Political observers might have been surprised when socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed began gaining traction in Michigan, a state that is far from deep blue.

I wasn’t.

I grew up in metro-Detroit, Michigan, just outside Dearborn, which is home to the largest Muslim population in the United States. Over the years, I’ve watched this population more than double, and its influence has spread beyond the city of Dearborn — where businesses advertise in Arabic and the Islamic call to prayer is broadcast over loudspeakers throughout the day — to the entire metro-Detroit region. Just last year, officials in my hometown of Canton, Michigan, approved the construction of a massive Islamic mosque and education complex called the Muslim Education Community Center of America — MECCA for short. Groundbreaking took place last month.

El-Sayed is the inevitable political result of Michigan’s multi-decade experiment with mass Muslim immigration. His parents are both Egyptian immigrants, and his father was a part-time imam. His father-in-law is a founding committee member of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the federal government.

El-Sayed himself is a practicing Muslim, and while studying at the University of Michigan served as the vice president of the Muslim Students Association, which also has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Pointing any of this out is, of course, Islamophobic, according to El-Sayed. We’re not supposed to ask why El-Sayed was worried about offending “a lot” of people in Dearborn who, in his own words, were “sad” about the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. We’re not supposed to think it strange that El-Sayed honored the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by fretting about “the cultural and social biases that fuel discriminatory behavior and hate crimes” against Muslims. (Unlike Norm MacDonald, he was not joking).

And yet these are exactly the kinds of questions many Michiganders are now asking themselves. How did our state become home to public vigils mourning the death of a Hezbollah terrorist leader? How did a rally in Dearborn come to feature chants of “Death to America”? How did the mayor of Dearborn, who has endorsed El-Sayed, come to believe it was acceptable to tell a Christian constituent he was “not welcome” in his own city simply for objecting to renaming city streets after someone who celebrated Islamic terrorism?

And perhaps most importantly: Why does one of the leading candidates seeking to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate feel compelled to embrace and align himself with the very people at the center of this disturbing trend?

Because he has to. Not just because he practices the same faith, nor because the Muslim bloc in Michigan has grown to become a powerful political force in the state, but because the left-wing coalition El-Sayed represents has been built around an increasingly visible alliance between Marxist ideology and Islamist activism.

Like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose victory in 2024 El-Sayed has said inspired his own run, El-Sayed is the perfect standard-bearer for this unholy alliance. He is able to cater to the far leftists in places like Ann Arbor and Traverse City with his attacks on the wealthy and talk of universal healthcare — never mind his hypocrisy on both fronts — while also winning over Dearborn’s Muslims who reject much of the Left’s cultural agenda.

These two groups might have very different visions for what the ultimate political outcome should be, but they at least agree on the immediate priority: subverting and destroying the values and institutions that have long defined our country.

Take a drive through metro-Detroit, where church buildings are being converted into mosques, where the FBI is training security at Jewish synagogues, and where Hezbollah and Iranian flags are proudly displayed, and you’ll realize that, in Michigan, they have a head start.

The truth is that the groundwork for this political moment has been years in the making. El-Sayed hasn’t created a new coalition — he has inherited one built over decades through immigration, demographic change, and the rise of identity-based politics. Whether he succeeds in his primary campaign for the Democratic nomination will be a test of just how strong and how deeply rooted this coalition has become.

But for those of us who will always call Michigan home, we know the problem didn’t start with El-Sayed. And it won’t end with him either.

***

Kaylee McGhee White is a Fox News contributor and the editor-in-chief of IW Features, the grassroots storytelling arm of Independent Women.

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