In a column published Wednesday at American Thinker, writer Mike McDaniel takes direct aim at Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, arguing that the candidate’s stated goal of getting “money out of politics” is contradicted by the donors bankrolling his campaign — donors the column characterizes as “Islamists” and “sketchy fundamentalist Muslim groups.”
The piece, headlined “El-Sayed is funded by Islamists,” leans heavily on a donor list the author attributes to Newsweek, which the column says identified billionaires and plutocrats supporting El-Sayed, including Jeffrey and Catharine Soros, Jennifer Pritzker, Andrew Dudum, Jon Favreau, Ben Haggerty, Tommy Vietor, Ben Rhodes, and El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, whom the column describes as CAIR-affiliated.
That donor roster, McDaniel writes, comes from a source “not known for its conservative leanings” — a detail he treats as evidence that the funding claims are not merely the invention of El-Sayed’s political opponents.
The Fight Over the Slogan
At the center of the column is what McDaniel calls a “specific lie” — El-Sayed’s use of “money out of politics” as a campaign slogan. The author argues that any politician who claims not to need anyone’s money is, by necessity, misleading voters, because running a statewide or national campaign requires substantial funds for advertising and events.
McDaniel notes that the slogan itself is a familiar political trope, used by both parties. When Republicans say it, he writes, there is usually “at least a bit of truth involved,” and they typically mean illegal funding he claims Democrats rely on. When Democrats say it, in his framing, it is a pose of virtue meant to distract from who is actually funding them.
He cites an ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, which he says highlights the reasons to call El-Sayed a hypocrite — and a national security threat. The column points to El-Sayed’s family history, which it says includes “extensive” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and multiple family members in what McDaniel calls “jihad front groups,” as well as funding from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization the column describes as “Hamas-tied.”
CAIR has long disputed characterizations of it as tied to Hamas or other militant groups.
The Muslim Brotherhood Question
A significant portion of the column focuses on El-Sayed’s alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization based in Egypt. McDaniel writes that El-Sayed has claimed dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship and is now “backpedaling” on that claim and any Brotherhood connection. He also cites a claim attributed to El-Sayed’s sister that the family has “always been” Brotherhood — a point McDaniel frames as a matter of pride in Islamist families.
McDaniel goes further, drawing a sharp distinction between ordinary civic affiliations and the ones he alleges here. Being tied to the VFW or the Rotary, he writes, is categorically different from being associated with Islamist organizations, because in his characterization, “Islam is a political system with religious cover which exists to conquer the world by the sword.” If CAIR or the Muslim Brotherhood supports a candidate, he argues, it is because that candidate is “one of them” and is furthering what he describes as a religious duty of world conquest.
He also invokes the concept of taqiyya, which he describes as a practice within the faith that permits lying to non-believers, arguing it allows El-Sayed to navigate conflicting demands: being sufficiently Islamist to satisfy his faith and co-religionists while saying enough to win over general-election voters.
A Question of Loyalty
The column’s closing argument is not about money but about allegiance. McDaniel contends that El-Sayed could not take the Senate oath without lying, because in his view Islam does not recognize a separation of church and state, and an Islamist’s loyalty is “never to a nation” but always to Islam, with family and tribe ranking behind it.
He asserts that El-Sayed would not represent Michigan, though he would represent the interests of the state’s large Muslim population — and, in McDaniel’s words, “America least of all.” The piece opens and closes on the same note: the truly dangerous outcome, in the author’s framing, is not the fundraising but the possibility of El-Sayed in the U.S. Senate.
The column is written by Mike McDaniel, who identifies himself as a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher, as well as a published author and blogger at Stately McDaniel Manor.
Notably, the piece relies on a chain of sourcing rather than original reporting: it attributes the donor list to Newsweek, the ad to the Senate Leadership Fund, and the family claims to El-Sayed’s sister and his political opponent, Mike Rogers. McDaniel acknowledges the potential objection that Rogers “could be lying,” and treats the Newsweek list as the answer to that concern. Several of the characterizations in the column — including the descriptions of CAIR as Hamas-tied and of Islam as a political system bent on conquest — are contested claims rather than established facts, and appear here as the author’s assertions.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/el-sayed-is-funded-by-islamists/