Dem centrists picked their side on the biggest political fights going this past week, choosing money and power over their most popular young leaders.
This is happening in a context of immense and building political, cultural and economic pressure.
American politics are under pressure from seismic forces — war, genocide, internal oppression, corruption, inequality, deep and bitter divisions — that threaten to lead to political earthquakes and greatly expanded violence.
And a number of leading centrist Dems chose their side this week at New York’s Israel Day Parade and an anti-ICE protest in New Jersey.
First We Take Manhattan
New York Governor Kathy Hochul and US Senator Chuck Schumer proudly marched next to as yet unindicted Israeli war criminal Bezalel Smotrich at New York’s annual Israel Day parade, while Zohran Mamdani took heat in the press for not attending.
The flag of the infamous ambulance murdering Golani Battalion was proudly flown at the parade.
Here’s the view from NY Times:
pic.twitter.com/qAyWFwa3Gk
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 1, 2026
Some key quotes from the piece:
Pro-Israel New Yorkers gathered on Sunday for the annual Israel Day Parade, a celebration of the Jewish state, but for the first time in recent memory the mayor of New York City did not join them.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani decided not to participate, citing his longtime opposition to the Israeli government. Parade organizers said they believed he was the first mayor to skip the parade since its start in 1964.
Many other elected officials marched in Manhattan on Sunday, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner.
Ms. Hochul said at a news conference as the parade started that the group was marching “in defiance.”…
Also attending:
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, also marched, according to a spokesman from his Religious Zionist Party. He was not on the official list of attendees that the Israeli consulate sent to The New York Times before the parade.
Also note how deftly Mamdani handled it with an assist from his billionaire zionist Police Commissioner:
WATCH: I asked Mamdani that while he won’t be attending given his personal views, is the administration sending a representative on behalf of the administration to the parade?
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch steps in and points to herself. Mamdani nods in agreement. pic.twitter.com/CLsmh6PnYJ
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) May 28, 2026
“I said on the campaign trail I would not be attending the parade, and I have made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear,” Mr. Mamdani said at a news conference last week focused on security preparations for the parade.
Standing by his side, Ms. Tisch indicated that she would march as a representative of his administration. She and Mr. Mamdani said security for the annual event would be tighter than ever.
“As the mayor of our city, I take seriously my responsibility to protect the safety and well-being of every New Yorker and every event, regardless of my attendance,” the mayor said.
Ms. Tisch, who is Jewish and has been a longtime supporter of Israel, described the parade as “one of the most joyful days of the year.”
She added: “It is the mayor’s decision not to march, and it is my decision to march proudly.”
This analysis from X user انوس is well worth reading:
Honestly, Mamdani and his PR team are incredibly savvy. They’re doing exactly what they promised: rebuilding the people’s trust in government, but through perception first.
Take the Israeli parade. First, he announces he’ll be skipping it. That dominates headlines and reinforces the image of a mayor willing to take a bold stand, even at political risk. People who were skeptical start questioning their skepticism because the move feels authentic and principled.
Then, after that positive perception takes hold, you get something like the video below. He still announces that he won’t attend the parade himself, so he keeps the positive publicity. But at the same time, he says he’ll send a member of his administration instead: Jessica Tisch, whom he chose to retain despite her family’s well-known ties to Netanyahu.
Most people won’t notice the distinction. A small number like myself will criticize it, but by then the mass deception has already been established. The public focus shifts from scrutinizing the contradiction to defending the image of a “principled mayor.” The net result is growing support, deeper belief in the system, and no political cost for it.
This is the same pattern I saw with his pro-Palestinian messaging. “Free Palestine” goes viral, his supporters rally behind him, and his popularity grows. Then later, he starts saying in interviews that “Israel has a right to exist.”
When I called it out and challenged him directly, the base had already been manipulated into a loyal following built around a radical image of him. Only months later did my criticism start to go mainstream, but by then the cycle had already reset and repeated itself.
That’s what makes the strategy so effective. The headline-grabbing position comes first. The nuance comes later. By the time people notice the difference, the public perception has already been set and he’s onto the next thing.
Rafael Shimunov has a very useful thread that also spots other Israeli notables at the parade, including Itzhak “a blessing on the one who seizers babies and dashes them against the rocks” Wasserlauf, Cabinet Minister Amihai “Starve Gaza, Nuke Gaza” Ben-Eliyahu, Ariel “A Nakba in Gaza ” Kellner, Knesset Speaker Amir “If you want a Palestinian state, build it in London” Ohana, and many many more such worthies that Democratic officials could not be prouder to march with.
And we must let the Senior Senator from New York have his say:
Schumer’s implication is that Americans are a profoundly antisemitic people ready to turn on Jews at any moment. I’m sorry but what?!?
It’s frankly insane that a national political leader hates and distrusts the American people this much. https://t.co/ybisXFjwbZ
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) June 1, 2026
Alright, let’s move on to New Jersey where ICE kicked off some kino and is now hiding behind the skirts of Dem centrist Governor Mikie Sherrill who’s deployed the state police to crush the protests.
Sheltering ICE in the Garden State
Here’s a quick catch up on the situation in New Jersey:
pic.twitter.com/MHduaHJ7N4
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 1, 2026
Links to stories above: The Guardian, CNN, DHS.
Let’s let the NYT set the scene, grand arbiters of truth that they are:
Violent clashes between demonstrators and federal agents erupted early on Friday outside an immigration detention center in Newark after nearly a week of protests over living conditions at the facility.
Just past midnight, about 50 activists convened in front of about 30 federal agents. A group of officers charged into the crowd, and several protesters were pushed to the ground as officers sprayed a chemical irritant. One officer beat a demonstrator with a baton across the torso, thighs, knee and calves as he tried to flee. Three protesters were arrested, restrained with zip ties and carried past a razor-wire fence into the detention center.
The skirmish Friday morning followed confrontations earlier in the week.
A group of demonstrators was arrested on Wednesday as tensions built between protesters and federal agents who were heavily armed while they stood watch at the facility’s gates.
On Thursday, relatives of detainees and advocates for immigrants said that migrants incarcerated at Delaney Hall were being beaten and subjected to pepper spray following a hunger strike by some inmates.
For months, many detainees have complained to family members and elected officials about rotten food and inadequate medical care at Delaney Hall, which is overseen by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Democratic officials in New Jersey have focused on the issue and toured the facility, echoing the concerns raised by inmates.
Now let’s get to the U.S. Senator who got himself pepper sprayed by those peacekeeping, law-abiding ICE agents.
Senator Kim spoke to New York Magazine who used a supercilious headline that outraged me “Andy Kim Wants Delaney Hall to Outrage You”:
Delaney Hall, a federal immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has been the site of escalating clashes in recent days as demonstrators have gathered in support of detainees on a reported hunger strike over poor conditions in the facility, only to be met with force from federal agents. Over the weekend, the skirmishes continued, with authorities arresting several demonstrators who refused to leave the premises after a curfew imposed by Newark mayor Ras J. Baraka.
Last week, New Jersey senator Andy Kim visited the site to conduct oversight and was hit with pepper spray alongside protesters. Kim is just the latest local politician to find himself on the front lines of the fight over Delaney Hall, which was reopened as a detention facility last year. LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey representative, is currently facing federal charges after being accused of assaulting an ICE officer during an attempted oversight visit last year, allegations she denies.…Sen. Andy Kim: I went to Delaney Hall — I’ve gone several times, but I went in particular because of the reports of protests inside. I wanted to hear why this hunger strike was happening. I showed up on Monday and, first of all, was not allowed inside even though I had an appointment. Geo Group, the company that runs Delaney Hall — the guards just decided they weren’t going to let me in, which just shows you they just don’t care at all about what the American people or Congress thinks about them, or about oversight. I actually had to call Secretary Markwayne Mullin directly and talk to him personally to be able to get access into the facility. And when I went inside and told the Geo Group head about being denied entry, he actually just looked me in the eye and called me a liar. Just said that I was making the whole thing up, which is, again, just absolutely mind-boggling that taxpayers are giving them a billion dollars to run Delaney Hall.
I went and talked to the detainees. Trump often calls them the worst of the worst, saying that these are the violent criminals. But the people I met were a pregnant woman that’s not getting the medical care that she needs. She’s being held there indefinitely and she literally just asked me, like, does she need to be prepared to have her baby in Delaney Hall? There was an 18-year-old high-school senior who just wants to go to prom and graduate. A stage-three lung-cancer patient who actually wants to leave the country. He wants to just go back home and spend whatever remaining months he has with his family, but he’s stuck and can’t even go. These are the people that I met.
The other thing I just want to hit, because the detainees were very clear with me, is that they have concerns about the conditions, but the main thing they’re protesting is the fact that there’s just no movement when it comes to their cases — that they are not having anything that resembles some type of opportunity to have their cases heard.
Note the role of Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka in ordering local law enforcement to back up ICE and suppress protest.
But wait, Governor Mickie Sherrill stepped up too, via WHYY:
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill visited a private immigration detention center in North Jersey Monday, where a hunger and labor strike began before the weekend.
The governor was joined by U.S. Sen. Andy Kim and other members of the state’s congressional delegation, including U.S. Reps. Rob Menendez and Analilia Mejia.
While addressing a protester upset that Sherrill had not reported to the facility sooner, the governor said she was not allowed access.
“People have been asking for you,” the unidentified protester said to the governor. “They started their strike on Friday and the first thing they said is we want to talk to Governor Sherrill, and it took you four days to be here.”
Sherrill explained that her office has been working with federal immigration officials to gain entry to the facility. She committed to continuing to attempt to gain access.
“These private detention facilities, which I have long opposed, are not treating people in the humane way we want,” she said.
Never fear, the Governor did step up and send in the New Jersey State Police…to protect ICE from her constituents:
💢 New Jersey State Police have taken control of the perimeter outside the GEO Group-run Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark, following an executive order by Governor Mikie Sherrill aimed at de-escalating more than a week of volatile clashes between ICE agents and… https://t.co/K8Pf6LNQan pic.twitter.com/2hZiYHRJLw
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 30, 2026
Sherrill’s decisions triggered some online debate between centrist Dems and activists:
This lawyer represents New Jersey Democrats and national Democratic Party. He cheers using militarized state troopers to crush protesters as a *strategic move* to protect residents from being brutalized by different cops. The Democratic establishment will walk us off a cliff. pic.twitter.com/bZDcTH6kay
— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) May 30, 2026
For her part, Sherrill played the time honored “outside agitators” card, per The Gothamist:
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Saturday blamed out-of-state agitators for clashes that erupted between protesters and local law enforcement outside the Delaney Detention Center in Newark.
Sherrill said five of the six people arrested Friday night in clashes outside the detention center for immigrants were not New Jersey residents. State police said the five out-of-staters were from New York and Pennsylvania.
“To the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations: You should not be here,” Sherrill said at a Saturday afternoon press conference. “You are not helping the people detained at Delaney Hall, you are not helping detainee families and you are certainly not keeping New Jersey safe.”
And Sherrill even got herself flagged by the Community Notes at X for allegedly misrepresenting events:
Yikes — @GovSherrillNJ community noted for lying about who knocked over the barricades
(spoiler: it was the police) pic.twitter.com/jJw0W1iV3p
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) June 1, 2026
And by on the ground witnesses:
“Sherrill said..that most of the instigation last night was caused by out of state actors acting violently.
I saw it with my own two eyes tonight, the violence was completely caused by the police who escalated against unarmed peaceful passive protestors.”@TimmyFacciola_ pic.twitter.com/mu0mzhcN5v
— Talia Ben-Ora (@taliaotg) June 1, 2026
Progressive influencer Hasan Piker made an appearance along side Dr. Adam Hamawy, NJ-12 candidate (more on him in a bit), and said, “the governor of New Jersey Mikie Sherrill sent the NJ police to beat protestors outside of Delaney Hall ICE detention center at the behest of the Trump admin” on TikTok.
The right wingers at NewsForce present at the protests had this to say:
Hasan Piker praised activists tied to Neville Roy Singham’s network—which has received over $285 million in funding—as “wonderful people” while appearing at the Newark ICE protests.
Piker dismissed concerns about the network’s activities as he dodged questions about a Treasury Department subpoena tied to his recent Cuba trip with the same groups.
The fine folks at Cartel Watch tied Piker to Cuba
Left-wing streamer and political influencer Hasan Piker has arrived at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, site of ongoing protests against ICE operations. Piker, who describes himself as a Marxist, recently received a federal subpoena from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The subpoena is part of an investigation into whether he and others violated U.S. sanctions during organized trips to Cuba earlier this year, including possible financing, logistics, or support related to the Cuban government. This comes amid broader scrutiny of activist trips and potential foreign influence concerns tied to Cuba.
Other right wingers explained the origins of the protests as top-down and organized:
Nothing about what’s happening at Delaney Hall is organic folks, it’s scripted movie like outrage meant to drive a false narrative
Here are the Do’s and Don’t they want from content creators, pay attention to who’s doing exactly this, their on the take to fuel chaos https://t.co/t4hizGt8CT pic.twitter.com/tZipnCn0Zx
— Wake Up NJ 🇺🇸 New Jersey (@wakeupnj) May 31, 2026
One right wing influencer present at the protests repeatedly crowned himself in masochistic glory as the crowd pwned him again and again:
Protesters confront and pull at keffiyeh worn by conservative commentator Cam Higby outside Delaney facility housing ICE detainees in Newark, New Jersey. pic.twitter.com/M7Puqn5QvB
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) May 27, 2026
Unless you assualt protestors
Then Team Fash will give you shelter
Watch Cam Higby pepper spray people and then get to hide in ICE’s facility pic.twitter.com/JcO8iZRoPj
— Jgmac1106 (@jgmac1106) May 31, 2026
But I should talk more about the adjacent NJ Congressional race before I close.
the Much MSM Maligned Dr. Adam Hamawy
Hasan Piker was not alone in getting the reality distortion field treatment. This sampling of headlines should help readers get started:
pic.twitter.com/hFn37rvEST
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 1, 2026
Links shown above: NYT, The Guardian, The Times of Israel, National Nurses United.
From the Guardian:
After returning from a medical mission in Gaza in 2024, Hamawy went to Washington to describe the crisis – which he viewed as a US-funded genocide – to lawmakers, only to encounter “too many doors that were closed, that didn’t even want to listen”.
“I could only define it as a genocide, because I saw the bodies of the people that came in,” the veteran army trauma surgeon and political newcomer reflected, while walking between houses. “And it wasn’t an accident. You can’t have an accident, every single day for three years.
“When the hospital shakes and I see the bodies come in, I’m paying for it with my tax dollars,” he said. “I don’t want my tax dollars doing that.”
One of the few representatives on Capitol Hill who met with him was his own: Bonnie Watson Coleman, who has served New Jersey’s 12th congressional district for more than a decade.
When she announced her retirement in November 2025, after six terms, Hamawy decided it was no longer enough to seek the attention of those elected to serve in Washington – and launched his campaign to join them.
In six months, Hamawy has gone from a political nobody to, deemed by most measures, the frontrunner in a crowded race, endorsed by prominent progressive and Democratic figures including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Tammy Duckworth. His work history has driven him to call for Medicare for All, advocating for sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel, and the abolition of ICE – and to say openly he cannot support the Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.
Naturally he’s being hit by trumped-up kerfluffles, the Huffington Post summarizes the situation:
potential triumph, however, has elicited howls of protest from pro-Israel organizations, who have attempted to argue that Hamawy has unacceptable ties to Muslim radicals, with Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) going as far as to label Hamawy an “actual terrorist.”
The attacks have two prongs: A Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey laid out his ties to the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison following an investigation of the 1995 World Trade Center bombing; and a Jewish Insider story last week noting Hamawy volunteered with a medical charity in the Balkans that was accused years later of being a front group for Al-Qaeda.
Hamawy has condemned the attacks as smears. He has disavowed the blind cleric’s views, and the charity Hamawy worked for was widely praised – including by President Bill Clinton’s administration – in the years before their exposure.
“Attacks calling Muslims terrorists is not a new thing, and they’re just falling back to their old playbook,” Hamawy told HuffPost. “So I’m just going to continue talking about everything that I have done for this country in uniform and out of uniform.”
Here’s how the NYT carries AIPAC’s water:
His critics have been trying with growing urgency to highlight an earlier part of Dr. Hamawy’s history: a gap year the future surgeon spent between graduating from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1991 and entering the university’s medical school the next year.
It was then that Dr. Hamawy began spending time with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind, militant Islamist who lived and preached in New Jersey. Four years later, Mr. Abdel Rahman would be tried and convicted of inspiring violence that contributed to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He died in 2017 while serving a life sentence.
During Mr. Abdel Rahman’s trial in 1995, Dr. Hamawy, then 26, was called as a defense witness by the sheikh’s lawyers as they tried to undermine the federal government’s star witness, Emad Salem, who was paid $1 million by federal officials while working as an informant and also admitted lying under oath. Mr. Salem had testified that during a road trip to Detroit the sheikh had encouraged him to kill a former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. (Prosecutors had also charged Mr. Abdel Rahman with being at the center of a plot to assassinate the president during a planned visit to New York in 1993.)
Dr. Hamawy, who traveled in a van with the two men, testified that he did not recall hearing Mr. Abdel Rahman say that to Mr. Salem. In the course of his testimony he also told jurors that he helped the blind cleric translate a fax from Egypt in 1993, spent time in his apartment and listened to him speak at area mosques.
Dr. Hamawy, who is now 56, was never accused of wrongdoing and went on to serve with distinction as an Army combat surgeon during the Iraq War, where he helped to save the life of U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a Democrat who has also endorsed him. On Sept. 11, 2001, he and other residents at NewYork-Presbyterian went to ground zero to treat those injured in the second terror attack on the World Trade Center.
Andrew C. McCarthy, the lead prosecutor in Mr. Abdel Rahman’s trial, and Michael B. Mukasey, the federal judge who oversaw the case and later served as President George W. Bush’s attorney general, published essays earlier this month reminding readers of Dr. Hamawy’s link to the infamous cleric.
This isn’t the first MSM attempt to link Hamaway to terrorism. Drop Site debunked the first:
⚡️ The outlet Jewish Insider is attacking New Jersey congressional candidate Adam Hamawy over volunteer work he performed in Bosnia in 1994 with the Benevolence International Foundation, or BIF, later accused by the U.S. government of ties to jihadist networks.
What the article… https://t.co/nTGzIVaQF7 pic.twitter.com/cHInI7rhFD
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 28, 2026
The New Jersey Globe has the horserace stuff on Hanaway’s race:
When a new super PAC called American Priorities announced that it would spend $2 million supporting a first-time candidate named Adam Hamawy in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district, it was seen as the opening salvo in what promised to be a brutal, bloody super PAC war. Would the American Israel Public Affairs Committee come in to sink the fiercely pro-Palestine Hamawy? Would cryptocurrency or AI groups see an opportunity in the district?
Instead, with just a few days left to go until the Democratic primary, Hamawy has remained essentially untouched, and there’s an increasing consensus that he’s the most likely person to be the district’s next congressman.…“The rest of the field is so divided that even if there were a viable Stop Hamawy movement, there’s no coalescing behind one candidate,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “A divided field against a unified frontrunner is always what you want.”
In the news, some less-than-ideal stories have trickled out over the last month: the conservative Washington Free Beacon has reported on Hamawy’s past ties to the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” who was later prosecuted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Jewish Insider added that Hamawy had volunteered for a medical aid organization in Bosnia that was later discovered to be an Al-Qaeda front. Even if they haven’t made as much of an impact in the local media, the stories have been making the rounds in the district.
But Hamawy said that outside the “right-wing media,” he hasn’t heard anything from voters in the district related to the Blind Sheikh or anything of that sort. “I think this is a frantic attempt in the last days to discredit all the work that I’ve done, and it’s garbage,” he said.
There hasn’t been any negative paid media against Hamawy sent by his opponents or by super PACs, and when speaking with the New Jersey Globe, several other 12th district Democrats declined to criticize him with any level of specificity. The one exception has been Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, who called Hamawy a “radical extremist” – but Mapp is not seen as one of Hamawy’s top competitors for the nomination.
“I definitely sense that his opponents are feeling a real risk of backlash,” Rasmussen said. “All the candidates are hoping somebody else will do it. They’re hoping somebody else in the field will take the swipe. They’re hoping somebody will start spending some money to drive the message against Hamawy, to raise concerns. But they don’t view it as their job themselves.”
That’s all I’ve got time and room for today. Stay safe, y’all.
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