Abdul El-Sayed can thank the corporate media in part for his success narrowly winning the Democratic primary for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats. His anti-Israel comments, and those of his campaign pal Hasan Piker, are routinely characterized as “perceived as antisemitic,” “facing backlash over rhetoric targeting Jewish Americans,” or other softeners to suggest that only some Jews have an issue with El-Sayed.
Well, I subscribe to the duck theory: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
Piker, who said America deserved 9/11 and would vote for Hamas over Israel “every time,” is hardly the only controversial character in El-Sayed’s orbit. There’s also Walter Masterson, who has participated in protests outside New York City synagogues and forced the cancellation of a campaign event for El-Sayed’s opponent, and UAW president Shawn Fain, who claims that he is under a grand jury investigation because of his anti-Israel union activities.
Just as the media refers to Nick Fuentes as a “white nationalist” without qualification, for years tarred the pro-Israel Breitbart as antisemitic, and routinely assigns “racist” labels to people whose comments they don’t like, I’m entitled to apply my preferred labels: El-Sayed is an antisemite and Piker is a rabid antisemite. I prefer “Jew hater” to “antisemite,” but I’m happy to embrace some rhetoric softener of my own.
The media says Bounce and I say Downy.
The corporate media has long treated concerns about El-Sayed as principally a Jewish issue, as if whatever animus his critics detect can be neatly quarantined within the boundaries of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But contempt has a way of revealing character, and El-Sayed has now provided a glimpse of how casually his can be directed elsewhere.
El-Sayed has twice dragged Usha Vance, Vice President JD Vance’s Indian American wife, into his attacks on her husband, despite the second lady neither holding elected office nor running for one.
During an April appearance on The Allen Analysis Show podcast, El-Sayed crudely speculated about the Vances’ sex life.
“What do you think is going through Usha’s head when [JD Vance] talks?” El-Sayed asked. “She’s like, ‘Damn, I have to sleep with him.’” He then invoked her pregnancy: “I guess she’s pregnant so something is happening.”
More recently, El-Sayed took another swipe at Usha Vance while mocking her husband on X: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no …” The reference was to JD Vance’s late grandfather, whom Vance has written never had the opportunity to meet Usha.
El-Sayed’s corporate media apologists might argue that his remarks weren’t necessarily racially motivated. Fair enough. What requires no speculation is that he repeatedly made an Indian American woman who isn’t seeking public office collateral damage in his political attacks on her husband—and, in one instance, reduced her to a crude joke about sex and pregnancy.
The corporate media’s silence on El-Sayed’s sexism is deafening, especially given that Usha Vance is a woman of considerable and impressive accomplishment.
She graduated from Yale University and then earned an MPhil from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She returned to Yale for law school, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Afterward, she clerked for Judge Amul Thapar, Judge Brett Kavanaugh when he was on the D.C. Circuit, and ultimately Chief Justice John Roberts at the U.S. Supreme Court. She later practiced complex civil litigation at Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the most elite and intellectually rigorous boutique litigation and corporate law firms in the U.S. (It was co-founded in Los Angeles by Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway fame.)
Yet none of those accomplishments figured in El-Sayed’s public characterization of Usha Vance. He reduced her instead to having sex with her husband and getting pregnant.
There’s another detail that makes El-Sayed’s treatment of Usha Vance particularly noteworthy. In his book, Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, El-Sayed wrote that his wife’s parents emigrated from a village in India. His wife, Sarah Jukaku, owns rental properties in Bengaluru and Dubai.
If they are still living, I’d welcome knowing what El-Sayed’s in-laws think about their son-in-law reducing another Indian American woman to a punchline about sex and pregnancy.
Despite positioning herself as a progressive who claimed to champion feminist and minority protection causes, former vice president Kamala Harris, the candidate the Democratic Party establishment installed as its 2024 presidential nominee, endorsed El-Sayed even before he won the primary, when his ties to Piker were already widely known.
“Dr. Abdul El-Sayed understands that the power is with the people, and that the stakes couldn’t be higher in this election,” Harris said in her endorsement. “While Michiganders struggle to afford everyday essentials — housing, gas, groceries, health care, and childcare — Trump and Republicans in Congress are giving away $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthy and powerful. Abdul knows that we need bold solutions to the crises facing America’s working families, and he is ready to take on this fight. I proudly stand with him to ensure we win a Democratic Senate majority in November.”
“I proudly stand with him.”
This is the same Kamala Harris whose Jewish husband Doug Emhoff assured a traumatized audience at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh days before the 2024 election that Harris was committed to “extinguishing this epidemic of hate” and that his wife’s commitment to Israel was so “unwavering” she “feels it in her kishkes,” an emphatic Yiddish word for a person’s innermost organs.
The Tree of Life synagogue was where an antisemite in 2018 massacred 11 praying congregants and injured six others, the deadliest targeted attack on Jews in U.S. history. Piker recently warned that if American Jews continued putting forward the idea that they were “singularly invested in Israel,” eventually “someone’s going to come around and take action” against American Jews.
I’d expect Harris would be especially offended by El-Sayed’s degradation of an Indian American woman. Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical and breast cancer scientist, immigrated to the United States from India.
In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris wrote extensively about how her mother, grandparents, and extended family instilled a strong awareness and pride in their South Asian heritage. She frequently credited her maternal grandfather, P.V. Gopalan—a retired Indian civil servant—with shaping her political consciousness during long walks in Chennai (formerly Madras).
In her 2020 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, Harris gave a shout-out to her chittis (the Tamil word for maternal aunts). She also held Diwali celebrations at the vice president’s residence and engaged directly with South Asian cultural and community organizations.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom at least waited until El-Sayed won the Michigan primary before jumping on the Senate candidate’s hate train.
“Congratulations @AbdulElSayed on a hard-fought victory!” Newsom posted on X, declaring that Republicans “can’t stop a Democratic Party united around working people and accountability.”
“On to November! Let’s take our country back.”
Other prominent Democrats have ordered the media to stop bringing up El-Sayed’s ties to Piker. Appearing with El-Sayed in Ann Arbor along with New York Rep. Jamie Raskin, Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell instructed reporters that any references to Piker would be verboten.
“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” Dingell told the crowd. “It’s not what November is about.”
A candidate’s judgment about whom he campaigns with, whose audience he courts, what rhetoric he’s willing to tolerate, and when he finally decides an association has become politically inconvenient is precisely what elections should be about.
But let’s accept Dingell’s premise for a moment. Perhaps healthcare is what November should be about.
El-Sayed, a former Detroit health director who earned a medical degree but was never licensed to practice medicine, has made Medicare for All one of his signature political causes. Providing universal healthcare is a worthy aspiration. But Medicare for All won’t do patients much good if the hospital Medicare pays for has a troubling safety record.
El-Sayed lives in Ann Arbor and has access to Michigan Medicine, consistently ranked among America’s top hospitals. But Dingell’s constituents in Wayne, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s constituents in Dearborn, aren’t so fortunate. They are served by Corewell Health’s hospitals in those cities, which both have “C” grades from the highly regarded Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade program.
Grand Rapids-based Corewell recently announced it will spend about $440 million building an eight-story, 423,000-square-foot tower at its hospital in affluent suburban Troy. Corewell says the expansion is needed because the hospital operates at more than 90% capacity and its emergency department handles more than 106,000 visits annually.
Michigan Medicine is also building a $360 million, 295,000-square-foot medical campus in Troy featuring specialty care, advanced imaging, and cardiovascular centers.
That’s $800 million in new healthcare investment pouring into affluent Troy while hospitals serving less prosperous communities like Wayne and Dearborn languish.
Corewell isn’t hurting for money. The nonprofit health system earned nearly $1.3 billion in 2025. An astonishing $1.04 billion—more than 80% of its $1.27 billion in net income—came from investments, returns Corewell CFO Matt Cox described as “unusually strong.” Corewell, whose CEO is a past chair of the American Medical Association, generated another $272 million in operating income, which included $96 million in federal reimbursements for COVID-related expenses incurred in prior years.
Then there’s an even more glaring hypocrisy in El-Sayed’s Medicare-for-All crusade, and this one is under his own roof.
El-Sayed’s wife is a psychiatrist who reportedly doesn’t accept insurance of any kind. Think about that. El-Sayed wants every American covered by a government-funded healthcare plan while the practicing physician in his own household apparently wants nothing to do with accepting health insurance from her patients.
Democrats and their corporate media allies are gearing up to repeat the same deception: sanitizing candidates whose rhetoric and associations would be treated far differently if they were on the other side of the political divide. Dana Nessel, Michigan’s lightweight attorney general, should stop calling on El-Sayed to retract statements and tone down his rhetoric. Voters deserve to know what El-Sayed stands for and who he stands with.
The best hope for ending Republican rule is critically and unequivocally calling out antisemitic and other hate-mongering candidates—and those who embrace them—and ensuring they are promptly sidelined.
Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom are at the top of the list.