🗳️ Zeteo is gearing up to cover one of the most consequential midterm elections in modern U.S. history. Tonight, Mehdi and Prem will be live from Abdul El-Sayed HQ in Detroit, Michigan, from 9pm ET on Substack and YouTube; Swin will be on the ground covering the major races in Ohio, and Andrew will be reporting from Maine. So if you’re a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to unlock all that Zeteo has to offer, from in-depth reporting to acclaimed documentaries. You can also support our work with a donation. Even a little goes a long way.
Good morning friends. Prem here, reporting on the ground from Michigan on a long-awaited 2026 Election Day – and we find out just how tired Americans are of Donald Trump’s authoritarian presidency and Republican control in Washington.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ I bring you a story the corporate media has refused to touch this campaign season: We’ve seen the state obliterate free speech and unconditionally fund a genocidal government all under the flag of “Jewish safety.” But what, if anything, is being done about Arab and Muslim safety?
Plus, Trump’s pals at the Supreme Court reject his request to set aside 20,000 ballots in California, the president is ready to preemptively pardon Elon Musk, and a pardoned Jan. 6 defendant is charged with threatening to kill judges.
Come along for a read – and go vote!
‘Always Guilty’
On Monday, I spent time in Dearborn – the hometown of Ford Motor Company and the city with proportionally the largest Muslim population in the country. There, I met Michigan state Rep. Alabas Farhat, who I was surprised to learn was one year my younger, 26.
He invited me to join him at Al Ameer – a longtime local favorite that’s hosted the likes of Bill Clinton (who, once upon a time, encouraged a valedictorian Abdul El-Sayed to run for office). Farhat was quick to point to the portrait of Clinton’s 2016 visit on the wall the moment we stepped inside.
We shared a table’s worth of tomatoes and cucumbers and hummus and pita and fresh falafel and mujaddara, and talked about Muslim-sounding names and Nazis and which gets more scrutiny in the United States of America.
The meal was one of a series of conversations I had with Muslim and Arab Americans, to listen to their experiences of living in a nation governed by a political party that largely hates them, overseen by a man who has sought to ban and criminalize and deport and bomb people who look like them.
We had these conversations near the end of a long and heated election season that’s seen vicious racism and Islamophobia hurled not just at Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, but at the hundreds of thousands of people in the state who look or pray like him.