Rogers, for his part, invoked Martin Luther King Jr.: “You cannot solve darkness with darkness; you have to solve it with light. You can’t solve hate with hate; you have to solve it with love.”For the site of their hard launch, the odd couple chose Perfecting Church, a Black church in Detroit, evidently seeking to exploit the aura of social justice implicit in the Black faith tradition.

Aura farming aside, it is very hard to square the claims of patriotism and love with the actual campaign that Stevens now supports. Indeed, since the moment Abdul El-Sayed triumphed in the Democratic Senate primary, Rogers has made his views of his opponent clear. “I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” he claimed the morning after El-Sayed won.

“Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.” (Never mind that Hasan Piker, not El-Sayed, said the 9/11 quote, which El-Sayed has disavowed.) Indeed, a consistent theme of Rogers’s campaign has been the implication that El-Sayed is a tool for shadowy forces originating in the East. “The Muslim Brotherhood celebrated exactly one victory in the United States in the primary this year,” Rogers claimed. “Abdul El-Sayed’s.”

As a factual matter, the attack is highly dubious. But facts are not the point, so much as the deployment of “Muslim” as a slur.

To understand this, one need only look to the overlord of the Rogers campaign, President Donald Trump. As is his wont, Trump delights in mangling El-Sayed’s name, referring to him as “Abduladadalalalala” or simply “Mohamed.”“Somebody said his name isn’t Mohamed,” Trump told attendees at a rally. “I’m the president, I can call him whatever the hell I want. To me, he’s Mohamed.”

The Trump theory of El-Sayed holds that his ascendance is being facilitated by the machinations of Wayne County, a “strictly Third World” jurisdiction that seeks to elevate to Congress a “jihadist” who shouldn’t even be eligible for “a seat on an airplane.”If seated in the world’s greatest deliberative body, El-Sayed, the theory holds, would execute his dastardly plan to ban Christmas and—you guessed it—impose Sharia law.

Trump’s attacks have been echoed and amplified by right-wing news outlets like Newsmax, which has lambasted El-Sayed as an “anti-Israel Muslim,” an “immigrant from another Muslim country,” and a Midwest variant of that other alien, Zohran Mamdani, the “socialist Muslim who’s always smiling.”For those too dense to catch the message, the Newsmax chyrons have helpfully driven home the point—“THE LEFT IS FORGETTING THE HEINOUS ATTACKS OF 9/11,” “DEMOCRATS DROOL OVER NON-WHITE SOCIALISTS,” “MUSLIMS TELL US THEY’RE TAKING OVER, AND THEY ARE.”

Lest one think that this bigotry is merely limited to the crude ramblings of unlettered ogres, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stepped in to offer some intellectual heft to the attack. The Muslim Brotherhood, according to Kennedy, is responsible for not just the menace that is El-Sayed, but also the dark age that has fallen over the entirety of the Arabdom. “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world,” Kennedy claimed, “and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Field[s] prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce the literature they used to produce.”

Again, facts aren’t really the point here, and there is no wisdom in debating a quack whose brain has literally been infected by a worm. Nonetheless, it is worth noting the particular history at work. During both his run for president and his time in the White House, Barack Obama endured his share of racist attacks. To Rush Limbaugh, Obama was “Barack the Magic Negro.”To Newt Gingrich, he was America’s “food stamp president.”

At the Value Voters Summit, a vendor hawked “Obama Waffles,” a product featuring a racist caricature of the president on the packaging. The tagline was: “Point box toward Mecca for tastier waffles.”That last line deserves particular attention.

Indeed, by 2016, the political scientist Philip Klinkner would find that the best way to discern whom a voter would support in the upcoming election was to pose a simple question—“Is Barack Obama a Muslim?”Stevens, in joining Rogers, has allied herself with this odious culture war, one that is itself tied to a very real war. The campaign of hate, of which El-Sayed is the latest victim, has a simple goal: to render Muslims and Arabs more killable.

The latter does not require the former. In 1953 the CIA backed a coup that overthrew a democracy in Iran. In 1965 it supported a coup in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, that killed between 500,000 and a million people. During the Cold War, the justification for this death toll was the threat of communism; post-9/11, it is racism. In 2008, John McCain confronted a supporter and disputed the claim that Obama was Arab.

“No, ma’am,” McCain told his supporter. “He’s a decent family man.”This moment is often referenced as an act of patriotism, and perhaps it was one. But the notion that “decent” people exist in one place, while Arabs exist in another, is the major premise for a syllogism of violent, chauvinist power—wedding parties droned, governments overthrown, schoolgirls bombed, and inconvenient people eliminated.

This long war on the Muslim and Arab world has reached its apogee in the concentration camp of Gaza, where every single bomb was dropped from a plane of American extraction. And the genocide is but the latest chapter in a book authored by Israel, a state whose own basic laws reserve full rights for its “decent” people and something less for everyone else. This is the state that Haley Stevens has claimed to literally see in her dreams. And it is ultimately the defense of this state that drove Stevens into the arms of Mike Rogers. From this perspective, Stevens’s defection isn’t a story about party intrigue. It is a story about Stevens waking up and choosing violence.