The radical left is so predictable. Whenever it needs to push extremist ideas, it sends a minority to deliver the message, and then it brands anyone who objects as a bigot. In 2008, Barack Obama was arguably the most radical presidential candidate any major party had ever nominated. If you criticized him or his policies, you were a racist because he is black. Heck, simply opposing him was enough to earn the label.
When it was finally Hillary Clinton's turn at the nomination, the script barely changed. Everything that had been racist in 2008 was suddenly sexist, and opposing Hillary meant you had a problem with women.
The strategy never went away.
It just found a new client in Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat Senate nominee in Michigan, whose extremism is plain to anyone paying attention. Point it out, though, and you're an Islamophobe.
The mainstream media is working overtime to turn every criticism of El-Sayed into an attack on his faith.
"In the final weeks of Michigan's closely watched Senate race, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's ethnicity, religion and family have come under renewed attacks and scrutiny," The New York Times claimed this week.
The paper then laid out what it considered the evidence.
His Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, invoked Dr. El-Sayed's mother during their first debate, trying to draw a connection between her and Al Qaeda. President Trump has mocked the pronunciation of Dr. El-Sayed's name and has started referring to him by his middle name, Mohamed. And Republican ads have suggested that Dr. El-Sayed has ties to terrorist groups or to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political movement.
Dr. [sic] El-Sayed has forcefully responded to the questions about his identity. Over the weekend, a nearly five-minute exchange at a town-hall event with a man who asked him to "disavow the Muslim Brotherhood" went viral on social media. This week, in a brief, testy interaction with a reporter from Newsmax, he said, "I clearly disavow" the movement. And in a new video, Dr. El-Sayed says that he prays daily and calls himself a "man of faith."
Look at how the Times frames it. Questions about a candidate's associations and positions become "questions about his identity." Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) raising concerns about terror ties becomes an assault on the man's family.
As you could have expected, El-Sayed is leaning hard into the narrative. Speaking at a rally, he cast his opponent's debate performance as a simple act of religious bigotry.
"You might have know, you might have seen yesterday we had a little debate. Or I had a debate and he just pointed at me and said, 'Well, he's Muslim,'" El-Sayed said.
This is how the left weaponizes identity. If you belong to a minority group, any attack on you is an attack on your identity, and whoever launched it is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe… any fill-in-the-blank-phobe you can think of depending on the target. Your record, your words, and your allies all become off-limits the moment you can claim victim status.
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What El-Sayed doesn't want voters to realize is that his religion has nothing to do with any of this.
His radicalism does.
Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary under George W. Bush, explained it perfectly on X.
"Abdul is not the only Muslim to run for the Senate. Mehmet Oz ran in 2024," Fleischer wrote. "No one ran against Oz because he's a Muslim. That's because Oz didn't call Israel Bloodthirsty. Oz didn't write an oped urging support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Oz didn't have donors who belonged to the MB. Oz didn't blame terrorism on the policies of the US. And Oz didn't justify a terrorist [attack] on a synagogue. This race isn't about Abdul's faith. It's about his extremist ideas."
That should settle it. Republicans had no problem supporting a Muslim Senate candidate who wasn’t a radical with extremist ties.
The Islamophobia smear works. If you’re a leftist.
It's so potent that left-wing Jews like Fox News' Jessica Tarlov and actor Mandy Patinkin are backing El-Sayed. They care so much about virtue signaling their tolerance that they’ll support a radical Muslim with terror ties. The social capital that comes with being “tolerant” matters more to them than anything else, including the safety of their own community.
On top of everything else, when the left calls every objection bigotry, it cheapens the charge for the real thing.
