MAGA and the GQP have been trying to make Abdul El-Sayed the poster child for so-called Dem extremism.
RepuQ = LIAR
But, as critics have noted, Rogers has twice voted against healthcare and other benefits for 9/11 first responders and survivors, congressional records show. He has also helped kill other bills that would have provided benefits and healthcare to first responders nationwide.
Opps
... That drew sharp criticism this week from John Feal, a 9/11 first responder who has advocated and lobbied for legislation supporting benefit programs, and who spent 11 weeks in the hospital after a steel beam fell on his foot at ground zero. Part of his foot was amputated.
Feal told the Guardian he personally discussed the Zadroga legislation with Rogers on Congress's floor during committee debate in which Feal testified. Feal said Rogers told him first responders' health issues were a "New York problem" and asked: "Where is the money to help them going to come from?"
He called Rogers' opposition to 9/11 first responder benefits "a betrayal".
"Here's the thing: Republicans like Mike Rogers love cops and firefighters until one gets shot or burned in a fire and can't do his job," Feal said. "That's their playbook. They say: 'You're a hero. Oh, wait, you're sick? You're a drain on the municipality and the federal government. Get out of here.'"
... Republicans faced enormous backlash in 2010 for their votes against the Zagroda legislation. Feal at the time told CBS News: "Whatever member of Congress voted against this bill, whether Republican or Democrat, should go to jail for manslaughter." ...
Other Rogers votes against veterans and first responders' healthcare: 2002, 2011, 2013 and 2014.
Lock Rogers up!
As usual, it's all about xtian White supremacy.
‘It’s just straight bigotry’: wave of Islamophobic rhetoric looms over US midterm elections
One of the 2 dumbest Senators leads the charge:
Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed's victory in Michigan's Democratic US Senate primary, Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama declared that the party had "just voted to send a TERRORIST" to Washington.
El-Sayed – or "Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed", as Tuberville called him on X – was a "RADICAL ISLAMIST" who would "do everything he can to destroy America", he claimed.
Hate is as American as cherry pie.
It was the opening shot in what researchers who track anti-Muslim sentiment describe as the most concentrated wave of Islamophobic rhetoric in US electoral politics since the 9/11 attacks, arriving at the exact moment Muslim candidates are winning office in unprecedented numbers.
"It's probably the worst of what we've seen," said Saher Selod, director of research at the non-partisan Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), which has tracked anti-Muslim sentiment nationally for a decade. "We're certainly seeing in 2025 and 2026, ahead of these midterms, really very Islamophobic ads – more so than what we saw after 9/11."
... Anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI, which spiked to 481 in 2001 from 28 the year before, have never returned to pre-2001 levels, according to Pew's research. The ISPU separately found that 63% of Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination in the past year, the highest share of any faith group it measures.
Set against that backdrop is a wave of Muslim electoral success. There are four Muslim members of US Congress, with a fifth likely on the way, compared with zero in 2001. Ghazala Hashmi became Virginia's first Muslim woman elected to statewide office this year, as lieutenant governor. Zohran Mamdani was inaugurated as New York's first Muslim mayor in January 2025, and El-Sayed's primary win put him on track to potentially become the first Muslim ever elected to the US Senate.
The reaction to El-Sayed's victory showed how quickly the rhetoric escalates. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate found Islamophobic posts naming El-Sayed rose by nearly 1,900% in the week after his win, from an average of 155 to more than 3,000 a day.
As I said.
... This year, Trump called El-Sayed a "jihadist" from the Oval Office, and separately claimed – without naming anyone – that "jihadists" were being elected to office "all over the place". Vice-president JD Vance, meanwhile, called El-Sayed "very, very evil" at a Michigan rally ...
More dumb and bigoted pols:
The attacks go beyond one candidate, however. Senator Ted Cruz told Fox News that El-Sayed and Mamdani were "Islamists" who "want Sharia law" and "hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate capitalism, they hate America". Representative Nancy Mace posted that "every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic", and followed up by writing that Islam "must be removed from civil society in the US". In March, Representative Randy Fine of Florida wrote on X, "We need more Islamophobia, not less. Fear of Islam is rational," while Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted that "Muslims don't belong in American society".
... "With Abdul El-Sayed, we're seeing these kinds of intense Islamophobic attacks against him, as opposed to attacking his platform or critiquing his policies," Selod said. "It's a playbook. They're going to attack him for his religious identity to see if this will help pull voters away from him."
That playbook resurfaced this week in New York, where Mamdani attended the ceremony marking Friday's 25th anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero, as his predecessors have every year. A petition with
more than 100,000 signatures, riddled with attacks, unashamedly asked him not to.
Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York City at the time of the attacks, who is now closely aligned to Trump, claimed from thin air that Mamdani "doesn't agree that September 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack", and that his attendance "offends" him, adding even more venom against Muslims generally: "They have every desire to take us over … they want to dominate us. Mamdani is a clear supporter of that."
Giuliani offered no evidence for either claim.
Cheri Sparacio, one of the petition's organizers, whose husband died in the attacks, has said her objection is "not about the mayor's background or faith, but his public actions". Mamdani attended anyway, and on Friday morning, Mamdani and Giuliani shook hands at the ceremony.
Mamdani is the bigger man.
viewtopic.php?p=231920#p231920
... (Mobashra, associate director of Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia globally) Tazamal ties the current spike partly to political calculation. "Polling for Trump is low, and the GOP is the sitting party, and they haven't delivered on their promises," she said. "So instead of focusing on institutional failures and policies they haven't been able to put into place, they're stirring up hate and bigotry towards a certain group, which is a routine tactic that they do."
Caleb Elfenbein, a Grinnell College professor who has mapped Islamophobic rhetoric for years, sees a small, organized network reactivating on a predictable schedule. "It really looks, and feels, like a very cynical effort to take advantage of a general sense of fear that can be activated at any given time," he said.
Fear and loathing is the only strategy RepuQs ever have.
... Whatever happens, amid growing political mobilization among Muslim Americans and other groups, Tazamal does not expect the party to abandon this effort, or the Islamophobic rhetoric at the center of it.
"I don't think the GOP is going to do away with it," she said.
Has the GQP ever done away with its White supremacy?
Absolutely. That said we also have nostalgia for 60 years ago:
Typical Trumpette.
