Haley Stevens Condemns Anti-Israel Ad Backing El-Sayed
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Right 50%
1 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) criticized a political advertisement shared by Cenk Uygur’s Rebellion PAC promoting Abdul El-Sayed, who had defeated Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The ad showed a couple in a grocery store putting items back because they could not afford them, attributing the shortfall to funding wars on Israel’s behalf; Uygur, host of The Young Turks, presented it as a “new” Rebellion PAC ad and said former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) had been “bought” by Israel after promising to serve Israel “unconditionally.” In an X post, Stevens called this “type of fearmongering about Israel” wrong, said it “does nothing to help Michigan Democrats win up and down the ballot in eight days,” and argued against “blaming the high costs of our goods on the only Jewish homeland in the world.” The grocery-store scene had appeared in an ad for Uygur’s 2024 presidential campaign—launched in mid-October 2023 and suspended on March 6, 2024—and had been on YouTube for more than two years. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” asked whether she would stand “fully” with El-Sayed, Stevens said she was “still on the team.”
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
The commercial Uygur billed as new is old campaign footage, and only right-leaning coverage says so. The Hill presents a Rebellion PAC spot as a new anti-Israel attack without dating the footage. Daily Wire reports the ad's grocery-store scene first ran in Uygur's own presidential campaign and has been on YouTube for well over two years. A reader who never sees that timeline cannot tell a current Michigan ad from recycled video being reissued for this race.
The two sides do not even agree on what kind of attack this is. Daily Wire calls it an "openly antisemitic ad." Left-leaning coverage stays with Stevens's charge of fearmongering and never applies that word.
Who in El-Sayed's campaign, if anyone, authorized Rebellion PAC to air this spot as support for him?
Bottom line
Stay with The Hill and this is a new Rebellion PAC ad. Daily Wire is the outlet that dates the grocery-store clip to Uygur's 2024 campaign, already on YouTube for well over two years.
The receipts — 5 facts one side's coverage lacks
- The grocery-store scene first ran in Uygur's 2024 presidential campaign and has been on YouTube for well over two years
- Uygur's presidential campaign launched in mid-October of 2023 and was suspended on March 6, 2024
- The ad shows a couple putting groceries back because they cannot afford food while funding wars on Israel's behalf
- Stevens said Democrats should not blame high costs on the only Jewish homeland in the world
- Uygur said Mike Rogers promised to serve Israel unconditionally but never made that promise to voters
The Left View
The Hill frames Stevens’s remarks as a slam of Uygur’s “anti-Israel ad,” foregrounding her label of “fearmongering” and her comment that the Rebellion PAC spot “really rubs me the wrong way.” Coverage presents a Democratic House member rejecting the message as both wrongly aimed at Israel and electorally unhelpful in Michigan.
The Right View
The Daily Wire frames the episode as “Dem on Dem violence,” stressing that El-Sayed’s defeated primary opponent put what it calls an “openly antisemitic” ad “on blast.” It highlights that Uygur’s supposedly “new” spot reused years-old presidential-campaign footage, that he accused Rogers of serving Israel rather than voters, and that Stevens would not stand “fully” with El-Sayed, saying only she was “still on the team.”
Our Take (balanced)
Stevens’s strongest argument is that tying household hardship to Israel is “fearmongering” that neither explains prices nor helps Democrats win, with cost relief, in her telling, running through housing, health care, and the tax code rather than blame on “the only Jewish homeland in the world.” The Daily Wire’s strongest argument is that the recycled grocery-store frame plus Uygur’s “bought” by Israel charge is “openly antisemitic” scapegoating, and that Stevens’s blast and refusal to stand “fully” with El-Sayed expose a live Democratic split. The central unresolved tension is whether the ad is a critique of U.S. war spending and aid or antisemitic fearmongering—and how far that disagreement runs inside the Michigan Democratic ticket.
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