If El-Sayed can’t say the right words, maybe the rest of the party will be smart enough to inoculate itself against the political pathogen he’s set on spreading.
According to the unreliable narrators who populate the online environment, Abdul El-Sayed easily dispatched Mike Rogers in last week’s debate. If you needed another reason to ignore the conventional wisdom that is forged in the internet’s crucibles, that’s only the latest.
While El-Sayed clearly bested Rogers on style, it seemed obvious to me that the Republican Senate candidate did precisely what he had to do. With a level of gratuitous repetition that amounted to neurolinguistic programming, Rogers hammered El-Sayed on his family connections to and sympathies for a variety of Islamist terrorist enterprises. Those allegations proved sticky.
Today, one week later, there’s no ambiguity about who performed more adroitly on that stage. No one is writing articles about Rogers’s Florida home or his boats. Instead, they are reporting, editorializing, and commenting on El-Sayed’s sordid associations. What’s more, reporters cannot get off that story because El-Sayed will not let them:
WATCH: NBC's Tom Llamas asks the basic follow-up questions Kristen Welker did not, cooks Abdul El-Sayed like shawarma over familial MoBros ties and equating Israel to Iran pic.twitter.com/TYj4xJQNPB
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) October 14, 2026
After he delivered what appears to have been a mendacious performance in his interview with NBC News’ Kirsten Welker, the outlet cornered El-Sayed once again this week. There, reporter Tom Llamas gave El-Sayed every opportunity to walk back his dubious claim that his family had no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, but El-Sayed refused the offer. Beyond that, when pressed to revise his morally and intellectually bankrupt conviction that Israel and Iran are equal threats to U.S. security, El-Sayed declined with all of Colonel Nathan Jessup’s self-restraint. “Yes!” he insisted in a fit of theatrical exasperation.
Not only is the story Rogers goaded El-Sayed into creating for himself not going away, it’s taking on a life of it own:
Asked how he would have answered if Iran or Israel is a bigger threat the the US, Buttigieg tells Fox News: “Iran is our enemy, Israel is not. They’re an ally so that’s pretty clear to me.” pic.twitter.com/oLxmSLKN0a
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) October 14, 2026
Why do we think Pete Buttigieg, a former cabinet secretary with a Michigan address and presidential ambitions, would answer that question as directly and forthrightly as he did? He has every political incentive to be a team player, to obfuscate on El-Sayed’s behalf. Buttigieg pivoted to cost-of-living talking points pretty quickly after summarily dismissing the central premise of El-Sayed’s worldview, so why didn’t he start there?
Perhaps the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., knows that El-Sayed doesn’t play in Peoria. Maybe he has enough political horse sense to know that the remarks he makes today on the Senate candidate’s behalf will haunt him in an election in which national security matters. What if expending political capital to boost El-Sayed is the electoral equivalent of throwing good money after bad?
Yes, it’s only Fox News that is now asking other Democratic Party luminaries to weigh in on one candidate’s gaffe, but that is how snowballs start rolling. Clearly, NBC News isn’t afraid to move this story forward. The rest of the legacy media may follow suit. Indeed, they may feel obligated to press El-Sayed further, if only in the pursuit of what they understand is the right answer to questions in which the unstated premise is whether the West and its allies deserve terroristic violence. And if El-Sayed cannot say the right words, maybe the rest of the party will be smart enough to inoculate itself against the political pathogen he’s set on spreading.