On October 14, The Daily Signal headlined a film by its own contributor Steve Cortes as claiming Muslims want an Islamic state. In the film, that claim is one interviewee’s, made about three named politicians. “Documentary Claims” hands the sentence to a film, a speaker no reader can answer. The first paragraph of the same page names the owner: Daily Signal contributor Steve Cortes, maker of “Muslims and Michigan: Opposites Don’t Attract”. Lower down, the “Islamic state” line belongs to one interviewee, podcast host Larry Alex Taunton, and it is about Ilhan Omar, Sadiq Khan and Zohran Mamdani. The headline keeps the charge, drops the names, and puts a faith where three people stood. That swap is the tell to carry into the next headline: the group named where named people spoke. It rides the habit of us and them, where the other group’s one member stands for all of them and our side’s is the exception. The claim with no owner, a weasel word dressed as a film, lets it land without anyone saying it. Pew’s 2023-24 survey puts Muslim adults at 53% Democratic and 42% Republican, from 273 respondents with an 8.3-point margin. The filmmaker’s own words move along the same path. His October 7 launch post names “Anti-American radicals like Abdul El-Sayed and @Ilhan Omar”, and the same post says “Muslim mass migration will destroy our country.” Named people, then the group, then the threat. On October 12 he said the issue “could be determinative” in Michigan’s Senate race, where his own polling, he told The Daily Signal October 3, had El-Sayed four points ahead of Republican Mike Rogers. The article’s top photo is El-Sayed, who is not quoted in it.
