TJ Wolfgram, a campaign worker for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan, defends the Muslim Brotherhood and calls Americans idiots in a video recorded with a hidden camera.
In a video obtained exclusively by The Midwesterner, Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign staffer TJ Wolfgram, the campaign’s conservative and independent outreach captain, defended the Muslim Brotherhood and claimed that concerns about links to the organisation are “because Americans are idiots”: pic.twitter.com/4GYbPm3zti
— The Midwesterner (@Th_Midwesterner) 26 October 2026
In the video, which has been published by the Michigan newspaper The Midwesterner, Wolfgram attempts, on the one hand, to downplay El-Sayed’s links to the Brotherhood, which risk coming back to haunt him on polling day, Tuesday 3 November.
On the other hand, he portrays the Islamist movement as virtually harmless, and depicts Americans who might think otherwise as idiots.
Townhall quotes from the video, which also features a voice-over (here in italics):
The Brotherhood was, after all, the revolution in Egypt that we – the US – were either neutral towards or even supported at the time. And now it’s sort of like this: in 1999, Abdul’s mother – who didn’t raise him, as he grew up with his father and stepmother – worked for a company that transferred $60,000 to the Muslim Brotherhood in … it’s just so ridiculous.”
But my point is that he’s a Muslim and a fighter, and he’s anti-colonialist, I suppose. Why shouldn’t one support revolutionary movements for one’s own people? I’m not offended by that.
It’s because the Americans are idiots.
We’ve done plenty of imperialist crap ourselves.
Yeah, for fuck’s sake.
And then there’s the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and these other organisations just want to protect their people. So I’m not offended, because for me … the Muslim Brotherhood, and he’s a Muslim. He comes from that part of the world – why shouldn’t he stand with his brothers? Does that make sense?
‘Absolutely. Yes, I’ve got nothing against the Muslim Brotherhood. And if I knew more about it, I might even support some of what they do. I mean, of course there will be cultural differences, so there will be things about the way they go about things that I don’t agree with. And we have to understand that self-determination involves decisions that we don’t agree with.
They may choose to treat women in ways we don’t agree with, and I urge us to make private donations to voluntary organisations working to combat this, or to some bloody paramilitary organisation. I don’t really care. But it is not the case that the collective choice we make as a government should, as a matter of principle, be about trying to tell others how to live.
El-Sayed has previously refused to answer directly whether he supports the designation of parts of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organisations, as the US has done, according to Townhall.
