IT’S FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2026
Huzzah!
The Republican Party’s dreams came true this week. Abdul El-Sayed, the Hamas-adjacent anti-capitalist international landlord and luxury watch collector, edged out Haley Stevens to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan. He’ll face former GOP congressman Mike Rogers in the general election.
What could go wrong?
Nothing comes to mind. There is literally a zero percent chance of El-Sayed beating a generic Republican like Rogers in November. No, seriously. This couldn’t have worked out better. El-Sayed is a toxic racist who’s going to alienate swing voters the same way he turned off moderate Democrats. There’s nothing to worry about.
Drawing an unelectable opponent means Rogers and the GOP will have more time to focus on the bigger picture. First item on the agenda when he gets to Washington: impeaching President Hillary Clinton.
BIG TENT ENERGY
As expected, El-Sayed’s victory was fueled by elite white grievance. He dominated in upscale enclaves where most people have college degrees, while black and working-class voters went heavily for Stevens. However, it would be unfair to suggest that El-Sayed’s coalition was not impressively inclusive in its own way.
For example, he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, the crotchety socialist who beat Hillary Clinton in Michigan in 2016. He was also backed by Hassan Qazwini, the Dearborn Heights imam Sanders condemned for spreading “antisemitic conspiracy theories” during the 2020 primary.
“Beware of the plot being schemed by the pro-Israel lobby,” Qazwini told his followers last month. “You have to choose between people, clean people, who are running to serve your community, your state, and people who are there to serve the interest of Israel.”
The LGBT & Allies Caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party endorsed El-Sayed, as did several progressive lawmakers who still have pronouns in their social media bios—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), among others. He was also backed by a lesbian trial lawyer who celebrated Veterans Day by posting a tribute to her grandfather’s World War II service—in the German Army.
El-Sayed even managed to win over some former Trump supporters. The Free Beacon spotted Husham al-Husainy working the crowd at El-Sayed’s victory party in Detroit. The pro-Hezbollah imam, based in Dearborn, endorsed Trump in 2024 because he thought (incorrectly) that Trump would ban gay marriage.
Al-Husainy was one of the Dearborn voters El-Sayed described as being saddened by the death of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. “Killing is not the solution,” he told us. “They assassinated ... Malcolm X. They did kill him and they assassinated Kennedy.”
Asked to clarify what he meant by “they,” al-Husainy said it was not the U.S. government, but rather a “special interest group ... could be money people, business people, could be special, special faith.”
Democrats assembled this lovely tent. Now they must sleep in it. El-Sayed is 5’8” (at most), so there’s plenty of room for everyone. Well, not everyone, obviously. Gotta keep it “clean.”
Truth, or reconciliation: Democrats are trying to patch things after a bitter primary. It’s going OK. Haley Stevens and El-Sayed have both said they want to move on and focus on beating Rogers. Hasan Piker, the anti-American influencer who became a leading El-Sayed surrogate, seems less eager to bury the rocket launcher.
“Everyone being like, ‘Abdul has a fuck-ton of work to do mending bridges,’ here's the fucking take nuke for you, okay? You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit,” he said on his livestream.
Democratic politicians will find a way to cope. It’s going to be humiliating, but they will suck it up and pretend that this is what they always wanted. If Ted Cruz could forgive Trump for insulting his wife, they’ll manage.
Bless their hearts. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer party.
Ladies and gentlemen, the American voter: El-Sayed won by less than 16,000 votes. Mallory McMorrow, a generic liberal white woman who dropped out of the race in early July, got more than 61,000 votes. Most of them probably didn’t realize McMorrow had quit, and honestly, God bless them for that. Knowingly voting for a defunct candidate seems even dumber—until you consider what happened in Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District.
Republican candidate Tom Smith, a retired engineer, suspended his campaign weeks ago after raising less than $2,000. He endorsed one of his rivals. Donald Trump, who won the district in 2024, endorsed the other. On Tuesday, Smith trounced both of them by double digits.
That’s right, Mr. Smith is (potentially) going to Washington. He’ll face incumbent congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet in the general election. She’s a close ally of Kelly Neumann, the aforementioned lesbian lawyer who honored her Nazi grandad.
This is what democracy looks like: Wisconsin holds primary elections next week. Bipolar college dropout Francesca Hong, another left-wing radical backed by Hasan Piker, is heavily favored to be the Democratic nominee for governor. She spent the past few days refusing to walk back her support for canceling Thanksgiving—“the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx [sic]”—before finally walking it back under duress.
Establishment Democrats would like to stop Hong from winning—at least in theory. The best challenger they could muster is David Crowley, a 40-year-old black guy with a degree in “community engagement” who has worked in politics his entire life. He recently accused Hong supporters of racism for calling him part of the establishment. “I look at that as a slur,” Crowley said, “particularly as an African-American candidate.”
Next door in Minnesota, Republicans are poised to nominate Mike Lindell for governor. The recovering crackhead turned pillow magnate has spent tens of millions of dollars litigating his theories about the 2020 election. Naturally, Donald Trump endorsed him. Lindell’s previous foray into politics—running for RNC chair in 2023—fell short of expectations. Out of 167 total votes cast, he got 4.
Enough with these freaks already. America needs more Tom Smiths.
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
Get a load of these MAGA broads: Canadian pop singer Tate McRae was recently asked to address “being labeled MAGA.” By whom? The internet, naturally. What about her is MAGA, exactly? Well, she recently sang a duet with country music star Morgan Wallen. And if that wasn’t damning enough, McRae is also dating Jack Hughes, the USA hockey player who won Olympic gold but refused to lecture Donald Trump after the president made a “distasteful joke” about women’s sports.
That’s slightly more evidence than was used to convict Sydney Sweeney, who was denounced as a MAGA stooge for (checks notes) wearing jeans. Yeah, these internet people are exhausting. They were calling Sophie Cunningham a “MAGA Barbie” even before her comments on transgender athletes in women’s sports. She was merely an attractive white girl on a team with Caitlin Clark.
After publicly siding with 80 percent of the country on trans sports, Cunningham has embraced her role as “the right’s anti-Black, anti-transgender culture war ambassador,” wrote Howard Bryant, a “sports” columnist for the Guardian. “She is every bit as political as Colin Kaepernick.”
Calm the f— down, man. Seriously.
Some context: Bryant, who is black, was arrested in 2011 for allegedly choking his wife, who is white, in front of their six-year-old son. He blamed the systemic racism of law enforcement, obviously.
If the journalist wants to pick on someone his own size, how about Julie Tétart, the jacked Frenchman who has quickly become the most dominant player in European women’s basketball. The six-foot-three, 195-lb center has long dreamed of playing in the WNBA, but for reasons that can only be ascribed to heartless bigotry, the league has shown no interest in bringing “her” aboard.
Read more: Photos of Sophie Cunningham
The kids are not OK: Checking in on Gen Z, the Wall Street Journal reports that it is now “commonplace” for the parents of young college graduates to show up to job interviews or request phone calls with management on their child’s behalf. That seems healthy enough. But why stop there?
Gen Z is notoriously bad at dating. Parents could tag along at the beginning, then hang back if things go well, like in olden times. And sure, you could hire an intimacy coordinator to mediate proceedings in the bedroom, but there’s really no substitute for parental guidance.
The voting booth is no exception. Just let their parents handle it until they grow up—if and when that ever happens.
NYC is trash: Mayor Zohran Mamdani is touting a revolutionary new initiative to solve the city’s trash problem. His predecessor, Eric Adams, paid a consulting firm $1.6 million to study the relative merits of putting bags of rubbish into bins versus letting them fester in piles on the sidewalks. Now Mamdani is eager to implement that plan and take credit for inventing dumpsters.
Not so fast, writes Matt Shaw, a New York-based architecture scholar who lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. In an op-ed for the Architect’s Newspaper, Shaw complained that Mamdani’s proposed cure—no more rat-infested trash piles— would be “worse than the disease.” Even if the city ends up “physically cleaner,” Shaw argued, the dumpsters would diminish the “character and history” of the city. Even worse, cleanliness could be a gateway drug to gentrification.
He’s not even wrong about the dumpsters. They’re ugly, and will inevitably be vandalized to hell or fashioned into luxury hotels/toilets for vagrants. Maybe it would be better to do nothing so America’s biggest city could retain its “character and history” of smelling like weed and garbage. Maybe it’s worth a shot. Honestly, who cares? It’s just that making the socialist mayor sound like the voice of reason is quite the achievement. Bravo.
PALATE CLEANSER
Meet Kirill Basin. He’s a 40-year-old Democrat running for Congress in Hawaii. As far as I can tell, he’s a drug-addled tech nerd and aspiring hippie guru who fled the mainland during COVID, presumably to evade criminal charges. “We must act with love. Urgently,” his campaign website warns. Among the few discernible policy proposals is a “community-owned” grocery store.
Over the weekend, Basin disgraced himself on a beach in Maui by blasting (undoubtedly horrendous) music from a loudspeaker. When an older gentleman asked him to turn it down, the Democrat threatened to shoot his wife, who called him a child. “I’m a child? I’m 40 fucking years old,” he boasted. That’s when a local martial arts enthusiast stepped in to diffuse the situation. Basin promptly challenged him to fight, which did not end well for his face.
Anyway, here’s the video. Enjoy!
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND
Email: stiles@freebeacon.com
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Brilliantly funny update. I hope that Hawaii guy gets elected. He seems super stable.
"David Crowley, a 40-year-old black guy with a degree in “community engagement” who has worked in politics his entire life." Wait, that sounds an awful lot like that other "community organizer" we all know who went on to wreck the country over a period of 12 years (he gets credit for Biden's 4 years too).