On the menu today: A sign that Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed can’t or won’t moderate his stances or tone or embrace of extremism between now and Election Day, and an update on where the U.S. Navy’s eleven aircraft carriers are.
No Moderation in Michigan
This upcoming Labor Day weekend, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is scheduled to speak at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America in Detroit.
In 2008, five former leaders of a U.S.-based Muslim charity were convicted of funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. In that case, which became known as the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, federal prosecutors publicly listed the Islamic Society of North America as one of roughly 300 “unindicted co-conspirators,” describing them as part of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both the trial court in Dallas and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the release of that list violated the groups’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
The organization lamented, “In spite of the assurance that ISNA’s lawyers received from the assistant U.S. Attorney that ISNA was not under investigation, was not involved in any criminal conspiracy or other illegal activities, and was not a target of this prosecution, ISNA remains unjustly branded by the government as an unindicted co-conspirator. . . . To be clear, ISNA remains consistent in its rejection of terrorism and violence. ISNA rejects all acts of terrorism, including those perpetrated by Hamas, Hezbollah and any other group that claims Islam as their inspiration.”
However, as Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon lays out, this doesn’t mean that the upcoming ISNA conference won’t feature its share of controversial speakers:
Tariq Masood was slated to speak on a panel about youth mental health but “is no longer speaking at the convention,” ISNA said Monday following a Washington Free Beacon report on the influential cleric, who has defended child marriage and admitted that he forced his young niece to get married, remarks that prompted Canadian activists to urge their government to block Masood’s visa to the country in 2024 over his “pedophilic rhetoric.” The report stoked outcry against El-Sayed, who has sought to cast Republicans as “pedophile protectors” for allegedly blocking the release of Jeffrey Epstein files.
Tariq Masood is a Pakistani cleric who advocates killing those who commit blasphemy and blamed the Covid-19 pandemic on “immodest women.”
Whose idea was it to give this guy permission to enter the United States to speak at a conference?
The Washington Free Beacon continues:
El-Sayed’s campaign distanced the candidate from Masood, saying that “Abdul is not affiliated with and does not endorse any other participant of the conference” and that the candidate is scheduled “to speak on unity and commitment to justice in public service.”
“We have no further comment on this matter,” ISNA spokeswoman Crystal Habib told the Free Beacon.
Ah, so the Democratic senatorial candidate “does not endorse” a man who encourages child marriage, approves of murdering those who blaspheme Islam, and says that immodest women started Covid-19. (I suppose that’s one way to characterize “Bat Woman” Shi Zhengli.) Way to take a stand, El-Sayed! I’m sure Masood feels the sting of that one.
The Free Beacon reports that the upcoming ISNA conference will still feature a number of speakers with records of extremism:
Texas-based imam Yasir Qadhi, who will appear on several panels over the weekend, has called the Holocaust a “hoax” and said Adolf Hitler “never intended to mass-destroy the Jews.” Abdul Nasir Jangda, another Texas-based cleric who will speak on a panel with Qadhi, has defended the practice of sex slavery and said that husbands have a right under Islamic law to rape their wives, according to reports.
Baqir Berry and Hassan Qazwini, two influential imams in the Dearborn area, will also speak on a panel about closing the “divide” between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Berry, the head of Dearborn’s Islamic Institute of Knowledge, prayed in a sermon in June to grant “mighty victory” to the “mujahideen” over the “evil of these Zionists,” the Middle East Media Research Institute reported.
Now, if your name is Abdul El-Sayed, there is an exceptionally good chance that in the upcoming election, you’re going to do quite well among Michigan’s Muslim voters. I suspect the Dearborn chapter of the “Muslims for Mike Rogers” could hold its meetings in a phone booth. El-Sayed has this demographic locked up.
Any candidate or campaign that looked objectively at the nascent general election race would conclude El-Sayed doesn’t need to spend any more time or effort courting or attempting to drive up enthusiasm among a demographic he already has in his pocket. He needs to worry about . . . well, as NBC News lays out, just about every other demographic:
The most worrying finding for El-Sayed in the poll may be that his weakness compared to his Democratic ticket-mate isn’t limited to any specific demographic. He’s underperforming [Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn] Benson among just about every group — including men (by 4 points), women (by 8 points), white voters (by 5 points), Black voters (by 11 points), college-educated voters (by 4 points), voters without a college degree (by 7 points) and even voters under 30 (by 7 points).
The starkest deficit is among independents: Benson is winning them by 18 points, or 56 percent -38 percent, while El-Sayed is losing them 5 points (48 percent – 43 percent) in the same poll.
It’s not that Mike Rogers has this race won. But all over the mainstream media, you can see a tone of pessimism about El-Sayed’s prospects in November.
Nate Cohn, writing in the New York Times, a few days ago: “There are clear signs that the newly minted Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, could underperform a typical Democratic candidate’s vote share by enough to endanger the party’s chances . . . the polls nonetheless raise the possibility that he could significantly underperform, and they aren’t the only reason to think he’s at risk of doing so. Historically, candidates of the activist left have tended to fare much worse than other Democratic candidates.”
Theodoric Meyer, writing in the Washington Post:
El-Sayed’s challenges run deep enough that three Democratic donors in Michigan are hosting a fundraiser for his Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers, on Tuesday evening, according to an invitation obtained by The Washington Post. One of them, Brian Hermelin, wrote in an email to potential donors last week that El-Sayed’s rhetoric on Israel and toward Jews meant he could not support him.
“A party has to understand that there are consequences when it moves away from the values that brought us to it,” Hermelin wrote. “For me, this Senate race is that point.”
While El-Sayed’s potential drag on the Democratic ticket has gotten lots of attention, he is very much the exception for the party.
In fact, it’s Republican candidates who have the popularity problem in a number of key races.
And of all the crucial Senate races, Michigan is the only one in which Democrats have the more unpopular candidate, according to averages of the quality polls available. In all the others, it’s the GOP.
If the available data suggested that El-Sayed had a good chance of winning this race, we would be hearing a lot about how, despite Republican attacks, El-Sayed is on the verge of making history as the first Muslim U.S. senator. (Yes, yes, insert all your Barack Obama jokes here.) But the tone is the opposite: explaining to a national audience that a state that hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1994 might do so this year, in a year that otherwise looks rough for the GOP, because Michigan Democratic primary voters decided to pick Hasan Piker’s buddy. (After the primary, El-Sayed’s defeated rival Haley Stevens urged the nominee “to get rid of this Hasan Piker affiliation.” So far, there is no sign that El-Sayed has the slightest interest in doing that.)
Instead of pivoting to a warm, fuzzy, safe-and-reassuring mainstream image and tone for the general election, El-Sayed is going to spend part of his Labor Day weekend at a convention where he’ll share the stage with some indisputably extreme and controversial figures. By any conventional (no pun intended) measure, this is campaign malpractice and self-destructive.
The lesson we can take from this is that either A) El-Sayed doesn’t want to moderate or B) he just can’t moderate; this is who he is, through and through.
However, Axios is here to let us know that El-Sayed wears “tight-fitting t-shirts” and that he is a “thirst trap.”
Where Are Our Aircraft Carriers?
The controversy surrounding the deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has reached a predictable and frustrating pattern. Family members report that their sons and daughters in uniform are working and living in intolerable conditions, the president and secretary of defense insist this isn’t true, and no one can get into the ship to see for themselves whether the complaints are accurate and whether they are representative of conditions overall, or are outliers.
Over in the Washington Post, I focused on a measurement that is much clearer and more indisputable, namely, length of time deployed:
On July 6, the [USS Abraham Lincoln] marked its 207th consecutive day at sea, breaking a record set by the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in 2020.
Not every ship sets a record like the Lincoln, but long deployments aren’t as rare as they used to be. The USS Gerald R. Ford set the post-Cold War record for longest deployment, with port calls, departing from Norfolk on June 24, 2025, and returning on May 16, 2026, after 326 days — the longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam War.
A standard U.S. Navy aircraft carrier deployment typically lasts six to seven months. In February, Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said the Navy’s aim is to establish predictable schedules that include a “seven-month deployment.”
We’re aiming for seven-month deployments and ending up with ten-month or nearly eleven-month ones. That, among other indicators discussed in the column, suggests that our military forces are currently overstretched and that we’ve asked them to do too much with too little for too long.
The U.S. Navy has eleven aircraft carriers. Over at the National Interest, Peter Suciu offers a rundown of the carriers’ locations and status.
The USS Nimitz recently arrived in Norfolk, Va. The Nimitz is “transitioning to serve as a local training platform for new US Navy aviators and sailors ahead of its scheduled decommissioning in March 2027.” The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower is also in Norfolk.
The USS John C. Stennis is in Newport News, Va. From Suciu’s report:
CVN-74 is likely to spend much, if not all, of 2026 docked in port at Newport News, Virginia. USS John C. Stennis began her midlife Refueling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH) in 2021 and was originally on track to see the work completed by August 2025. However, in August 2024, it was announced that the warship wouldn’t return to service on schedule and that the carrier’s RCOH maintenance period would take longer than expected — about five and a half years in total, an extension of about 14 months from its planned schedule.
The USS Harry S. Truman “is preparing for its scheduled extended mid-life refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH), a massive multi-year maintenance process that will take place at HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.”
After its record-setting 326 days at sea, the USS Gerald R. Ford “returned to her homeport [of Norfolk] on May 16. Given the time at sea and the need to complete upgrades — including the capabilities to operate the fifth-generation F-35C Lightning II — the USS Gerald R. Ford will be sidelined for the rest of 2026 and may be unable to deploy until at least mid-2027 at the earliest.”
With the Nimitz, the Eisenhower, the Stennis, the Truman, and the Ford, almost half of the Navy’s aircraft carriers are in port in Virginia right now.
The USS Carl Vinson and USS Theodore Roosevelt are in San Diego. The USS Ronald Reagan is in port in Bremerton, Wash., undergoing scheduled maintenance.
That leaves three U.S. aircraft carriers out beyond our shores.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is currently deployed in the Arabian Sea, participating in Iran war operations, as is the USS George H. W. Bush. USS George Washington is departing the Western Pacific, traveling to the Middle East to relieve the Abraham Lincoln.
If you’re wondering when the next carrier will be ready, a week ago, “the second Ford-class aircraft carrier — John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) — left Wednesday afternoon for acceptance trials after years of delays and Navy and congressionally mandated equipment changes to the ship.” The Kennedy’s first deployment is expected in 2028 or 2029.
You may have noticed that with the USS George Washington leaving the Pacific, there is no U.S. aircraft carrier in that area now. The Chinese have noticed this as well. An editorial from the Chinese state-run Global Times:
American allies in the Western Pacific see this vacuum clearly. Washington keeps talking up the “China threat” and pushing Japan and the Philippines to take more forward roles. Yet just as the last US carrier is leaving the region, what Tokyo and Manila are feeling is not only insecurity, it is a reminder that even American security commitments have limits.
But I’m sure we have nothing to worry about; as President Trump said, “President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens.”
ADDENDUM: Thanks to John Puri and Noah Rothman for filling in while I was away.