See You In Hell

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed smashed Mike Rogers in Tuesday night’s midterm bloodbath to become Michigan’s next Senator-elect. The Michigan Senate race generated a massive amount of national attention and was easily the most consequential election of this cycle. It was full of unprecedented twists and featured a bleak rogue’s gallery of despicable characters that made the whole ordeal way more stressful than it needed to be. Abdul stood up to a seemingly endless tsunami of astonishingly racist attack ads and Israeli election interference to become the first Muslim man elected to the US Senate. I want to give an account of what happened:

Let’s start with Haley Stevens, who made the disastrous decision to endorse Mike Rogers right before the election. Stevens had originally endorsed Abdul after narrowly losing to him in the Michigan Senate primary. It was clear from the beginning that, while Haley Stevens was on the record about supporting Abdul, she was not entirely thrilled about him being the candidate. Even before switching sides, she would pop up occasionally to do disingenuous concern trolling about Abdul‘s association with Hasan Piker and darkly intone about the danger to Jews that Abdul’s campaign represented.

The Wednesday before the midterm elections her fiancé, a Jewish man named Jason Turkish, came out of absolutely nowhere to announce that he would be backing Mike Rogers for Senate. The concern trolling from Haley Stevens escalated. On the lead up to a unity event with Abdul that she was booked to speak at, Stevens started making demands, with the implicit threat that she would withdraw her endorsement if he didn’t comply. The demands mostly centered around disavowing an ad by Cenk Uygur’s Rebellion PAC that linked the cost of living crisis to the Israel/US war in Iran. Haley said she found this to be antisemitic. The ad was not connected to or endorsed by the campaign. She continued to nitpick, asking Abdul to disavow this or that statement, all to make him shuck and jive for AIPAC. In a sense, she was trying to get him to falsely admit that he had been trafficking in antisemitism. Abdul played the game a little bit, but when it became clear nothing reasonable would satisfy Stevens he put his foot down and told her to stay away from the campaign. Then, two days before the election, she and Rogers attended Sunday service at the Perfecting Church (a predominantly black church) in Detroit. The two of them gave a press conference outside where she formally endorsed her former opposition.

The response from the Democratic Party was immediate and sweeping condemnation across the board. Everyone from Chuck Schumer to Zohran Mamdani denounced Stevens for her betrayal. Stevens was expelled from the Michigan Democratic Party; most of her staff resigned. She used a black church as a prop and Jewish voters as a shield so she could endorse a literal white supremacist, all under the guise that she was standing against hate. Please remember that Haley Stevens is not Jewish. Her fixation on Israel is a personal quirk. She’s just another racist white Karen who prioritized her own bigotry over every group in the Republican crosshairs: women, Muslims, immigrants, black people, brown people, gay people, and so on.

I sincerely doubt that Stevens had a sudden crisis of conscience, as she suggested. My guess is that she had been planning this for months and egregiously overestimated how much impact it would have. The reality is her last minute backstab didn’t move the polls at all. Everyone had already made up their mind at that point. She sacrificed her career and her reputation for no benefit to her or Rogers. To put it plainly: She’s finished.

Steven’s not withstanding, AIPAC and Israel were all over this election in ways that we probably don’t know the full extent of.  It’s been reported by DropSite News that two people who worked on the Rogers campaign are registered as foreign agents for Israel. One of them is a woman named Abigail Ronson, who can be seen standing behind Rogers and Stevens when they did their press conference outside the Perfecting Church. This raises questions about the level of collusion between Stevens, Rogers, and the Israeli government. I think it’s possible they coordinated this last minute ambush. AIPAC itself dropped a whopping $31 million on the Rogers campaign.

Another error by the Mike Rogers campaign was the relentless focus on Hasan Piker. Despite nonstop attack ads prominently featuring Piker’s infamous “America deserved 9/11” comment, voters either didn’t know or didn’t care who he was. Making him a focal point of this race was a mistake and more crucially didn’t deter a meaningful amount of people from voting for Abdul. Piker was an early supporter of Abdul’s campaign and had interviewed him last year. The two of them did a couple campaign events during the primary. Hasan wasn’t really a surrogate for Abdul’s campaign, just a firm supporter in the media. The hate campaign against Hasan didn’t speak to anyone’s material concerns and amounted to nothing.

Speaking generally about Mike’s political communications: I have been exposed to countless outrageously racist and islamaphobic attack ads attempting to link Abdul to 9/11, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the IRGC, jihad, the terror attack on the Jewish temple in West Bloomfield, etc. One ad I saw claimed that Abdul “refused to disavow 9/11.” They essentially ran the same playbook that we saw during Zohran Mamdani’s election for mayor of New York.

Rogers tried all kinds of psychological trickery. The first was a group called Democrats for Mike Rogers, which was founded and funded by Republican mega-donors and Trump loyalists. They held an event in Pontiac with an empty bouncy castle that almost nobody attended. Rogers also tried to cast doubt on Abdul’s black voter turnout, while attempting to pit arabs and black people against each other. Of course, we were told over and over again that Jews were horrified by the Abdul campaign and were feeling unsafe. The reality is there was no antisemitism coming from Abdul’s campaign, and the only way to credibly make the argument that there was (at least to a certain section of the population) involves trafficking in a truly revolting amount of Islamophobia. Mike Rogers should have been made by the media to answer for fomenting resentment against Muslims and endangering their lives by pushing all of this bigoted slop. Do we ever hear mainstream news ask about the safety and fears of Muslim voters? Of course not. Muslims are acceptable targets, even in many elite Democrat circles. The accusations of antisemitism by the Rogers campaign were really a confession of their own intentions to target Muslims.

While Rogers was putting all his chips on racist fear mongering, Abdul‘s greatest strength was being laser focused on the message. Every time he faced islamaphobic attacks, he would let it roll off his back and immediately pivot to talking about the economy. He basically did his own version of Zohran Mamdani’s affordability agenda — always talking about gas prices, healthcare, and groceries. Everyone knew what Abdul was running on, because he was constantly reminding people: Money out of politics! Medicare for all! He made an appeal to material concerns.

We at Murder City interviewed voters as they were coming out of the Obama/Abdul rally at Cass Technical High School on October 24. The people we spoke to would cite specific policies that they supported. Almost everyone we talked to mentioned Medicare for all and high prices. Abdul offered a platform that people were excited about. It invited a positive mobilization.

Contrast that with the movement cultivated by Mike Rogers. At this same rally we saw infamous right wing provocateur Jake Lang with his crew. They were standing behind a fence and antagonizing people in line for the rally, yelling things like, “Go home, you dirty arabs!” We went over to talk with a man who went by the name White Rabbit, who claimed to work security for Jake Lang. White Rabbit’s real name is Eric Murgo. He and Lang live in Florida. He has an Instagram page with over 146k followers, where he posts wacky conspiracy theory nonsense. Almost all of the people with Lang that day were not residents of this state. The only local I talked to with Lang’s crew was a woman brandishing a Mike Rogers sign. She told me she was planning to vote for Rogers because of the way Muslims treat women. She made a point to tell me she’s softer on social issues like LGBT rights, but was more motivated by her fear of a Muslim take over in Michigan.

When all was said and done, Mike Rogers choked. His campaign was so focused on astroturfing and negative mobilization against Muslims that he didn’t take the time to make an affirmative case for himself. In that sense, he made the same mistake that Haley Stevens did during the Senate primary. What was one platform plank that Rogers ran on that is equal to Abdul’s push for Medicare for all? What was it he wanted to do for the people of Michigan? Occasionally he would intone about the sorry state of Michigan’s education system, but presented no ideas on how to fix it. Rogers was inextricably tied to the very unpopular President at a time when the economy was (and still is) in shambles; a very unpopular war was (and still is) being waged in Iran. And when the anti-lslam angle fell flat, the Republican Party was out of ideas. Even with all the astroturfing and Haley Stevens’s desperate attempt at a last minute rat fuck, the people of Michigan saw through the lies and made the right choice.