When Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed was asked at a town hall meeting in Caro at the weekend whether he disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood, his answer could not have been any more unambiguous.
“Sure,” he said. “Yeah, absolutely. Why are you asking the question?”
The man who asked, who gave his name only as Tommy, said: “Well, because they’re a terrorist group.” El-Sayed then rejoined, “But what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?
“You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right? You assume that somehow I wouldn’t disavow, or that I’ll have some higher order allegiance than the constitution.”
Suggested Reading
The tech bros doing Donald Trump’s dirty work for him
It was as unequivocal answer as one might have expected from El-Sayed, a respected epidemiologist whose primary win yielded a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric. JD Vance has falsely claimed that he supports “sharia law” while Donald Trump has repeatedly called him a “jihadist” and a “terrorist sympathiser”.
But “sure” and “yes, absolutely” were not enough for Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who retweeted the video with the comment “El Sayed [sic] refuses to disavow Muslim Brotherhood terrorists”.
And it wasn’t enough for CBS’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, who posted on X thanking ‘Tommy’ for his question and adding: “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 only dream about triggering. Congrats.”
Suggested Reading
Tapped Trump posts AI video of him toying with a tiger
Following a reported backlash from colleagues at CBS, Crawford has since deleted the post, writing on X: “Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.”
Several US news colleagues had publicly criticised Crawford, with CNN political commentator Karen Finney writing that she had been “caught red-handed” trying to help “spread false, racist lies about Abdul because he is Muslim”. Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, meanwhile, wrote: “Very strange editorializing from a chief legal correspondent!”
Still, Crawford’s post will likely do her no harm at the top of her organisation: CBS has faced allegation after allegation of political bias since conservative commentator Bari Weiss was appointed as the network’s editor-in-chief, despite no broadcasting experience, in October 2025.
Ted Cruz, meanwhile, has not apologised.
Most popular
My truly deranged encounter with Trump apologist Kellyanne Conway
Suella Braverman’s book has sold only 106 copies. This is why
The moral depravity of Robert Jenrick
Hungary’s lesson to the world: Populism isn’t permanent
