JUST ANOTHER RIGHT-WING PROVOCATEUR WHO'S HIGH ON HIS OWN PROPAGANDA SUPPLY

This clip from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall is getting a lot of attention:

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.

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— Abdul El-Sayed (@abdulelsayed.bsky.social) October 17, 2026 at 9:17 PM

Here's a quick summary of the clip:

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed clashed with a voter who asked him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, prompting an extended exchange in which the progressive contender accused the man of questioning his loyalty to the U.S. because of his religion....

The voter, who identified himself as Tommy, asked El-Sayed whether he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed responded, "Sure. Yeah, absolutely," before questioning why the man believed he needed to be asked....

"You assume, Tommy, that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution," El-Sayed said. "That's your assumption. That's implicit in the question."

El-Sayed went on to compare the scrutiny to questions John F. Kennedy faced over his Catholic faith during his 1960 presidential campaign. He said the Constitution would guide him as a senator and protect the right of Americans to practice a religion or no religion.

"For me, that Constitution is the guiding light," El-Sayed said. He then turned the discussion toward the voter's Christian faith and religious freedom, ultimately asking whether the man disavowed attempts to introduce religious doctrine into U.S. law. The voter said he did not.

"So I think it's you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me," El-Sayed replied.

This exchange took place in Caro, Michigan, the county seat of Tuscola County, which voted for Donald Trump in 2024 by a 71%-28% margin. So this wasn't friendly territory for any Democrat. But Tommy, the questioner, isn't just an ordinary conservative. As Marisa Kabas reports at The Handbasket, Tommy is the son of Timmy Teepell, a veteran Republican operative. Tommy, for his part,

served as Operations Director for Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley until February of this year, according to Legistorm. He then took a job as Political Director for the failed gubernatorial campaign of Philip Sarnecki, a Republican businessman in Kansas.

Kabas writes:

What brought the younger Teepell to the small town of Caro and his viral moment with El-Sayed? An October 2nd story in the University of Michigan student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, revealed that a conservative PAC called America Next offered College Republicans $200 to travel to an upcoming El-Sayed town hall in Flint to “boo” him and ask him inflammatory questions—hoping to spark embarrassing viral moments for the candidate.

So Tommy was a paid provocateur. And what was the point of this particular question? One commenter at Bluesky offers this theory:

Clearly the purpose was to get sayed mad so they could scream ‘angry Muslim!!!!’ because Muslims don’t get to be angry.

Unlike MAGA politicians, who are allowed to be in a state of incandescent, screaming public rage at any time.

That's part of it, I think. But I think the main reason for the question -- "Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?" -- is that Tommy thought El-Sayed would express support, or at least equivocate in response to the question, even though El-Sayed has repeatedly responded to questions about the group by denying any support. It never occurred to Tommy that El-Sayed might respond to a call for disavowal by saying, "Sure. Yeah, absolutely."

Tommy lives in a right-wing information bubble. What he learns about Muslims in that bubble is that they all hate America, all support anti-American and anti-Western terrorist groups, and all want to impose Taliban-like religious strictures on Americans by insinuating themselves into the government and outbreeding white Christians.

This is what right-wing propagandists cynically tell the rubes in order to get the rubes to vote Republican, but now many of the party's operatives are the rubes. They believe the dishonest propaganda. They're not just dealing the drugs -- they're high on their own supply.

It's true that El-Sayed's half-sister claims their family supports the Muslim Brotherhood, but this specifically focuses on El-Sayed's mother, who wasn't a part of his life for most of his childhood.

In an interview that aired Thursday, NBC’s Tom Llamas asked El-Sayed about past tweets from his half sister, including one in which she mentions their biological mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”

El-Sayed’s Egyptian immigrant parents divorced when he was 3 years old, and his biological mother, Fatten Elkomy, moved out of Michigan. El-Sayed was raised by his father, Mohamed, and stepmother, Jacqueline Johnson, in a Detroit suburb.

“I was born in 1984, down the street in Rochester Hills. I was raised here in Michigan, went to the University of Michigan, rebuilt the health department in this city, led the health department in this county, and you want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?” El-Sayed told Llamas in the interview.

After Llamas pressed him, El-Sayed insisted that he has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood....

“I have no ties. We have no ties,” El-Sayed told Llamas. “I have never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother ... You’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. It’s just not serious.”

So in Caro, El-Sayed disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood -- as he previously did in interviews with NBC's Tom Llamas and Kristen Welker -- and the best they've got is that his disavowal wasn't loud enough. Here's Jan Crawford, whose right-wing leanings at CBS News (and ABC before that) were obvious decades before Bari Weiss became her boss:

Tommy, thank you. I had to watch this twice to catch Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s nanosecond “yeah absolutely” response. His subsequent uninterrupted three-minute diatribe proving your exact point is the kind of spectacular self own most ppl only dream about triggering. Congrats

— Jan Crawford (@JanCBS) October 18, 2026

If you believe that El-Sayed's eloquent invocation of John F. Kennedy and the Constitution was a "self own," you live in a right-wing bubble, Jan. And if you didn't hear his disavowal the first time, get your hearing checked -- or your biases.