least somewhat disillusioned.

Also – contrary to the scare propaganda of the left – Trump isn’t going to be running for a third term. If his health holds up, which I sincerely hope it does, he’ll be in office for a little over two and a half more years. Trump’s 80th birthday is only a couple of weeks away, and if all goes well he’ll be 82 and a half on leaving the presidency. At that point, Trump will have a successor or successors. But Trump is sui generis, and there won’t be anyone quite like him again, for good or ill.

The post The Trumpian primaries and Trump’s influence appeared first on The New Neo.

AOC is on the extreme left, or what used to pass for extreme. So was Obama, but he hid it fairly successfully, especially when campaigning for his first time. AOC doesn’t have that option. In that respect she’s more like Bernie Sanders, because she’s been fairly straightforward about her extreme leftism. In 2016, Democrat higher-ups blocked Sanders from winning the nomination when it looked as though he had a chance to do so, using their superdelegates to favor Hillary because they thought Bernie the outright socialist could not win in the general.

Like Bernie, AOC can’t hide who she is, but I think the party calculus has changed. How far has the Overton Window moved in the ensuing years? The party may believe a socialist could win by 2028. After all, Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City.

But New York City isn’t the US, and a 3-way mayoral race isn’t a 2-way presidential race. So I don’t know about AOC and the nomination, but I strongly believe it could happen. And if it does happen, Democrats will be counting on some or all of the following:

(1) Fraud will pull them over the line.

(2) AOC has appeal to two groups. The first is leftists, especially young ones. The Democratic Party is loaded with those. The second is those people who will never, never ever vote for a Republican and think that any Democrat is better than any Republican. Those two groups together make up a not insignificant percentage of the electorate. Enough to win, if turnout is good and they are highly motivated? I don’t know.

(3) Who are the alternative candidates in the party who would be viable in the general and who yet could appeal to the base enough to win the primaries? No one comes to mind.

The funny thing is that I think one good candidate would be Fetterman, because he could appeal to the moderate middle in the general, and yet yellow dog Democrats would also hold their noses and vote for him if he was the nominee. But Democrats will never nominate him because the base hates him and considers him a traitor to the party.

Why am I even thinking about 2028 at this point? Well, it’s not all that far off. I also saw excerpts of an AOC interview recently and it seems to me that she’s positioning herself for a future run. Actually, it’s seemed that way to me almost from the moment she first burst on the scene.

An excerpt:

The people in that room love her.

The post AOC as a presidential candidate appeared first on The New Neo.

But it’s not just about policy, and in fact policy may be way way down on the list. To say it’s about power doesn’t really say much either, although power is a big draw for some people of a certain personality type. But power is also about money. With revelations such as this about the vast sums given to NGOs, for example, or Medicaid fraud (and kickbacks and/or payment in votes from the grateful fraudster community), not to mention speaking fees and insider trading and the like, there’s a lot of money to be had.

Trump in particular is a threat – not because he’s a “Nazi” – they clearly don’t mind Nazis if they’re Democrat Nazis – or an “authoritarian” (likewise; authoritarians are great if on the left). It’s because he’s actually serious about “draining the swamp,” which not only has the potential of cutting off the power they wield even when Republicans are in charge, but cutting off the money spigot or at least reducing it.

There’s still another reason, which is the things they’ve done in the past: leaks of classified information, planting false conspiracy theories such as Russiagate, lawfare for political reasons, and now gerrymandering (which both parties have always done but which the left had especially mastered). They may not go to prison for things like the classified leaks, but when their machinations are revealed they do lose face with at least some voters.

Plus, during the Biden administration they were so very close to so many of their goals. They almost were able to pass their transformative legislative package. The only thing that stopped them was the fact that Manchin and Sinema wouldn’t vote for the nuclear option. Manchin and Sinema are gone now – funny thing, that – and the only possible stopper if the Democrats get power again (accent on the “possible” because I’m not sure how he’d really vote) would be Fetterman.

Put it all together and the GOP must be fought with every tool possible, some of them quite creative. With the help of leftist judges, it might be possible to do a lot of shady things now but especially in the future, if the Democrats can win control. That’s why the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision blocking their redistricting efforts for this year was such a shock and such a blow to the left. That’s why, if they come to power again and gain a majority in Congress plus the presidency, they will pack the US Supreme Court to make sure it always rules for their side.

That’s why Hakeem Jeffries said this recently:

Just days before an apparent assassination attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, one of the Democratic Party’s leaders called for “maximum warfare” against Republicans.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., made the inflammatory remark while warning Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., against redrawing the state’s congressional map ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Jeffries said that if DeSantis attempted to counter Democratic gains in Virginia following the state’s aggressive gerrymander, Democrats would continue to ratchet up pressure on Republicans nationwide.

“We are in an era of maximum warfare. Everywhere, all the time,” Jeffries said Wednesday at a news conference.

Note the subject matter was redistricting, and Jeffries was basically saying to Republicans, “We can do it but you aren’t allowed to do it.”

The post Why are the Democrats so desperate to regain and retain power? appeared first on The New Neo.

Likely 2028 Democratic presidential contender Rahm Emanuel sat down this week with Michael Moynihan, co-host of The Fifth Column podcast. A veteran of American politics, he has served as a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, a member of Congress, mayor of Chicago, and U.S. ambassador to Japan.

Reflecting on the current state of his party, Emanuel told Moynihan, “Democrats have lost the plot.”

“We lost the plot. We, as Democrats, nationally, from Latinx to defunding the police, to police organizations are all racist, to bringing a set of cultural wars to our schools, we are on the losing side of those cultural wars. Full Stop.

“You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access, why don’t you focus on classroom excellence? You have 50% of our kids not reading at grade level.”

I don’t think Emanuel has a chance of being nominated by the Democrats in 2028, for one very simple reason: he’s Jewish and the party has become highly anti-Semitic. I also wouldn’t trust his “moderate” declarations, although his record is indeed moderate compared to most of his fellow-Democrats these days. But beware: Spanberger of Virginia, to take one prominent example, campaigned as a moderate but once in office became radical in terms of actions.

I do know, at least based on anecdotal evidence of a friend of mine, that there are indeed voters yearning for moderate candidates and willing to vote for them. How numerous this voting group is I do not know.

The post Rahm Emanuel, 2028? appeared first on The New Neo.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., plans to bring the bill to the floor next week, but Republicans won’t take the route of launching into a talking filibuster despite pressure from President Donald Trump and the GOP base to do so.

“We don’t have the votes either to proceed, get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it,” Thune said. “But that is just a function of math, and there isn’t anything I can do about that. I mean, I understand the president’s got a passion to see this issue addressed, as we all do.” …

While the end result after an exhaustive marathon of debate would allow Republicans to pass the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act at a simple-majority threshold, Thune has time and again warned that the votes aren’t there among Republicans to block Democratic amendments that could completely reshape the bill.

Still, Trump and a sphere of online conservative voices are demanding that the bill pass at any cost. Trump warned that if it does not, Republicans will fall flat in the upcoming midterm election cycle.

The online chatter is that the GOP doesn’t want to pass it. I think it’s much more accurate to say that a certain minority of them don’t, but they hold a lot of power because of the tiny margin the GOP has in terms of numbers.

But I am convinced that – although I strongly support the bill – people are exaggerating what it would accomplish in this election cycle, if passed. There would be immediate court challenges that would probably tie it up so that it couldn’t be implemented prior to the 2026 election.

If the Democrats win the House in 2026, they will impeach Trump again. But I have to say, who cares at this point? It’s meaningless unless they could convict and remove him, which they couldn’t because they would not have those kinds of numbers in the Senate, even with the Murkowskis of the world. Plus, removing Trump would give them Vance. Not really what they want, either.

And what if they do gain the Senate, too? They would definitely nuke the filibuster. But they wouldn’t get past Trump’s veto.

I think the whole thing hinges on 2028, not now. And yet everyone is so fired up about this that a failure to pass it could have the result of many voters on the right punishing the GOP in the midterms. That would be a real self-own, IMHO.

The post Save the SAVE Act? appeared first on The New Neo.

If you took the day off yesterday, unlike me, you may have missed the story that Donkey-Chompers [AOC] went to the Munich Security Conference because she’s running for president and someone told her she had to show her “foreign policy chops” and so she read an issue of The Nation on the plane and figured she was all set.

She was not in fact all set. She embarrassed herself horribly — more horribly than usual, if you can believe that — and may have permanently damaged her ambition of becoming a Senator, let alone President of the United States. …

* She asserted that the next president must impose a “wealth tax,” and was embarrassed by a much better informed South American who told her to her face that Latin countries and repeatedly tried this and it had resulted in bankruptcy and immiseration every time. …

* She claimed that Marco Rubio was wrong that cowboys came from Spain. They did, because cowboys ride horses that only came over to America with the Spanish conquistadors. Some yesterday, Sean Davis I think, said, “How could someone with the last name Cortez not know that Cortez introduced horses to the Americas?”

* She claimed that Trump only thought he had the right to “kidnap” the dictator Maduro because Venezuela is “south of the equator” and you know those damn racist white Europeans think they’re smarter and better than the Global South. Pro-Tip: Venezuela is not in fact south of the equator. I guess if you want to be charitable to a Make A Wish Foundation Pretend Presidential Candidate, you could say she was close. I mean, it is a few hundred miles from the Equator.

* Asked a lay-up, no-surprise, you-knew-this-was-coming question about the US defending Taiwan from a hypothetical Chinese invasion, this idiot literally said “um” and “you know” for a full minute before finally speaking in a (more or less) grammatical sentence, stating, essentially, Well we’ll just have to hope that doesn’t happen.

All those things happened, and the press is covering up for her for the most part – of course.

Bloomberg claims that her only critics were “Republican commentators” who “claimed” — lied, that means — that she was “unprepared.”

Everyone with eyes and ears understands she was hideously unprepared. The analogy that occurs to everyone is that she looked like a third grader who was supposed to give a book report but didn’t read the book so she just “ummed” for a minute before saying “it was a very, very, very, very good book, thank you.”

Amazingly, Bloomberg claims that after she seemingly “flubbed” her answer, she came up with a “cogent” response, which was to say that we’ll just have to hope and pray that China never invades Taiwan so no I won’t answer your question about whether we’d defend Taiwan and I won’t even sound authoritative in refusing to answer.

But I have an observation to add: it won’t matter to Democrat voters, who will vote for her anyway if she’s the nominee. And she might be the nominee. She’s got all the qualifications, after all: she’s telegenic (despite the “donkey-choppers” nickname), she’s young, she’s female, she’s Hispanic, and she’s a leftist. What more could a person want?

Yes, Newsom (another telegenic stupidhead) will give her a run for her money. But stupidity and ignorance and the inability to answer questions cogently have not been a bar to the nomination recently: see the cognitively-challenged Biden and the word-salad master Harris.

Come to think of it, maybe by 2028 Mamdani will try to run [*see below]. He’s more able to – as Holden Caulfield would say – shoot the breeze and sling the old bull than the rest of them put together.

Alternatively, I think if AOC wants to be the next senator from NY (in 2028), it’s hers, and I don’t think this performance will matter.

NOTE: Contrast with Marco Rubio, who acquitted himself very well indeed at Munich.

[* A commenter pointed out that Mamdani isn’t a natural born citizen and therefore can’t run for president. Hey, but if AOC runs for president in 2028, Mamdani can run for the Senate.]

The post It’s a long long way to November of 2028, so don’t count AOC out … appeared first on The New Neo.

I agree that it’s important, and it would be wonderful if it were passed – although as soon as Democrats came to power they’d probably pass HR1, its mirror-image opposite.

And is it worthwhile to nuke the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act? Probably, many say. Plus, there’s little doubt the Democrats would end the filibuster – and will do it if they control the Senate – in order to finally pass HR1 after so many tries.

So, what’s the problem? Why not do it? Isn’t it just the usual stupidity, cowardice, and mendacity of the Republicans in the Senate (including of course McConnell and Murkowski), holding it back?

The Ruthless guys beg to differ. They’re very smart cookies, so it’s worth a listen. The clip is about 20 minutes long, but very informative and different from what you’ll hear elsewhere:

The post The Senate GOP and the SAVE Act appeared first on The New Neo.

Tesla CEO and former DOGE chief Elon Musk is reportedly backpedaling on the idea of forming a third political party and instead seeking to use his vast wealth to support the leading contender for the presidency in 2028.

Reportedly, Musk is keen on Vance in 2028.

[NOTE: This is my very first post in the category “Election 2028.”]

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