Blog

The Angry Elf

The Terrible Temperament

Michigan is hiring a senator, not a terrible temperament.

I have watched Abdul El-Sayed long enough to stop treating each eruption as a one-off. They are not one-offs. They are a temperament. Michigan is not hiring a temperament. Michigan is hiring a senator.

Call him what the tape made him. The Angry Elf. Small man energy aimed at bigger rooms. A dare where an answer belongs. A lecture where a neighbor would use a noun. Hard questions do not get absorbed. They get upgraded into a fight, a wound, or a second creed for a second audience. That is not a style problem. That is the candidacy.

I said after the primary that Mike Rogers wins this seat no matter which Democrat came out of August, and that El-Sayed would be the easier general. I am not moving off that. The compilation is why. Each item below would be enough on its own in a serious state. Together they are a closing argument.

Start with Watters.

Start with Jesse Watters, because that is the one he thought he won. Watters asked whether a parent should be allowed to mutilate a child’s sex organs. El-Sayed asked, “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?” Then he said it twice: “You probably should want to move on.” Circumcision, he added, is “surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling,” so the host was being selective. The New York Post put the question in the headline. Breitbart ran the tape.

He said it like a man who had just closed a seminar. Genital mutilation had been compared to a covenant cut, and then the room was told to sit down. Michigan is not going for that. Watters said so on the air. The clip does not need a narrator.

Same night he got Sharia. “Nobody is trying to push Shariah law on anybody else,” he said, then equated it with Christian canon law: “Just like I hope nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else.” The Detroit News printed the swap. That is not an answer. It is a pivot that only works if the audience already wants him to be fine.

A Senate race is not a recess fight.

August 12 he answered Mike Rogers on football. Rogers had played the old tape: football as a toxically masculine culture, fireworks as harm, the American picnic as something to lecture. El-Sayed did not clarify. Instead he challenged a 63-year-old former FBI agent in public: “Since you’re too afraid to debate me, how about you ‘hold me accountable’ on a football field instead. Tackle, no pads like we used to play when we were kids. I’d be happy to show you how much I love football.” Fox News carried the dare. Rogers’s shop answered the only way that line deserves. “That’s an awfully tall threat coming from down there,” the New York Post quoted back. A Senate race is not a recess fight. He made it one.

September 18 he did it again with the vice president of the United States. JD Vance joked about a patchy beard. El-Sayed answered with testosterone, a fake beard, the Ohio State trophy fumble, and a formal invitation to any weight room in America.

“If he thinks that my beard is somehow indicative of my strength, I’m happy to invite him to any weight room in any place.” “We could do it in D.C. I’d love to see him on a bench. I’d love to see him on a squat. I’d love to understand if he’s as strong as he likes to pretend he is.” “I’m all natural, bro.” “I’d like to understand what your dose is, and I’d like to understand if your beard’s actually real.” Projection much?

The Hill wrote the squat-off. TMZ got the fake-beard line. This is the football dare with plates instead of pads. Tariffs and Iran will not hold him once someone touches his face. The question gets upgraded to a lift-off.

September 25 he sat with Chuck Todd and advertised the picture he wants the country to have. He would go on Bill Maher’s show despite “the terrible things Bill Maher has said about people like me.” Then the line: “I wanna give people the image of watching him get his ass whooped on his own show by a guy who prays like I do.” Twitchy put “whoop” on the page. Todd nodded.

Scott Jennings needed two sentences.

David Marcus was more blunt.

The running mate he will not bury

Hasan Piker is the running mate he will not bury. Campus events. A pool party the night before the primary. A hot mic calling conservative reporters “bogeys” and asking staff to silo them. A comms director stepping in after one Piker question.

Partial distancing followed Piker’s lines on Jews and on terror “pound for pound,” which the New York Times still had to write down. Never a clean disavowal. “I’m not here to disavow people’s views.” “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it.” A man who wants the Senate wants the association and the exit at the same time. Michigan noticed.

The 9/11 file

The 9/11 file is the same reflex applied to the worst morning in living memory. The campaign wiped the pre-July 2023 archive “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context,” CBS News reported. The context that came back compared COVID deaths to the towers and hoped “we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty … like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11.”

On the twentieth anniversary he wrote, “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.” The New York Post recovered the anniversary tweet. Townhall found the rest of the deleted file. Asked about it later he asked how much safer the wars made us. That is both-sides dissembling as liturgy.

Hurt people hurt people

After the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield he reached for the cycle. “Hurt people hurt people.” Months later, in a room with the Michigan Democrat Jewish Caucus, he said, “I made a mistake.” “If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry.” The Times of Israel has the apology. The first statement is the elf. The apology is the campaign catching him. James Clyburn then announced that second chances apply, in the Washington Examiner. Second chances are for men who missed a vote. They are not a cleansing ritual for a temperament.

There is an older habit. In 2012 he amplified Hoodies and Hijabs, the frame that tried to make an Iraqi-American woman’s murder in California into Trayvon plus American bigotry. The killer was her husband. Reach for the American indictment first. Ask questions later. Just the News kept the record.

This August a union woman stood at his podium looking like she had been walked to the microphone. Prompted. Breathing hard. El-Sayed and Mallory McMorrow coaching from the flanks. Fox News ran the podium tape. I said then it looked like Graham Platner’s wife. It still does. A campaign that has to hold a civilian upright to get the sentence out is a campaign in a hurry.

This week in Ann Arbor an Iranian-American named Iman Dashti told him what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps did to his family and to tens of thousands of protesters. He asked him to “stand unequivocally against the IRGC.” El-Sayed talked about America as “the world’s policeman.” “One can disagree with the governance of a foreign country, one can stand in solidarity with freedom and democracy movements,” he said, then warned against taking out a foreign government’s leadership.

Dashti asked again: “You stand with us?” El-Sayed: “I will always stand with movements for freedom and democracy.” The Jerusalem Post printed the dodge. So did Newsweek. Rogers put the only honest caption on it. He can look a young man in the eye and still not condemn the unit that murdered Americans and Iranians. Leaked audio had already explained the caution. Staff was told not to comment on Khamenei’s death because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.” That is not non-intervention. That is a refusal priced for a precinct.

Then there is Mackinac.

I will not dress this up. Mackinac Island is one of the true beauty spots in Michigan and in America. Horses. Water. The Grand Hotel porch. The governor’s summer house for a reason.

El-Sayed, walking that ground in 2018, on camera later released in a documentary: “I hate Mackinac so much.” If he wins, “this is gonna be, like, the summer home.” “Every time I’ve ever come here, I’ve hated it. Why am I here?” Bridge Michigan walked the tape. The campaign now says he meant the policy conference. Kid Rock heard the island. So did everyone who has stood on that shoreline in July. The Detroit News has Rock calling him an idiot on the porch.

El-Sayed could not leave it alone in the cleanup. “I don’t think the most ‘American place in MI’ can be a place that…bans cars.” He looked at a postcard the state keeps on purpose and treated it as a defect. The Washington Examiner still has Rogers standing on that shoreline. Football, fireworks, the Fourth, the island. Creaturehood. A senator who flinches at Mackinac is telling Up North that the thing they love is a problem.

Policy is the other half of the same man.

Call the method what it is. Taqiyya. Concealment of the creed you actually hold so the room you are in will let you pass. On Medicare for All he has practiced it in public.

America has heard this movie. Barack Obama sold the country a line so clean Politifact, of all shops, named it the Lie of the Year for 2013: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” The fuller pitch was the twin promise. If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Cancellation letters followed. An apology followed. The law did what the slogan could not admit.

El-Sayed is running the sequel. Same two rooms. Same soft landing for people who already have a plan. Same destination once the door closes.

2019: “Anything that allows private health insurance to continue to be required to cover some subset of the population is not real Medicare for All.” 2020: Medicare for All “does away with the private insurance market.” He wrote the book. He ran for governor on Michicare as single-payer. That is the version he sold to Bernie rooms. That is the creed. The Detroit News marked the rewrite when the union tour began.

2026, union tour and website: “Medicare for All does not have to ban additional private insurance through unions or employers, although Medicare for All should make those choices redundant and unnecessary.” To Brian Tyler Cohen and then on his own feed: “If you like your insurance from your employer or from your union, that can still be there for you.”

Mallory McMorrow called it on contact. That is not M4A. That is rewriting the definition so he can have both. He called her “bad faith.” Bridge Michigan printed the sequence without the poetry. The Michigan Advance caught the same two rooms. He used to say eliminate. He now says unnecessary, not banned. Obama said keep it. El-Sayed says it can still be there for you, and also that real M4A does away with the market. That is not nuance. That is taqiyya. One creed for the Sanders hall. One creed for the UAW hall. The same man.

Taxes get the same two faces. Kristen Welker asked if people under a million would see taxes rise. He would not say yes. “We’d be paying for health care in a different way.” In Saginaw he hoped a family at $100,000 would not. Fox News dug up 2011 audio in which he said the quiet part. “We’re actually just going to give other people access to what you have and make yours more expensive.” National Review called the sleight of hand.

Fifteen years later the expensive part is a whisper. The free-at-the-point-of-service part is the ad. His wife’s psychiatry practice does not take Medicare. He sells accepted everywhere. His own house does not live it. Vox had to write that down too. Taqiyya again. The public line and the private rate are not the same religion.

Abolish ICE sits on the same shelf. So does the sister charged after an anti-ICE rally for allegedly spitting on an Illinois trooper, in the Mediaite file. The campaign says he loves her and “disagrees with her on a number of political positions and the rhetoric she’s chosen to use.” The noun on the bumper is still abolish. Michigan has already lived the sanctuary-and-release argument. It does not need a senator who treats the agency as the villain and the family tape as someone else’s problem.

None of this is a vibe. It is a stack. Circumcision as a closing argument. No-pads football with a man old enough to be his father. A squat-off with the vice president. “Whoop” Maher. Silo the “bogeys.” Wipe the 9/11 timeline. “Hurt people hurt people.” “I hate Mackinac.” Will not say IRGC. Keep your Blue Cross and also abolish the insurers.

Each one is disqualifying in a state that builds cars, packs lunch, and puts a summer house on an island on purpose. Together they are a character. Taqiyya is the method that ties the policy half to the temper half. He tells Room A the creed. He tells Room B the passport stamp.

The polls will tell you to ignore all of it.

I am not ignoring it. The same class of surveys that had El-Sayed up double digits on Haley Stevens watched him clear her by a point. Emerson had him plus fifteen. Mitchell plus fourteen. Data for Progress plus thirteen. RealClearPolling’s last primary average was plus 10.2. The result was 48.5 to 47.5. The New York Times counted the wreckage. The last eight public polls were double-digit leads. Glengariff, the shop treated as the misfit, had Stevens ahead. That shop saw the race.

Now the same firms have El-Sayed plus two or three in the general, almost never at 50. Suffolk is the fat plus seven. Glengariff has Rogers plus two. The RCP general still has him under 50 in the average that supposedly has him winning. Polymarket has him around seventy cents. Markets that ate plus ten in July did not learn. They rolled the error into November and called it a forecast.

I have written for months that midterm polls are garbage unless they ask Democrats where they sit on the pressure line. They still do not ask. Beware a nominee under 50.

Mike Rogers is the stable and consistent half of the contrast, which is the point. Former FBI. Former member. Factories, faith, families. No weightlifting invitations. No hostage optics. No two-room insurance pitch. You do not have to make him a poet. You have to put him next to the compilation. The PACs already treated Michigan Senate as a top-line buy. Macomb does not need Sabato. It needs the Watters clip, the Ann Arbor refusal, the Mackinac sentence, and the keep-your-plan rewrite on a loop.

A senator from Michigan has to live with the Big Three, the contract cycle, the lakeshore, Dearborn, and a national security file that still runs through Detroit. Temperament is not a side quest in that job. It is the job. El-Sayed’s tape is a man who turns a policy question into a circumcision quiz and a beauty spot into a grievance. Rogers only has to remain the alternative.

I will say it in the short form. The Angry Elf has neither the temperament nor the policies that are good for a senator from Michigan. The method on the policy half has a name. Taqiyya. Mike Rogers is the clear choice. The rest is footage.

Like this post? Become a Citizen Producer!

James K. Bishop

James K. Bishop is a conservative writer and raconteur hailing from Texas, known for his incisive and often provocative takes on political and cultural issues. With a staunch commitment to originalist constitutional principles, he emphasizes limited government, individual liberties, and traditional American values. Active on X under the handle @James_K_Bishop, he frequently engages his audience with sharp critiques of progressive policies, media narratives, and overreaches by the federal government. His style is direct, often laced with humor and wit, which resonates strongly with his conservative followers.