On the menu today: Today is Election Day. If you’re legally eligible to vote and you want to vote, you should go vote. If you are not legally eligible to vote, or you don’t have any strong opinions about who you want to win the elections in your area, you should probably stay home. Read on for a review of how America is responding to candidates who are increasingly openly antisemitic and Islamist. Also: wondering if we should be so certain that the two sides of the horseshoe in the horseshoe theory of politics could never work together for long; and the vice president offers a vague claim of large-scale illegal Somali immigrant voting in Ohio.
The Anti-Anti-Islamist Party?
A quick recap of the political drama in Michigan: On October 27, Cenk Uygur recycled a television ad that contends that Israel and “they/them” are A) the reason grocery prices are high and B) the reason husbands angrily swear at their wives in public. Even a certain failed German painter would have found the ad’s message a little heavy-handed.
Haley Stevens, who got 47 percent of the vote in the Michigan Senate primary, wanted Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to denounce the ad. El-Sayed issued the most pro forma, check-the-box, going-through-the-motions response possible: “No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.” You’ll notice that terse statement does not include any criticism of Uygur’s ad.
Things escalated from there, with El-Sayed disinviting Stevens from a Democratic unity rally, suggesting he really doesn’t understand what a “unity rally” is supposed to accomplish. Then Stevens shocked the political world by attending church with Mike Rogers and endorsing him.
As mentioned yesterday, I don’t think Stevens’s endorsement of Rogers will alter the trajectory of the race. Michiganders had a lot of reasons to think El-Sayed was antisemitic and/or soft on Islamism before this past weekend. (“Hurt people hurt people,” not wanting to say anything about the death of Iranian ayatollah Ali Khamenei, etc.) About 40 percent of the vote is already in, and I don’t think there are that many remaining undecided or persuadable voters out there.
But this doesn’t mean that Stevens’s act won’t have longer-term consequences.
In short, if you’re a Jewish American for whom the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state is important . . . it’s getting increasingly difficult to remain in the Democratic Party.
It’s not just Abdul El-Sayed, or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his declaration that he has no opinion about the future of Hamas. It’s Melat Kiros, all but certain to be elected today in Colorado’s first congressional district, declining to describe a Molotov cocktail attack on a Gaza hostage demonstration in Boulder, Colo., as an act of antisemitism, stating she did not know the perpetrator’s intentions or the protesters’ beliefs. It is unsuccessful Texas Democratic House candidate Maureen Galindo contending, “We have Israeli Zionists who are influencing our local politics and our South Texas politics. Do you know that ICE trains with the IDF in Israel?”
It’s the Democratic Socialists of America “Liberation Caucus” — a self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus” within the DSA calling for the release of “Elias Rodriguez and all political prisoners.” Elias Rodriguez shot and murdered Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim in cold blood as they left the Young Diplomats Reception of the American Jewish Committee in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2025.
And perhaps more than anyone, it is Adam Hamawy. A few days before Election Day, The Atlantic magazine realized that a guy who worked for an al-Qaeda front is about to get elected to Congress from New Jersey:
Throughout his campaign, Hamawy has not fully accounted for why, as a young man, he kept company with Abdel-Rahman and others in his circle. Perhaps Hamawy was merely young, curious, and hapless and did not fully buy into the sheikh’s ideas. Or perhaps he harbored beliefs that he has since renounced. Hamawy himself has provided little explanation. When asked during the primary about Abdel-Rahman, who died in 2017, and his terrorism conspiracy, Hamawy told NBC, “I absolutely regret, and I condemn, what happened.” At the same time, he dismissed reporting about his relationship with the sheikh, attributing it to “right-wing media” and adding, “It’s racist. It’s really anti-Muslim.”
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who presided over Abdel-Rahman’s terror trial as a federal judge, has called the sheikh “one of the world’s leading theologians of terrorism.” And Abdel-Rahman’s influence continued after his conviction: While serving out a life sentence in prison, the sheikh issued the fatwa that Osama bin Laden would use to justify the September 11 attacks. . . .
I could find no public evidence that Hamawy had denounced Abdel-Rahman prior to his candidacy and the media’s unearthing of that history. More to the point, asking about that history is fair game. He owes a fuller explanation to his would-be constituents.
El-Sayed’s fairest gripe would be that his relationship with Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker has gotten way more attention than a guy running for Congress who worked for an al-Qaeda front.
For those of you out there who don’t know the difference or who host a CNN show, Islam and Islamism are two different things. Islam is a religion; Islamism is a belief that the religion should effectively influence all sectors of society, including the government; in short, it is anti-secularism, or the unification of mosque and state. Just about every variety of Islamism is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution because it sorts citizens into the categories of Muslim and non-Muslim under the law and treats them differently. You really can’t be an Islamist and then honor an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
(Yes, all of this would also apply to a “Christianist” who wanted to establish some version of Christianity as a national faith or elevate that form of Christianity over all other faiths.)
By the way, if a Republican congressional candidate were running in some deep red district who had worked for, say, a front organization for the Army of God, or the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, would he be as obscure as Adam Hamawy is today? Nah, I don’t think so, either.
The Democratic Party isn’t quite pro-Islamist. However, the Democratic Party isn’t particularly anti-Islamist and seems to be evolving into an anti-anti-Islamist position — that is, relentlessly critical of the steps taken to fight Islamism, while rarely getting around to offer much criticism of Islamism itself, lest that be seen as fanning the flames of Islamophobia.
A ‘Horseshoe Theory’ Theory
If you look on the fringes of the far left, you’ll find disaffected, under-employed, angry young men (and some women), prone to conspiracy theories and virulent antisemitism, who are itching to violently lash out at an American society that they believe has failed them.
If you look on the fringes of the far right, you’ll find . . . er, more disaffected, under-employed, angry young men (and some women), prone to conspiracy theories and virulent antisemitism, who are itching to violently lash out at an American society that they believe has failed them.
The gist of the “horseshoe theory” in politics is that extreme leftism and extreme rightism are closer to one another than either is to the political center. But despite their similarities, there’s a persistent sense that because of their remaining differences, they could never form a significant alliance. Because, you know, one side likes the rainbow flag and the other likes the Confederate flag, and they could never unify with, say, RuPaul in a Confederate Flag dress.
But . . . Abdul El-Sayed ran a commercial, approvingly touting Tucker Carlson’s criticism of Mike Rogers. Democratic New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made a sustained outreach to leaders in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. That hateful little troll Nick Fuentes endorsed Democrat Amy Acton in Ohio’s gubernatorial race, in part because he loathes Vivek Ramaswamy so much.
And remember, some of the biggest names in MAGA, such as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., used to be Democrats.
Graham Platner (remember him?) had a Nazi tattoo and was obsessed with “oligarchs,” and a lot of grassroots Democrats just adored him. Does his worldview really disagree with an anti-establishment bomb-thrower like Steve Bannon that much? Had he remained in the race, wouldn’t Platner have probably gotten along well with Joe Rogan?
If you read Jacobin, American Compass, and Compact, are you sure there isn’t some overlap in those Venn diagrams?
Are we absolutely sure that the far left and far right couldn’t unify behind a candidate/message/platform of demonizing Israel; virulent antisemitism; relentless paranoia about big corporations, banks, and the so-called “national security state”; redistribution of wealth; and general populist discontent and anger? At least long enough to have serious influence in an election cycle or two?
Someone Should Do Something About That, Mr. Vice President
Vice President JD Vance, speaking at a rally in Swanton, Ohio, Monday:
You can vote to keep American elections in the hands of the American people. Now, I saw a story just in the last couple of days that there are illegal communities of illegal immigrant Somali who are coordinating to flood the polls and drown out your vote. Well, well, I happen to believe that we want American elections to belong to American citizens. Send a message by voting for Vivek [Ramaswamy] for governor!
Back in March, President Trump named Vance his “fraud czar,” leading the administration’s “war on fraud.”
If the vice president has genuinely heard about “illegal communities of illegal immigrant Somali who are coordinating to flood the polls,” and this isn’t some made-up nonsense to rile up his voters — like the “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” from 2024 — I would hope someone in law enforcement and/or immigration enforcement would do something about that. This might even be the sort of thing a “fraud czar” would want to stop before any illegal votes get cast.
Vance did not add, “And we’re arresting and deporting these illegal immigrants,” or “We’re preparing to indict these individuals for attempting to cast ballots when they’re not eligible to vote.” He just called on the audience to “send a message by voting for Vivek for governor!” As if it’s their responsibility to cancel out these illegal immigrants illegally casting ballots.
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, a look at how we may consider the past two years as the stable part of Trump’s second term.