The masked Democrats strike again, this time Abdul El-Sayed, the anti-American who wants to be a United States Senator from Michigan.
Democrats are notorious for hiding their pasts, and that’s just what El Sayed is trying to do.
However, the most interesting part isn’t that El-Sayed removed more than 100 videos from his YouTube channel. It is who is looking for them.
Republicans aren’t stalking Abdul El-Sayed’s YouTube channel.
Democrats are.
That tells you almost everything you need to know about the coming war inside the Democratic Party.
El-Sayed is a Democratic Socialists of America candidate, and the DSA wing of the Democratic Party has become an increasingly influential force. It is also a movement with a substantial Muslim presence, which has created a particularly fascinating collision between progressive identity politics, Islam, socialism, antisemitism, immigration politics and the increasingly desperate Democratic establishment.
And now the establishment is beginning to push back.
Welcome to Tales From Taquiyya, the latest installment of the Democratic Party’s increasingly elaborate effort to explain away what its candidates actually believe.
The question isn’t whether Abdul El-Sayed said some crazy things years ago, as the jury deliberated and found him guilty. The question is much simpler:
Why delete them?
If you were 17 when you posted something stupid, tell us you were 17.
If you were 25 and you’ve changed your mind, tell us you’ve changed your mind.
If you said something you now regret, explain why.
Americans are capable of understanding that human beings evolve. What Americans don’t particularly like is watching politicians take an electronic eraser to their own history and then act surprised when somebody finds the pencil marks underneath.
Because once you start deleting your past, the past becomes news.
And El-Sayed has given his Democratic opponents a very interesting gift.
A treasure map.
Every deleted video becomes another X on the map, as does every old interview.
Every association becomes something worth examining.
And every statement he once made but would prefer voters forget becomes more interesting precisely because he would prefer voters forget it.
El-Sayed’s association with Hasan Piker adds fuel to the fire.
And the friendship isn’t some Republican invention that appeared out of thin air. It exists. Piker has said plenty of things that should cause any serious political party to have an adult conversation about whether he is someone they want their candidates embracing.
But El-Sayed isn’t running for president of the local student council.
He wants to be a United States Senator.
That means Michigan voters get to examine everything.
And this is why it’s not just El-Sayed with the problem, as the Democratic Party has a problem.
Actually, it has several.
The people who can win a Democratic primary are increasingly becoming people the Democratic establishment isn’t entirely comfortable putting on a November ballot.
This is the Democratic Party’s Frankenstein problem.
They spent years assembling the creature.
Identity politics over here. Socialism over there.
Open borders. Anti-American rhetoric. Defund the police.
Anti-Israel activism.
DEI. Gender ideology. The entire progressive buffet.
Now the creature has discovered that it has a vote.
El-Sayed is only one of the abominations that escaped from the lab.
The establishment Democrats don’t necessarily want him. But the progressive base does. So the establishment has to figure out how to simultaneously embrace the people necessary to win a primary while preventing those same people from becoming the face of the party in a general election.
Look at Wisconsin.
Francesca Hong was supposed to be another progressive success story. Instead, the Democratic establishment rallied around David Crowley, and Hong lost.
By the narrowest of margins.
Just in the nick of time.
Another win for the Democrats.
Another loss for the DSA.
And that is the story nobody wants to tell.
There is an attack happening inside the Democratic Party.
It isn’t always loud.
It doesn’t always come with a press conference.
Sometimes it looks like an endorsement that doesn’t happen.
Sometimes it looks like money flowing somewhere else.
Sometimes it looks like a candidate suddenly becoming radioactive.
And sometimes it looks like journalists who previously had little interest in a candidate suddenly discovering that the candidate has a history.
That’s what is happening to El-Sayed.
The Leftist media is beginning to slow-cook him.
And the Republicans aren’t even doing the cooking.
They’re just sitting at the table waiting for dinner.
The Democrats are doing the digging because they understand something Republicans already figured out:
El-Sayed has a record.
And records are inconvenient things for people who have spent their political careers pretending history began yesterday.
The Democrats have a genuine quandary in Michigan.
Do they fully support El-Sayed and risk putting an increasingly radical candidate in a general election where Republicans can spend months introducing Michigan voters to the things El-Sayed would rather leave in the attic?
Or do they quietly begin moving toward Mike Rogers?
My bet is they’re choosing Rogers.
Not because they suddenly love Republicans or discovered the joys of conservatism.
Because Democrats know what happens when ideology outruns electability.
And they are beginning to hear from their own people that they are sick of the lunacy.
That’s the pivot.
Pivots or perish.
The Democrats won’t be able to pull a Platner every time one of these candidates becomes inconvenient. Eventually voters begin asking why the party keeps producing candidates whose past requires a forensic investigation.
And the more they try to erase the evidence, the more interesting the evidence becomes.
This is only beginning.
The world is beginning to strike back against radical Islam, and you don’t have to look very far to see the growing tensions. Look at Ireland. Europe has spent years pretending that every consequence of mass immigration, cultural fragmentation and failed assimilation can be solved with another press release about tolerance.
That fantasy is beginning to crack.
And when societies begin losing faith in the institutions that were supposed to manage these tensions, ugly things happen.
I suspect the Democratic Party is going to discover its own version of that backlash.
Not necessarily in the streets.
At the ballot box.
That’s where the real fight is.
The LGBTQ movement has collided with the women’s movement. The women’s movement has collided with #MeToo. The progressive movement has collided with the Jewish community over Israel. The DSA has collided with Democratic leadership. Muslims within the progressive coalition increasingly find themselves occupying political positions that don’t always sit comfortably beside the rest of the progressive identity coalition.
And everybody is discovering that intersectionality works beautifully on a whiteboard., but not in the real world.
Democrats now see all their intersections collide.
That’s what makes El-Sayed so fascinating.
He’s not simply a Senate candidate.
He’s a battlefield.
And Democrats know it.
The establish will continue searching his record. Finding more deleted videos.
They are going to keep examining his associations.
They are going to keep amplifying Hasan Piker.
They are going to keep asking what El-Sayed really believes.
And El-Sayed is going to keep trying to convince voters that the man who said all those things isn’t really him anymore.
Maybe he can erase enough of his life to make that argument work.
But the internet has a memory Democrats increasingly wish it didn’t have, as do Michigan voters.
So here’s my prediction:
Abdul El-Sayed loses.
The Democrats will eventually decide that the DSA experiment has become too expensive to defend in a general election. They’ll pivot, probably quietly, and they’ll tell themselves that this was always about electability.
It won’t be.
His loss will be about survival.
Because the Democratic Party has finally discovered the fundamental problem with radicalism.
You can use it to win the primary, energize the base, even build a movement.
But eventually somebody has to walk into the general election and explain it to normal people.
And that’s when the mask comes off.
Welcome to Tales From Taquiyya.
Michigan is shaping up to be an interesting chapter.
