We dive deep into the recent Senate victory of Abdul Al-Sayed in Michigan and explore the rising tide of Islamophobic rhetoric that has been growing, unchecked, for decades. As someone who has transitioned from a space of deep-seated bigotry as former MAGA to a more understanding perspective, I share my personal journey of transformation. I recount my experiences at a liberal college, where I was pushed out of my comfort zone and engaged in meaningful conversations with Muslim classmates. These interactions shattered the stereotypes I had long believed and opened my eyes to the dangers of propaganda that fosters mistrust. Ultimately, I urge listeners to be a supportive force for those beginning to question their biases, emphasizing the importance of welcoming dialogue over judgment as we navigate these complex societal changes together.

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I'm ex maga, current Christian and anti Christian nationalist.

And now that Abdullah Syed has won the Senate race in Michigan, I want to talk about it.

So now that all these videos are coming out talking about how Abdul Al Sayed, which I looked up how to say his name and I got two different answers.

So I, I'm sorry if I'm not saying it correctly, but there are all these videos talking about how he has won.

And predictably we're seeing a lot of the same comments as when Mamdani won.

Things like, this is the downfall of America.

Things like the.

I don't, I don't even want to repeat some of it.

It's a lot of very Islamophobic, Islamophobic rhetoric.

So as someone who went from being very Islamophobic myself and believing a lot of the propaganda about Muslim people and their agenda and just them in general as human beings, I want to talk about it specifically the moment that actually started to change that for me.

There are so many people even in the circles that I still run in who fully, fully believe a lot of really horrible propagand about Muslim people, about Islam in general, about what will happen if people who follow the Muslim faith enter into American politics, hold office in American politics.

And I used to believe all of it.

I want to be very, very clear about where I was and where, like how far I've come because I, I don't think I can overstate how bigoted I used to be.

I was never openly hateful, but I very fully believed I am someone who loves everyone but is realistic about the world and the evils that exist in it.

Oh, sweet summer child, you had no idea.

And now this is very important.

Up until a certain point in my life, I had never so much as had a conversation with a Muslim person.

Not so much as a conversation, but I heard a lot about it from my church, from people in my family, from Christian events that I attended.

There was this very strong undercurrent that I just took as fact that Muslim people are out here to get us.

There's this undercurrent, there's this agenda and somehow that applies to all of Islam, but the negative undertones on Christianity only apply to a certain sect like Christians overall good, Muslims overall bad.

And the fact that there are bad actors in both, and that's only a small subsect of the entire religion, of the entire movement was just the nuance wasn't there.

Like all Muslims are bad, but only a few Christians are.

That that was what I grew up believing.

And then one day I went to a liberal college.

Shock and horror.

But hang with me.

For some reason, I don't know why, because I was still very, very extremely conservative at this point.

I decided to take African American literature as one of my gen ed courses to satisfy some requirement before I could get into dietitian school that I later then got kicked out of.

But that's another story for another time.

So in this African American literature class that I took specifically to get outside of my own comfort zone, which I cannot stress enough how at that point in my life that is out of character for me.

I very much liked being in my comfort zone, in my bubble.

But something possessed me to stretch myself specifically by signing up for an African American literature class.

We had an assignment that was to find someone in the class who lived very, very differently from us, interview them, and then write a paper about it.

And somehow I ended up getting paired with an absolutely adorable, sweetest human being in the entire world, girl in a hijab.

And when I tell you when we met, I think we like met for coffee or after class, sat down and spent like an hour talking to each other.

It was genuinely, it had to be hilarious to those who were around us and watching us and hearing us, because it genuinely was like two people from different planets trying to find common ground.

And fortunately we both were approaching it in good faith.

But the kinds of questions we were asking each other and the reactions the other one was giving, like, it, it genuinely was like, like, she was like, wait, so you do, do you guys have to like get on your knees and like fold your hands like this in order to pray?

I've seen that in the media.

Like, is that true?

And I was like, no, that's, no, that's not true.

Is it true?

And I, I want to go back and find the paper.

I'm sure I have it somewhere.

And I was able to ask her about her hijab and if she, as a woman who was also Muslim, felt like she was oppressed.

And she wasn't.

And I was freaking shocked Pikachu about it, because my entire life I had been told someone who falls into this category, these specific things are true about them.

And while I knew that stereotypes weren't automatically completely true, I also fully believed, well, it's a stereotype for a reason, and that information is there to protect me.

And there you go.

Only to find out I had been completely wrong.

And this was not a one time event.

I fortunately was able to interact with and work closely with other Muslim Students during my time at college, again, shock and horror.

And I was able to see that the information I was able to gather for myself from actual one to one interactions with people who are actually Muslim gave me a completely different picture than the information that had been fed to me.

Secondhand thought, third hand, with its own agenda.

And then as I started to meet more people in the LGBTQ community, same thing happened when I actually sat down and talked with them, when I actually had interactions with them, the information I received, what I was seeing with my own eyes and ears, what I was experiencing connecting with other human beings, was vastly different from the information that had been spoon fed to me about those groups.

And the information fed to me about those groups was specifically designed to get me to mistrust those groups.

And again, what I saw with my own eyes and ears, what I actually experienced was completely different.

And you guys, that's how propaganda works.

That's how fascism works.

It asks you to take what, first of all, don't even gather your own experiences.

Rely on the experiences that are handed to you, then the information that is handed to you.

And then, number two, if you do have your own experiences, to disregard them because the decisions have been made for you, the information, and any synthesizing of that information has already been done for you, packaged as righteous anger and dropped on your doorstep, or more accurately, like into your brain.

So my question, especially to people who follow this rhetoric who are like, yeah, no, there's good in everyone, but we have to be aware because there's this agenda we.

When was the last time you, in good faith sat down with someone in the group that you mistrust, that you think is evil, that you think is plotting, and had an actual human interaction with them?

When was the last time that happened?

Because if you're anything like me, until it was truly forced upon me because I had to do it for a grade, it hadn't happened at all.

I am very fortunate in that I had a group of people that I felt safe with who were willing to challenge me, who were willing to lovingly sit down and ask me questions and poke holes in my beliefs and let me come to my own conclusions in my own time.

And that saved me from, honestly, the cult that is maga.

Not everyone has that, though.

So now I want to talk to the people in the room who are not maga, who maybe have never been maga, and who are really frustrated by people so slowly coming to their own senses, or even coming to their senses as a result of harmful policies impacting them.

And not as a result of seeing suffering from other people and realizing then that they were believing the wrong things.

I understand that it is incredibly cathartic to go, oh, took you long enough.

Oh, so you only realize what's going on when it ends up affecting you.

And I want to challenge you.

Be a soft place to land for people.

Because getting out of this mindset, coming out of genuinely what I just believed was objective truth, it's incredibly difficult and it's scary.

You're basically walking away from what you know and into the unknown, which.

Yes.

Should it happen sooner?

Absolutely.

Would it be great if people could look at the suffering of others and not have to have it affect them before they realize something nefarious is going on?

Yeah, that would be ideal.

But at the same time, us having a cathartic experience by putting down people who are starting to come around, who are starting to ask questions, that's not nearly as important as actually winning over hearts and minds.

We need to be openly accepting and welcoming in people who are starting to ask questions.

And I know that because I was the person who very slowly started to ask questions.

I was the person who very slowly started realizing there's cracks in my ideology, there's cracks here that I can't reconcile.

I know this isn't right.

And only because I had a safe place to ask questions, to learn without being judged, only because I was welcomed with open arms was I able to make it out of this way of thinking.

And it's so much more important for us to help people come out of this way of thinking than it is to have a cathartic experience and shouting down at people because it took them too long to come to the same conclusions that we have.

All right, thank you for coming to my TED Talk on this.

Have a great day.

And yes,.