hyperpartisan centrist

🚨 “Oh, for Fuck’s Sake, I Forgot to Ask Him If He Disavows the Muslim Brotherhood”: How One of the World’s Most Notorious Islamist Movements Became a Punchline I spliced Jon Stewart’s backstage exchange with his team to the beginning because I couldn’t get over how ridiculous it was. Stewart realizes he forgot to ask Abdul El-Sayed whether he disavows the Muslim Brotherhood. The joke escalates from there, making the question itself seem absurd, almost as though the very act of raising the subject is something to be laughed off rather than seriously examined. In the original sequence, this exchange comes at the end of a discussion in which El-Sayed argues that the media ask him “gotcha” questions that have little to do with what voters actually care about. Stewart sympathizes with that argument, and the Muslim Brotherhood question becomes an example of the media’s supposed absurdity. The recent focus on El-Sayed’s alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t materialize out of nowhere. El-Sayed’s own half-sister, with whom he shares a mother, has publicly alleged family ties to the organization in a tweet. Yet that context goes unexplored, even as the issue is reduced to a media “gotcha” question, and that’s before we even get to the alleged connections on El-Sayed’s wife’s side of the family.