Originally posted August 6th, 2026:

In the WSJ, Barton Swain writes about the Michigan Democratic State primary. He laments that it went as well as it could for Republican nominee Mike Rogers and about as badly as it could for the county.

Below, Mr. Swain gives readers a brief but important refresher on El-Sayed’s crankery:

• El-Sayed has refused to acknowledge the Jewish state’s right to exist.
• He has repeatedly, you could almost say obsessively, criticized Ms. Stevens for accepting campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.
• He damns terrorists with faint praise, as when he condemned the attack on a Jewish school in West Bloomfield, Mich., before excusing the perpetrator with the words “hurt people do hurt people.”
• El-Sayed campaigns with Hasan Piker, who, as a podcaster rather than political candidate, has the luxury of making explicit his hatred for Israel.
• Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary went about as well as it could for Republican nominee Mike Rogers, and about as badly as it could for the country. An easy win by Abdul El-Sayed, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed anti-Israel leftist, might have forced so-called establishment Democrats—particularly elected ones—to acknowledge their problem.

Silence Is Violence

Elected Democrats would do their party and their country a service by concluding that Mr. El-Sayed will lose in November and denouncing him as the antisemite he is.

Barton Swain explains. The idea that Jews deserved expulsion because their forbears had killed Jesus made little sense inasmuch as

• (a) his death, according to Christian doctrine, made salvation possible,
• (b) Jesus and all his disciples were themselves Jews.

Weak arguments gave permission to atrocious behavior. That was their point.

Afterall,

A great many Nazi political leaders and military officers didn’t think of themselves as antisemites or bigots at all. They felt compelled to perpetrate horrors against the Jews—as ordinary Germans and Austrians silently, if reluctantly, approved—because a collection of allegedly scientific theories about racial corruption made it all necessary.

Adolf Hitler himself thought some Jews were good people but believed the hard realities of race made this fact irrelevant.