In a clip that quickly went viral Saturday night, Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed countered a bigoted question about his Muslim faith at a Michigan town hall with a lesson in American government.
The five-minute conversation took place in Caro, Michigan, where a man who identified himself as “Tommy” asked from the audience: “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?”
After responding, “Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” El-Sayed then pivoted to questioning the man in response. “What are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?”
“I want to protect your right to practice your faith as you choose,” El-Sayed later said. “It seems like you don’t want to protect my right to practice as I choose.”
When Tommy, who identified himself as Christian, simply repeated his initial question multiple times, the Michigan candidate compared the man’s implicit “dual loyalty” accusation to what John F. Kennedy faced en route to becoming the first Catholic president.
El-Sayed has been regularly targeted by the right over his faith. Last week, President Donald Trump intentionally misnamed El-Sayed as “Mohammed” and called him a “jihadist.” His opponents have also attacked his family, including his wife, Sarah Jukaku, and half-sister Eman Abdelhadi, with bigoted rhetoric.
When El-Sayed asked his interlocutor to “disavow” any attempt to read religious doctrine into US law, Tommy refused. “So I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution now,” the nominee said. Tommy then sullenly left the town hall.
The exchange quickly found a huge audience on social media, with some questioning the authenticity of Tommy’s bird-dogging. And on Sunday, Marisa Kabas reported at The Handbasket that Tommy is Thomas Teepell, who, according to Legistorm, served as operations director for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) until February. His father is Timmy Teepall, a Republican strategist who worked for US congressman and former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindall from 2004 to 2011 and later helped Hawley become a US senator. The father is also reportedly strong allies with Sean Feucht, a Christian Nationalist who gained popularity opposing lockdowns during the initial years of the Covid-19 pandemic. In trying to manufacture a gotcha moment, Teepell seems to have gotten got instead.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed is just one of too many politicians and public figures who are forced to counter such bigoted language. On the subject, Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote on Saturday that El-Sayed’s argument also effectively counters how the right often presents these bad-faith questions:
Dr. El-Sayed would have been accurate if he’d said the question was Islamophobic. But right wing media has found extraordinary success in treating the identification and naming of bigotry as a form of unjust victimization unto itself, in which merely accurately identifying something or someone as racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc, becomes a bigger and more objectionable offense than saying or doing the racist, sexist, homophobic or Islamophobic thing. When this happens, it’s usually accompanied by rebranding the act of identifying hateful speech as “name-calling.” Dr. El-Sayed neatly sidesteps all of that by allowing Tommy to show the audience his own ass rather than telling the audience that Tommy is showing his ass.
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