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Can someone give me an analysis on who Abdul El-Sayed actually is as a person? He gave a weird interview where he said trans is a made up issue because your daughter has an I-Phone in her pocket so she will see dicks all the time anyway.
The first impression is he’s some sort of Muslim Brotherhood type. My second impression is pegging him as similar to brown friends I know whose parents do something science (medicine/engineering), are fairly wealthy, follow zero Muslim codes, hate white girls but probably slept with a few dozen in their twenties. All of these types are/can be fully assimilated into America. Half seem like they really do assimilate. The other half to me seem like they have a chip remaining on their shoulder that their people couldn’t build America.
My guess is he’s that type that still has a big chip on his shoulder to fully white people. So thinking things like sexualizing normies is perfectly fine for him in the same way a westerner might go to Thailand for a holiday and not view Thai’s as his people.
I'm sympathetic to Jonah Goldberg's argument in this podcast, that is, that El-Sayed wants the Democrats to be a straightforward anti-Israel party.
I don't think El-Sayed supports the full Muslim Brotherhood agenda. The social democrat positions that he holds are honest. He is not, I think, secretly an MB supporter in the sense of everything they stand for. But he is, I think, basically a middle-class western Muslim who attributes a disproportionate level of importance of Israel, and it has become organising for his thoughts in a way that it is not for other people.
To be honest I don’t think you can be Muslim and a Democrat in the same way that you can’t be Catholic and a Democrat. You can be a skinsuit globally homogenous Democrat who by virtue of ancestry are Muslim but follow Muslim beliefs. An ethnic Muslim but not a religious Muslim.
Trans is one example where a real Muslim’s response could be nothing less than trans mental people have a mental illness and should be locked up. And there really is no way to sugar coat that while maintaining spiritual connection to god.
I can’t see “anti-Israel” being a core belief that drives all of your beliefs but a symptom of a broader world view. For a typical progressive I think their mental model flows primarily thru an “oppressor-oppressed” framework which makes a progressive good person because they fight for the weak. Israel therefore is the bad side of this framework because they are rich.
The best mental model I can come up with Sayed is to model him on wealthy brown friends who are non-religious but tend dislike Israel for a vague tribal connection feeling similar to how an American with an Irish name supports Ireland. Basically the same reason I hate a few sports teams.
Obligatory Sarah Haider reference, I suppose? What Islam as a tradition and a body of doctrine teaches is less important than what specific Muslim-identifying people hold to be important - and in a case like Abdul El-Sayed, it's pretty clear that opposition to Israel is central to his worldview and his political advocacy whereas opposition to gender ideology is pretty clearly not.
The fact that Islam as a body of doctrine takes no special position on the existence of a state of Israel (that is, from an orthodox Islamic perspective, there is nothing special or interesting about Judaism qua Judaism, nor Israel qua Israel), and takes a much stronger position on gender, is not consequential. 'Islam', in El-Sayed's case, is an ethnic and a cultural background that informs his identity, rather than a set of propositions to be affirmed or rejected.
Her MINO category fits with every “Muslim” I have ever met. I don’t believe you can be both “Muslim” and “Western”. Real Muslims would be hated by blue and red tribe. I have many MINO friends but no Muslim friends. My vibes on Sayed is he’s one of these MINOs. His family probably does have some Muslim Brotherhood ties, but he vibes fully secularized to me.
The anti-Israel in his worldview feels very much like sports team fandom to me. I am not sure if Sayed types have to be anti-Israel but if you are a Democratic politician today and Democrats hate Israel then rooting for the Muslim side feels like the correct team to cheer for.
I do have a MINO friend whose family loves Trump so they can play for either side. I think a struggle for these types comes down to having to adopt someone else’s culture - Western Culture - instead of being born into it.
MINO's would also be hated by the red tribe, which is just generally islamophobic.
I think their are spots a MINO could fit into the red tribe. I call it the pagan right and I would call Peter Thiel the leading proponent of it.
Obviously, a MINO would not fit in with the Christian right which is probably still the largest right wing coalition partner. A MINO has basically depersoned themselves. They no longer have a central ideology and have fallen into global homogenism. No longer having a cultural tradition they are attached to then yes that does not fit with the definition of conservativism which is about maintaining traditions.
There is no pagan right, at least not in the red tribe(which is the sine qua non of american rightist politics for the forseeable future).
There are red tribers who do not practice Christianity, yes. There are red tribers who are secular, yes. But the red tribe itself rejects the idea that people who are not nominally Christian- or Jewish- can be a part of it.
What is Trump if not pagan?
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