Sure. Yeah, Absolutely.

On Saturday afternoon Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, took questions at a town hall in Caro, a farm town in the Thumb, and a man who gave his name as Tommy and said he was a Christian stood up and asked whether he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. "Sure. Yeah, absolutely," El-Sayed said. "Why are you asking the question?" Because they're a terrorist group, Tommy said. "But what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn't?" Yes, Tommy said, because he hadn't heard him disavow them yet. And then the candidate, who had already given the man the word he came for, spent the next several minutes explaining why the word was never the point. He said he was going to swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States, and that the Constitution "guarantees us all the right to practice whatever faith we want to or no faith at all." He brought up John F. Kennedy, who told the Houston ministers in 1960 that he was "not the Catholic candidate for President" but the Democratic candidate "who happens also to be a Catholic," and he said: "I'm not running to be a Muslim senator. I'm running for the U.S. Senate and happen to be Muslim." He told Tommy, "I want to protect your right to practice your faith as you choose as a Christian man," and then, "the only question though is that it seems like you don't want to protect my right to practice as I choose." Then he asked Tommy a question back. Would Tommy disavow reading religious doctrine into American law? "I do not," Tommy said. "So I think it's you who needs to understand the Constitution," El-Sayed said, "not me." Tommy walked out. The room cheered. The paper has watched the clip four times and it holds up on the fourth.

The paper will say what it knows about Tommy and no more. The independent journalist Marisa Kabas, at The Handbasket, identified him on Sunday as Thomas Teepell, who was operations director for Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri until February, according to the congressional staff database LegiStorm, and whose father is a Republican strategist who ran Bobby Jindal's shop in Louisiana. Nobody has shown that anyone sent him, and the paper is not going to call him a plant, because it does not know that. It knows that a man who used to work for a United States senator drove to a farm town to ask a loyalty question on camera, and that when the loyalty question was turned around on him, he declined to answer it and left. The paper will also not pretend the question fell out of a clear sky. Posts from 2012 by El-Sayed's half-sister, resurfaced this month, describe their mother's activism in the Brotherhood as a college student in Egypt in the 1970s. Mike Rogers, the Republican, said at their first debate this month that the mother later worked for a charity the Treasury designated for funding al-Qaeda. The President has called El-Sayed a "jihadist" and "a Muslim Brotherhood guy," and Rogers is running an ad calling him "the most dangerous Senate candidate in history." El-Sayed says neither he nor his family has ties to the Brotherhood and that he has no knowledge of what his mother did in Egypt fifty years ago. For the record, because the paper deals in records: the President signed an order last November aimed at the Brotherhood, and on January 13 the State and Treasury departments designated its chapters in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Hamas began life as the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch. So Tommy was not wrong that parts of it are, in American law, a terrorist organization. He was wrong about what that had to do with the man at the microphone, and he showed everyone exactly how wrong when he was offered the same oath and wouldn't take it.

Now the other room. On Monday, October 12, the President held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, for the Republican ticket, and somewhere in the crowd was a woman wearing a shirt that said "Release the Epstein Files." The video shows what happened next. A man near her shoved her and hit her in the face. He grabbed her by the hair and tried to drive her face toward the floor. The crowd chanted "USA." Officers eventually pulled her out of the scrum and walked her out of the building. The man stayed, and the video shows him exchanging high-fives. From the stage the President, who seems not to have been able to see that she was a woman, said, "They're all paid. They get paid by the lefties in order to destroy our country," and then, "he's gotta go on a diet," and "a fat guy," and "he's going back home to Mom." The paper has seen no evidence that she was paid, and neither has anyone else. A few days earlier in San Antonio a man in a red hat had pulled a heckler to the ground by the hair, so this is a pattern and not an accident. The paper notes that the shirt did not call for violence or for anyone's removal from office. It called for the release of a court file the President's own Justice Department is being pressed by both parties to release. For that, she got punched, and the most powerful man in the world made a fat joke.

Put the two rooms next to each other. In one, a man stands up to question a candidate's loyalty to the country, and the candidate answers him, at length, in front of everyone, and asks him to pledge the same loyalty, and he will not, and the crowd lets him walk out with his hair unmussed. In the other, a woman holds up a sentence, and the crowd beats her for it while chanting the name of the country, and the man they came to see laughs. One of those rooms was afraid of a religion with power. The other room was the thing it was afraid of.

Here is the part the paper suspects will get it some mail. The fear Tommy carried into Caro is not invented. It is misaddressed. People have good reason to fear what any religion does once it gets the keys, because every one of them has done it. Tommy's own church ran the Spanish Inquisition for three and a half centuries and expelled the Jews of Spain in 1492, in the name of the same God he says he came to defend. The Taliban took girls out of secondary school in 2021 and out of the universities the year after. In Iran a 22-year-old named Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police over a headscarf. On October 7, 2023, Hamas, which prays in the Brotherhood's tradition, murdered about 1,200 people in a morning, and in the two years since, a government whose religious parties read the map out of scripture has left tens of thousands dead in Gaza, a great many of them women and children. And at home, where Tommy does not want to look, legislatures have ordered the Ten Commandments onto classroom walls in Louisiana and Texas, a state superintendent in Oklahoma ordered Bibles into every classroom, and women in more than a dozen states lost a right they had held for half a century on arguments that come, when you follow them back far enough, from a pulpit. Killing civilians is wrong. It does not matter whose God the killer prays to. Taking rights away from women is wrong. It does not matter whose God the legislature prays to. The paper would sign, this afternoon, a condemnation of terror against civilians that does not stop to check the flag on the uniform or the book on the nightstand: the Russian missile into a Kyiv apartment block, the Israeli strike on a tent camp in Rafah, the Hamas gunman at a music festival, the Iranian gallows for a protester, and the masked men in an unmarked van who take a neighbor off an American street without a judge's warrant or a name on the badge. Terror is what it feels like from the sidewalk, and the sidewalk does not care who signed the order. The paper used to think most everyone in America agreed on that, and it would like to go back.

And lest anyone think Tommy's "I do not" was a slip, the men who say it on purpose have been saying it louder since the election. Doug Wilson, the Idaho pastor whose denomination the Secretary of Defense attends, and who preached at the Pentagon in February at the Secretary's invitation, told NPR in July what the public square would look like under his program: "Church bells? Yes. Minarets? No," because "the public space would belong to Christ." Asked whether a Muslim woman could hold office, he said she "couldn't vow to uphold the Christian Constitution." Asked why he wants to repeal women's suffrage, he said, "Because it's a good idea." Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor with a podcast and a conference, said in March of last year that public office "is not for Hindus. It's not for Muslims. And it's not for Jews. It belongs to Christians," and the same month agreed on air with a co-host that a president should seize the property of churches that fly a Pride flag or ordain a woman. And Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and no fringe figure, said in August that the Constitution's silence on God is "a constitutional error" and that officeholders ought to acknowledge the Trinity, which drew a public plea from the Southern Baptists' own former ethics chief to think again. None of these men asked El-Sayed anything. But that is the doctrine Tommy would not disavow, stated by people with a church, a seminary, and a cabinet secretary in the pews.

Which is why El-Sayed's answer was the right one and the only one. The men who wrote the Constitution came out of colonies founded by people running from one established church or another, and they put two sentences in Article VI about it. Senators "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution." And: "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." That is the whole exchange in Caro, written down in 1787. Tommy demanded a religious test. The candidate offered the oath. That is not word salad; it is the menu. The paper is not canonizing the man, and it will say the worst thing it knows about him before it says the next thing. After the March 12 attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, El-Sayed said "hurt people hurt people," which was a terrible thing to say about a man who had just driven a truck into a synagogue and opened fire, and it took him until August to apologize and until this month to say he regretted "stepping on somebody's pain." That is on his record, and the paper has weighed it. But on Saturday, asked the question that every Catholic, Jew, Mormon and Quaker who ever ran for anything in this country has been asked in one costume or another, he gave the answer the Constitution gives, and the man who asked it could not.

The next thing is this. The paper has never endorsed a candidate for anything. It rates clowns, which is a different trade, and it expected to keep to it. But the question on the ballot in Michigan this year is not really the auto tariffs or the price of a house in Grand Rapids. The question, as the Republican nominee has chosen to pose it, is whether a man can be kept out of the United States Senate by what his mother may have believed in Cairo fifty years ago, and Mike Rogers, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and knows exactly what he is doing, has decided to run on yes. So the paper will answer. The Daily Buffoon endorses Abdul El-Sayed for the United States Senate. It endorses him with the synagogue on the record and the five months it took him to apologize on the record, and with the plain understanding that if Senator El-Sayed ever says "hurt people hurt people" about a gunman again, he will get a column from this desk with his name in the headline. It endorses him because he was asked for a religious test and gave the oath, because that is the only answer the Constitution allows and he gave it without being coached, and because the other side of this race is the party whose crowd hit a woman for a shirt and chanted the name of the country while it happened. The paper has seen what the people asking the loyalty question do when they hold the keys. It would rather be governed by the man who answered.

So, the clowns. The paper does not rate the man who threw the punch; he is not a public figure, and the sheriff can rate him. It rates the man on the stage who watched a woman get beaten over a shirt about his own Justice Department's files and reached for a fat joke, and the party whose Tommys keep turning up in farm towns to ask whose side the Muslim is on while its own crowds answer the question about themselves. Four clowns, and the paper has set aside the fifth for the day somebody at that rally gets charged. The election is November 3. Tommy, who reportedly lives in Detroit these days, gets a vote too. So does everyone in the room he walked out on.