Socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani took to the airwaves Thursday to declare Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a victim of "blatantly racist attacks," deploying the left's go-to shield against legitimate scrutiny of a candidate who authored a paper warning against "interethnic mating" and who has never completed the medical residency that his "physician" label implies.
The stakes are straightforward: when every criticism of a candidate's record, associations, and policy positions gets laundered as racism, ordinary voters lose the ability to ask basic questions before handing someone power.
Mamdani told WNYC that El-Sayed is "navigating" his race against former Rep. Mike Rogers admirably, claiming millions are being spent "trafficking in that same racism." "A race of that magnitude is difficult enough as it is; to have to contend with blatantly racist attacks on a regular basis, and the silence of so many around him in the face of that — that is immensely difficult," Mamdani said.
What Mamdani calls racism, others call vetting. President Trump and Rogers have focused their fire on El-Sayed's apparent family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — a question of ideology and association, not ethnicity. Trump has branded him a "jihadist" and Vice President JD Vance called him a "psychopath."
Then there is the paper El-Sayed himself authored. While at Columbia Medical School, El-Sayed published a 2011 study in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health warning of the hazards of "interethnic mating" — which he claimed increased the risk of premature births — and concluded Arab women should reproduce within their own ethnic group for optimal health outcomes. Senator Ted Cruz called it "'science' with a pre-ordained racist & eugenics outcome. Scary stuff." The paper was one of several El-Sayed authored hyper-focused on race and religion.
The New York Post also noted that El-Sayed has "repeatedly called himself a physician though he never completed his medical school residency." That's not a racist attack. That's a factual claim about credentials.
HuffPost, meanwhile, framed the story entirely around Trump's rally rhetoric — specifically his comment that voters should "send him back to where he came from" and his claim that El-Sayed "doesn't like Jewish people and he doesn't like Black people." HuffPost was quick to note that El-Sayed was born in Rochester Hills, Michigan, making "send him back" a nonsensical line. Trump has used similar language against other Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — three of whom were born in the United States.
What HuffPost buried: the actual substance behind the scrutiny. No mention of the "interethnic mating" paper. No mention of the Muslim Brotherhood ties. No mention that El-Sayed campaigns on blocking U.S. aid to Israel or that both he and Mamdani have ties to Israel-hating activist Linda Sarsour. The Post covered all of it.
Trump's "send him back" shtick about a Michigan-born American is its own kind of stupid — it hands the left a grievance on a silver platter and lets them change the subject. But a clumsy attack doesn't make the underlying questions disappear. El-Sayed authored eugenics-adjacent research. He inflates his medical credentials. He wants to cut off aid to a U.S. ally. And Mamdani's answer to all of it is: racism.
The question that never gets answered: if the policies are so good for the people they claim to help, why do they always need the R-word to survive inspection?
