Five Quick Things: AOC 2028? Yes, Please! – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

If you guys will forgive me, this is a bit of a drive-by 5QT. I’m juggling a couple of projects as I’m writing it, because a PAC that I run here in Louisiana is having its big annual fundraising event next week, and accordingly, it’s a mad scramble to get all the logistics out of the way before it’s a last-minute thing.

Which, as you know if you’ve done events, is impossible. The thing always comes together at the last minute. No matter how hard you try to square it away in advance, you’ll invariably find that you’re hustling right up to the time it starts.

I’m mentioning the event because one of the speakers is The American Spectator’s own publisher, one Melissa Mackenzie. So there’s a plug for Melissa, who’s surely going to knock ‘em dead.

Anyway, I’m working on this thing with my phone’s ringer off, and I’m watching the calls and text messages piling up as I’m writing. We’ll make this light. And speaking of light, Thing Number One is pretty easily disposed of. Namely…

1. Yes, This Is a Pre-Campaign Launch, and No, It’s Not All That Launch-y

She showed up in Nampa, Idaho, which is a suburb of Boise, and filled up the Ford Idaho Center there with a capacity crowd of 12,000 or so.

And when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the podium after Bernie Sanders warmed up the crowd, this is what it looked like, allegedly…

Do not let them trick you into thinking we are enemies.

Do not let them trick you into thinking that we can be separated into rural and urban, Black and white and Latino.

We are one. pic.twitter.com/5rfXO1oJAT

— Team AOC (@TeamAOC) April 23, 2025

Impressive, right?

Ehhhh, maybe.

A few things we can say about this.

First, yeah — she’s going to run for president. And she’ll be a top-tier candidate on the Democrat side, which says a great deal more about the expected 2028 field than it does about AOC. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders and AOC Are Not the Answer to the Democrats’ Weaknesses)

Second, she’s Sanders’s candidate. He’s bringing her around the country on something called the “Fight Oligarchy Tour,” which is hilarious given that the chosen method of travel is… private jets. The fact that Sanders is opening for AOC is instructive: that’s Bernie throwing his brand on her and doing what he can to consolidate the 20-something percent of the Democrat vote that he effectively controls behind her candidacy. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders: The Socialist Who Scammed America)

Third, AOC might be the only potential Democrat candidate for 2028 who can sell out a decent-sized basketball/concert arena. Gavin Newsom can’t do that, Chris Van Hollen can’t (maybe before Donald Trump started deporting MS-13 members, he could, but probably not anymore), Kamala Harris can’t, and Pete Buttigieg can’t. To be fair, none of the candidates other than Sanders could in 2020, so this isn’t new, and it’s also not dispositive.

Fourth, what we don’t know is how many of these people in that crowd were bused in and/or paid by the unions. After Kamala survived on rent-a-mobs for all her events last year, we should be asking that question of every event the Democrats put on going forward.

And fifth, that’s a highlight video. Except it doesn’t have any highlights. Quick — without watching it again, name something she said.

Other than calling everybody in the crowd mustard seeds, which… I don’t think is a winning electoral message.

When AOC dropped this tweet, pretty much every conservative influencer on the internet let her have it for saying she wanted to unite the country but failing to capitalize “white” while doing so for “Black” and “Latino.”

It’s amateur hour.

But I don’t want to discourage Bernie or AOC from going through with the plan to groom her and run her in 2028. She’s exactly the candidate — a distaff George McGovern in a baggy boyfriend shirt — the Democrats need to run in order to fully blow up their party along the lines of the James Carville–David Hogg war we talked about in yesterday’s column. (RELATED: James Carville v. David Hogg? Yes, Please!)

2. David Hogg? Did We Mention David Hogg?

It appears that the concave-chested upstart Hogg is getting a substantial bit of brushback from official Democrat circles over his plan to raise and spend $20 million to take out older and more moderate Democrats in “safe” congressional districts. (RELATED: The Democrats Are Hogging the Wilderness)

Ken Martin, the mostly-invisible chair of the Democratic National Committee, awakened from his slumber to repudiate Hogg’s efforts. “Let me be unequivocal. No DNC officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary election, whether on behalf of an incumbent or a challenger,” he said. “Voters should decide who our primary nominees are, not DNC leadership. Our role is to serve as stewards of a fair, open and trusted process, not to tilt the scales.”

Which is hilarious given that the DNC hasn’t had a presidential election in which it didn’t rig its primaries since 2008. It will literally be 20 years since they ran a primary they didn’t “influence” by the time the next presidential cycle comes around.

Also hilarious is Martin’s putative effort to get rid of Hogg, though he doesn’t have any cause to. The DNC’s bylaws about neutrality, which it breaks constantly, only apparently apply to presidential races, and Hogg isn’t playing in those yet.

Since last week, Hogg has appeared on just about every cable news show and digital outlet, advocating for a party reset of sorts — not just because it lost the White House to Donald Trump, but also because, he said, it lost faith among voters.

Now the party is grappling with what to do with him.

Martin and others on the call did not discuss what next steps they’d take with Hogg. And Hogg maintained in an interview with NBC News Thursday that he was not in violation of current bylaws.

At 25, Hogg has emerged as a potential disruptor to a party still trying to find its way forward after a bitter loss in November. Since former Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat, the party has struggled to find its footing against a Republican trifecta in Washington and is still searching for a leader and a message.

Jane Kleeb, a DNC vice chair and the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said she backed neutrality, and it was also something that Martin also ran on.

Kleeb noted that enshrining DNC neutrality was something that Sanders “and many other Dems across the ideological spectrum have repeatedly asked us to codify into our bylaws.”

More, please. Much more.

3. The Crimea Cramdown

Neither Russia nor Ukraine appears to understand how to make peace with the other. The Russians have spent much of this week launching missiles at Kyiv, which might be something of a reprise of President Nixon’s Linebacker 2 campaign to bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table, or maybe it’s just evidence of what a savage bastard Vladimir Putin is.

And the Ukrainians are now rejecting a preliminary peace plan the Trump administration has put forward on the basis, at least partially, that the plan involves recognition of the Russian claim to the Crimean Peninsula.

Seriously. And how well did that play?

President Trump had already responded to these words in a social media post, reminding the Ukrainian that “Crimea was lost years ago” during the Obama era and that his remarks were “very harmful to the peace negotiations.” Following up in the Oval Office on Wednesday evening as he spoke with reporters while signing executive orders, the U.S. President remarked: “I will say I think that Russia is ready, and a lot of people said Russia wanted to go for the whole thing, I think we have a deal with Russia.

“We have to get a deal with Zelensky. I thought it might be easier to get a deal with Zelensky but so far it has been harder, but that’s OK, it’s alright. But I think we have a deal with both, I hope they do it… this is about a lot of humanity.”

Underlining the reasons behind his motivation to get a deal quickly to save human life, President Trump said of Zelensky: “I just hope he gets get this thing solved, because we’re losing about… 5,000 soldiers being killed every week, approximately… they’re Russian and Ukrainian, they’re not Americans. They’re Russian but they’re people, they are human beings they have families.

“They wave goodbye to their sons and they get a call that their son is no longer there… I get the pictures, the satellite pictures, I’ve never seen anything like it. The fields after some of these battles, it’s horrible, for nothing.”

My theory of what’s happening is one I’ve neither proven nor disproven — namely, that the reason Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy can’t seem to agree to anything which will actually end that war is that he’s getting guarantees from the Europeans that if he holds on long enough either Trump will recommit to supplying him with arms and even men, or they’ll do it themselves. (RELATED: Europe Is No Longer Worth Defending)

And that Zelensky,y for whatever reasons — we can guess at those, and none of them are particularly honest — is buying that.

Sure, it’s distasteful that Ukraine would have to give up territory in order to get the Russians to leave them alone. And yes, it’s not impossible that Russia will swallow Crimea and the Donbas in a peace agreement brokered by the U.S., then spend some time to reload and train up some fresh divisions before coming back for more.

If I were Zelenskyy, that would be my concern as well.

But it’s hardly a reason to keep a war going that you clearly aren’t going to win — if winning is defined as recapturing the Donbas and Crimea.

Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have all signaled very clearly that we will walk away from not only the peace process but the arming of Ukraine process if these talks go nowhere.

Now, if the perception that Ukraine can’t maintain the carnage much longer before it collapses is wrong, and Ukraine is actually winning the war, which is something we’ll hear from those quarters, then Zelenskyy probably shouldn’t accept a peace deal. (RELATED: Running Out of Cards in Kursk)

But either way, this has gone on for more than three years now, and we’re at the end of the time in which it makes sense for U.S. foreign policy that Russia is bled in Ukraine. Our national interest lies mostly in making ourselves neutral between an increasingly woke-authoritarian and rapidly declining EU and a semi-barbarian Russia, so that we can focus on the big geopolitical game with China. Ukraine has been an impediment to that shift.

Take the deal, Mr. Zelenskyy. Or don’t. Either way, this isn’t going to be our problem for much longer.

4. Here’s a Nice Little Kickoff…

Former NFL placekicker and CBS sportscaster Jay Feely is jumping into politics. Feely is running for the Arizona congressional seat being vacated by Andy Biggs, who’s leaving Congress after next year to run for governor of that state.

Jay Feely, a former placekicker for more than half a dozen NFL teams over 13 seasons, announced he will run as a Republican in next year’s open race to fill Arizona’s 5th Congressional District. The 48-year-old father began his campaign on Wednesday.

“I’m excited to announce my candidacy for U.S. Congress in Arizona’s 5th Congressional District,” he wrote in a simple statement on X. “I look forward to earning your vote.”

The seat is currently held by six-term GOP Congressman Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who jumped into the state’s race for governor earlier this year. That leaves Feely with a solid chance of taking the reins in a seat that has been reliably red since the Tea Party wave of 2010.

“It was a big decision for my entire family, but I think my wife and I both feel that this is the right decision for us,” he told reporters following his announcement in Gilbert, ABC15 reported.

The NFL champ said he spoke with Rep. Biggs before making his final decision.

“We had breakfast, and I just said, ‘You know, what are your you know, what are your intentions? What are you going to do?’ He said, ‘I’m all in and running for governor.’ I said, ‘Okay, then I’m going to actually consider running for your seat, because I have a tremendous amount of respect,’” Feely told reporters.

You would think Feely would hold that seat for the GOP, though it’s too early to know for sure that he’d be the nominee. But he’d continue the trend of Republican pols with very, very good communication skills and pre-politics resumes that show that they’re actually good at something.

The guy I’m waiting for, though it might be a while before he would jump into politics if he did it at all, is Harrison Buttker, the placekicker for the Chiefs — both because of the level of triggering on the Left that he’d engender and because he’s very eloquent and not easily shaken.

For now, though, Feely will certainly do.

5. And Finally, This Can of Worms

I’ll admit, I’ve not traveled deep into the rabbit hole that is Directed Energy Weapons.

But I did watch this report that Catherine Herridge did on the effects of these things on the people they’ve been used on. They’re scary.

BREAKING: Top US Neuroscientist & Military Advisor Confirms Reports Are ‘Credible’ That Directed Energy Weapon Attacks Have Happened on US Soil And Targeted US Personnel Abroad; Exclusive New Records Reveal Exposure to “Microwave Weapon” After Intel Officer Discovered Secret Op.… pic.twitter.com/rghp127hrv

— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) April 22, 2025

This has to do with the Havana Syndrome that our government has yet to be forthcoming about, but apparently, these weapons are used on our people fairly commonly, and they get brain injuries all the time as a result.

Parkinson’s is one of the most prominent effects.

Who has these things? Well, we do — but so do Russia and China, among others. And up until the current administration, nobody seemed to want to talk about it.

Just one more thing to be disgusted about in this crazy old world.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

James Carville v. David Hogg? Yes, Please!

Bribing Illegals to Self-Deport Might Be the Only Real Solution Available to Trump

Five Quick Things: The Hill They’ve Died On