A Muslim-American pollster named Dalia Mogahed spent years asking Americans what they think about Muslims. She found something most people get backwards.

Hostility toward Muslims doesn't spike after terrorist attacks. It spikes during election cycles — in the run-up to the Iraq war, and in the runs-up to the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Not after 9/11. Not after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Her conclusion: "Islamophobia is not organic. It is manufactured. It is a tool of public manipulation."

This week in Michigan, we got to watch it being manufactured in real time.

They didn't wait a full day

Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. He's the son of Egyptian immigrants, he's openly Muslim, and if he wins in November he'd be the first Muslim U.S. senator.

His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers (MI), responded with a statement saying he never thought he'd be "running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11" — then put out a video with images of Osama bin Laden and the burning Twin Towers.

El-Sayed never said that. Snopes rated it False. PolitiFact went further and rated it Pants on Fire, their worst rating — we wrote that one up separately. The words belong to a Twitch streamer, from 2019, and El-Sayed had gone on Fox News months ago and said the opposite.

Then came the name.

"Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed"

He goes by Abdul. He has always gone by Abdul. The National Republican Senatorial Committee had almost exclusively called him that too — right up until the day he won. Then its debut general-election ad called him "Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed" and "the most radical Senate candidate in America," and tied him to the Muslim Brotherhood's Egyptian branch, which the State Department recently designated a terrorist group.

NRSC chairman Tim Scott put out a press release calling him "the most radical Democrat Senate nominee ever."

Senator Jim Banks, an NRSC vice chair, said Michigan's "union Democrats" wouldn't "want to vote for a guy like Abdulrahman El-Sayed."

The UAW — the largest union in Michigan — endorsed El-Sayed in June, months before Banks said that.

If this feels familiar, it should. It's the same trick Republicans ran on Barack Hussein Obama — dig up the full name, say it slowly, let the voter fill in the rest. The difference is that Obama was falsely accused of being Muslim. El-Sayed actually is one. There's nothing left to expose. So the "revelation" is just his name.

A Senate hearing where one senator showed up

The day after El-Sayed won, Senator Ted Cruz gaveled in a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing called "Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America."

All five Democrats on the subcommittee refused to attend, calling it a targeting of the American Muslim community. "Scapegoating Muslims may be a Texas Republican strategist's idea of 'solid gold' to whip up their voters," they wrote, "but Democrats have no intention of indulging this political creepshow."

No Republican showed up either. Cruz held the hearing alone, in front of three reporters, some staff, and a few tourists.

He used it anyway. Cruz told the room that "behind El-Sayed's political rise sits a much older and more entrenched institutional network," and pointed to his primary win as evidence. Then he asked one of his own hand-picked witnesses a question that gives the whole thing away:

"Does Abdul El-Sayed's candidacy for senator in Michigan concern you?"

That is not a national security question. That is a campaign ad with a gavel.

On Fox News that same week, Cruz said the quiet part: "El Sayed is also an Islamist, as is Mamdani … they want Sharia law." There is no evidence for that. It's just the word you say.

This machine was built months ago

None of this was improvised. Republicans have been building the equipment all year.

By March, they had spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning "Sharia" or "Islam" negatively — most of it in Texas, right before its primaries. That is roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four election cycles, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Sharia is a religious framework. As NPR noted plainly in the same story, it does not have standing over the U.S. Constitution.

By March, the House "Sharia-Free America" caucus had 50 Republican members.

And when reporters asked Speaker Mike Johnson about his members saying Muslims don't belong in America, he explained that "the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem — that's what animates this," and added, "It is not about people as Muslims."

Here is what it looks like when it's not about people as Muslims:

• Rep. Brandon Gill: "No more Muslims immigrating to America."
• Rep. Randy Fine: "We need more Islamophobia, not less. Fear of Islam is rational." He later went on Newsmax and called New York's mayor a "Muslim terrorist".
• Sen. Tommy Tuberville posted a photo of the 9/11 attacks beside a photo of that same mayor, captioned "The enemy is inside the gates" — and separately said the mayor should be shipped to Guantanamo Bay.
• Rep. Scott Perry read the First Amendment aloud on the House floor, then spent ten minutes arguing Muslims are quietly taking over neighborhoods.
• Rep. Beth Van Duyne wrote a resolution about one imam's ugly tweet and tacked a Sharia clause onto the end.
• Gov. Greg Abbott labeled the country's largest Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization, using reasons that tracked a report from an anti-Muslim think tank.

And the panic that all of it feeds on keeps turning out to be nothing. In Arkansas, the "Sharia takeover" that produced a governor's proclamation, an attorney general's statement and a state bill traced back to five houses in Little Rock — two of them lived in by Christians. In Oklahoma, Rep. Josh Brecheen warned a town hall audience about the return of the Ottoman Empire, and a man in the room laughed out loud.

As one Tennessee Muslim advocate put it to NPR: "Because people don't really know or have any idea what Sharia law is, it's the boogeyman. You just throw the word out there and people get scared."

One Republican said something

Almost all of them stayed quiet. One didn't.

"Freedom of religion is a pillar of our nation and broad brush statements like this are offensive and completely inappropriate," Rep. Nicole Malliotakis told NPR.

It's worth remembering that this used to be the normal position in her party. Within days of the actual 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and said, "Islam is peace." Nobody in his party stripped him of anything for it.

Twenty-five years later, his party's Senate campaign arm is running his opponent's first name as the attack.

There's one more wrinkle. Rep. Andy Ogles — the member who posted "Muslims don't belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie," and who tried to strip New York's mayor of his citizenship — went into his own primary this week with Trump's endorsement and lost to a Republican challenger.

Michigan gets to answer this

Mogahed's finding was that this stuff is not weather. It's a choice somebody makes, on a schedule, because they think it moves votes.

Rogers and the NRSC have made that choice for November. They are betting that saying a man's full name in a scary voice will work better on Michigan voters than talking about what health care costs, or why groceries are still expensive, or what happens to the auto jobs.

Michigan voters get to decide whether that bet pays.

Source

Mehdi Hasan, "First Draft: Here Come the Super-Islamophobic Midterms", Zeteo, August 7, 2026. Photo of Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit, August 5, 2026, by Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images.