El-Sayed and Watters clash in Fox News interview over culture war, gas prices

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D) on Monday clashed with Fox News host Jesse Watters in a wide-ranging interview that was often full of cross talk and covered culture war topics, the candidate’s faith and gas prices, among other topics.

El-Sayed, a progressive, appeared for roughly half an hour on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” where the host played clips of past comments from El-Sayed and attempted to challenge him on those subjects, sometimes abruptly moving on to the next topic.

The two quarreled over gas prices, as El-Sayed accused Watters of not seeming “to be upset” about how they have soared as a result of the Iran war. He made a dig at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, saying he was the “sixth host” on Fox News’s “The Five” and that he “wanted to raise our military budget to $1.5 trillion.”

“You don’t seem to be upset about that,” El-Sayed continued. “What, so we can fight a war we don’t know how to get out of, to raise our gas prices to $5 a gallon? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

The two talked over each other about the $7 trillion federal budget, with El-Sayed emphasizing President Trump’s words about the conflict ending not long after it began in February.

“You go to war and you tell us that it’s going to be a special military operation. That was February,” he continued. “We’re now in September almost, and we’re still fighting the special military operation. I mean, it’s not working for us.”

“We’re not really fighting it, it’s a blockade,” Watters said.

Watters pressed El-Sayed on past comments he made about Sharia law, the official law of practicing Muslims. El-Sayed, who is Muslim, once said people seeking a ban on Sharia law are the “same exact forces that drove Native peoples from their land two centuries ago, destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago, bombed a building decades ago and tried to ban Sharia law not a decade ago, but those forces are alive and well today.”

“Do you know what canon law is, Jesse?” El-Sayed said, referring to the religious laws of Christianity. “I assume you’re Christian, right?”

“All right, so canon law is the name for Christian law,” El-Sayed said. “I don’t begrudge you your right to practice your faith as you choose. I don’t know why the idea that I could practice my faith as I choose is a problem. Nobody is trying to push Sharia law on anyone else, just like, I hope, nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion.”

El-Sayed said lawmakers going after Sharia law “seems to me to be deliberately targeting the Muslim community.” Watters claimed that Sharia law in Michigan is “kinda scary” and said voters would not be for it.

“I don’t think that’s a good position,” Watters said.

“Nobody’s pushing it. No –– but Jesse, Jesse, nobody’s pushing it,” El-Sayed replied, before saying Michiganders “are worried about how they’re going to afford their gas.”

Watters later asked the candidate about his past comments referring to the NFL as racist and that activist and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick “was a good guy.” El-Sayed said he thought Kaepernick was a “pretty damn good quarterback” who “should have had several more years in the NFL.”

“The bigger issue that we have for football right now is I looked at ticket prices to try and go and see a game with my family,” El-Sayed said. “It’s astronomical, through the roof.”

Watters then asked about gender-affirming care for children. El-Sayed, a physician, said decisions like that should be made between a child’s doctor and their parents, not by the federal government. Watters pushed back by asking if the candidate thought “it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s thing a little?”

“Do you really want to have this conversation?” El-Sayed asked. “Are you circumcised?”

“Yeah, but I mean, that’s a personal question, doctor,” Watters exclaimed. “A circumcision’s different than castration.”

“It’s a problem that you think that you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor and a patient,” El-Sayed replied back. “And I’m just saying that, yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling. So if you really want to bring that up, you can. I just think you guys are really selective about how you want to go about these things.”

Asked about transgender athletes, El-Sayed pushed back on the question. Watters clapped back, claiming that it is “kind of a big thing if you’ve been following the news recently.”

“Please be serious,” El-Sayed replied. “I’m here with you, I want to talk about the issues that matter. Let’s talk about the things that people are actually talking about. … I know you guys are talking about that, but, like, most of the country’s not.”

El-Sayed won a narrow victory against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate earlier this month and will face off against Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) in November.