The attendee who pressed Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood at a tense town hall this weekend was exposed as a former GOP staffer with “Christian nationalist ties,” journalist Marisa Kabas reported.
As first reported by Kabas on her Substack The Handbasket, Tommy was actually Thomas Teepell, who previously served as operations director for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) until February of this year.
Teepell’s father is Timmy Teepell, a GOP strategist who worked for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal through his climb from congressman to governor. Jindal is the founder of America Next, a conservative PAC that, according to The Michigan Daily, offered Republican college students $200 to travel to an El-Sayed event to “heckle” the Democratic candidate and ask provocative questions.
Holy masterclass batman. I’m not sure Tommy realized just how much he got schooled in that moment.
Of course it’s a far right wing extremist
Well obviously. He revealed his cards when he admitted before walking out that he won’t respect Abdul’s right to freedom of religion, despite the fact that Abdul respects his.
Jesus could turn water into wine, but a Christian Nationalist can turn alcohol into domestic violence.
This unfortunately, too real
Thomas Teepell was basically projecting? They have dual loyalties, one to a secular government, and a second to Christianity.
I wouldn’t say they’re doing well at either of those projects tbh.
I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
So this Tommy chud is one of those paid actors Republicans are always shrieking about, huh?
Tommy too. No offense to “Tommy” name havers; but holy shit, you drop it to Tom around the same age you stop wearing baseball caps backwards. This guy isn’t even following basic white cis-het male rules.
Something something accusations and projections…
They’re always harping on about paid actors because they’re doing it themselves and they just assume that everyone else is as well.
It’s the poor empathy thing again. They can’t really imagine someone else as different than themselves.
Abdul: So I’m going to ask you, do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?
Tommy: I do not.
Abdul: You don’t disavow that. So, I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me.
El-Sayed played him like a fiddle. Rock on.
I hate Republicans like I’m so past the point of tolerating them but damn if I didn’t self-cringe listening to that ass whooping poor little Tommy just got
Must’ve been such a deer in the headlights moment for him. He didn’t even do what Republicans do best and lie
Found the 4 minute exchange shown in the article on El-Sayed’s BlueSky instead of xitter: https://bsky.app/profile/abdulelsayed.bsky.social/post/3my4gocauzs2x (Another person posted a Mastodon re-up if you prefer that)
It’s worth a watch, it’s so good that you’d think El-Sayed’s campaign tried to set this moment up yet in fact it’s the right-wing provocateur that came in thinking they could get soundbites insinuating Abdul is a terrorist, but went away with their clock cleaned instead.
I only saw the first 2.5 minutes previously, but the finish is baller. El-Sayed has some swagger
I hope enough Michiganders agree with me Nov 3
This so much… I would have easily believed that they paid this creep to show up and blow the dog-whistle.
The response was so perfect that it feels like a campaign stunt.
Now it’s blowing up everywhere and people get to see both how incredibly poised Dr. El-Sayed was as he explained his position (especially with the stark comparison to how the GOP typically handles people who ask them unfavorable questions at events) AND that it’s really the GOP pulling pathetic stunts like this with paid actors.
This guy and candidates like him give me a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe we can find some real leadership out there and start getting this disaster of the past decade turned around. Small hope mind you, but it’s definitely there.
I agree the response is so good that it feels scripted, but the truth is probably that he has it kind of scripted in his head. He’s probably dealt with similar questions or attacks many many times so by now it’s not surprising that he has this type of immaculate answer to it ready to deliver.
I had just already assumed that, but good to know it’s been confirmed.
And dude was properly shutdown by El-Sayed and exposed for the hypocrisy him and his group stand for.
*he and his group
“Him and his group” is grammatical here for some dialects of American English (and maybe others too).
One common explanation for this phenomenon is the linguistic idea of “default case”, but first we have to explain the idea of “case”.
Personal pronouns in English change form depending on where they are in the sentence; the first-person personal pronoun, for example, is “I” when it appears in (or “is licensed by”) subject position, and is “me” everywhere else. This difference based on syntactic (word) position is one example of a widespread crosslinguistic phenomenon we call “case”. We usually say that “I” is “Nominative” case, and “me” is either “accusative” or “oblique” case.
Anyway, “default case” is the idea that each language picks a case to appear in positions that aren’t licensed by specific syntactic positions.
In Modern English (but not older English!) the default case appears to be the accusative/oblique. This is why, in English, the answer to the question “Who wants ice cream?” is “Me!” and not “I!”
In Spanish, however, where the default case is Nominative, the answer is “Yo”, not “mí”.
The fact that default case has switched from Nominative to Accusative in English has had a number of effects over the years. Answering the phone, for example, has gone from the archaic “This is she” to the more modern “this is her”.
Copular/“be”-verb sentences like these are weird cross-linguistically anyway, and in this example the pronoun does not appear in a canonical subject position, which makes it much more likely to be affected/governed by default case. So, in older English we saw Nominative “this is she”, but in Present Day English we often get Accusative/Oblique “this is her” in many dialects.
Another place where case is famously wonky is with conjunctions, especially “and”. It seems that when a noun stands by itself, it always gets the expected case for that position (which, of course, is exactly what we would expect to happen), but when multiple nouns are joined by a conjunction in the same position, it’s common for default case to be assigned instead, which has led to the idea that “case-assigning positions” (in this case subject position) “can’t see down into the conjunction”.
This leads to interesting case alternations like “I went to the store”, but with a conjunction, “Me and him went to the store.”
And this is exactly what we see here. In these dialects we get the expected Nominative case when the noun appears by itself, but we instead get default case when the conjunction blocks case assignment (or feature agreement, or however your preferred theory of syntax deals with case).
Interestingly, as a result of the pedantry seen in your comment and, more importantly, displayed by English teachers for at least the past hundred years, we’ve seen a series of interesting, unexpected results.
First was simple hypercorrection. After being corrected so long for saying “me and him” in subject position, the chastised speakers began changing “me and him” to “he and I” everywhere, not just in subject position.
This has led to sentences like “Jane went to the store with he and I” (where “him and me” is usually prescriptively considered “correct”) becoming incredibly common in many dialects of American English.
Even further, and more interesting to me, however, is that this seems to have started becoming a marker of politeness, or even professional jargon.
For example, when writing work emails, I have to consciously make myself write a sentence like “Jane went to the store with him and me”, because not using “he and I” feels unprofessional somehow, even though it’s prescriptively “correct”.
A similar example of corporate pronoun jargon weirdness under a conjunction can be seen in the use of “myself” instead of “me”. For example, in a formal business meeting a person giving a presentation might say something like “If you have any questions, you can direct them either to Jane or myself”, when according to prescriptive grammar rules “me” would be “correct” here.
Anyway, language is fun and weird, and its only constant is that it is always changing!
You are clearly more educated than I (or me) about the evolution of English but I will go to my grave bristling at this usage. Luckily for all y’all, I’ve one foot in already. But when “Bob and me” agree to be my pallbearers, I will literally sit up in my casket and scream my head off.
I think it’s perfectly fine to have personal preferences. That’s only human. I, for example, get driven up the wall by the new usage of “weary” to mean “wary” or “leery” (which are also the two words that got blended to form this new “weary” form). As in, “I want to be excited about the new Star Wars Galactic Racer game, but I’m weary that it’ll have some AAA bullshit that will ruin my experience.”
The important things are to remember 1) that these preferences are subjective, not objective, and 2) to make sure that we don’t treat people differently or look down on them because of the way they speak (or write).
Edited for clarity
This particular abomination/identity crisis seems to creep in when people are trying to sound sophisticated, and i just can’t with it.
I should know better than to argue with you about linguistics (because I remember you have an advanced degree in it from a previous conversation), but…
I’m going to go ahead and put my foot down and say that using “weary” to mean “wary” is just wrong usage. Like saying “it would be hoo of you” instead of “it would behoove you.” It’s just bone-apple-tea seen in the wild.
Now I will agree with point 2 in that it isn’t grounds to look down on someone or treat them poorly. If it’s in a context where it can be gently corrected without patronizing, it should be. Otherwise we should just let it go. But that doesn’t make it any less incorrect.
Any attempt by phd candidates to retrofit an explanation for it is just “explaining away” and reflects more the overly-permissiveness of modern academia and the hesitancy (especially in humanities fields where subjectivity is like water to a fish) to make firm corrections, especially in cases where cultural relativity might be argued.
I mean sure, language evolves and theoretically a dialect could emerge in which words that previously meant some things could take on completely different meanings. But if we accept that as the official “correct” stance in the field of linguistics, then the field of linguistics itself loses relevancy. Because if nothing can be wrong, then nothing can be correct either. Words will lose their meanings over time and it will become impossible to communicate across cultural barriers. You can already see this phenomenon if you pay attention to words that have taken on euphemistic meanings, especially in the contexts of intergenerational communication, which I would argue is a form of cultural barrier. For instance, “pussy” still means “cat” to many people of a certain age. That’s an extreme example, but that sort of thing can create miscommunications. Especially when it comes to more obscure innuendos or newer ones that aren’t as widely familiar to people.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to innuendo though. The whole basis of language is a mutual understanding of represented meanings. If we lose that consensus, then language itself begins to break down and become no longer an effective basis for communication. Carried to extremes, we find ourselves returning to meaningless/inarticulate grunts (not that we’re likely to reach that extreme, especially not within the lifetime of anyone living today; but it’s about the trajectory).
First of all, thanks for the response! I love talking about this stuff, and will do so every chance I get!
using “weary” to mean “wary” is just wrong usage. Like saying “it would be hoo of you” instead of “it would behoove you.” It’s just bone-apple-tea seen in the wild.
Language as a system is inherently a constant, mass negotiation among its users. Its relationship to meaning is (with a tiny number of exceptions) completely arbitrary, which means that if speakers unconsciously agree to use “it would bee hoo of you” to mean “it would behoove you”, then that is literally the correct usage. Merriam-Webster agrees with me - language is defined by usage, not by an obsolete code of speakers priviledged enough to have access to the secret knowledge of “correct grammar”.
There is an argument that using “weary” in this way is still marginal, and so is still ungrammatical for most speakers (myself included), but it’s definitely widespread enough for a linguist to consider it correct for many younger speakers (even if it irks me to admit it).
If it’s in a context where it can be gently corrected without patronizing, it should be.
This depends on your perspective, I suppose. Few people actually understand how language works, and even fewer are willing to be non-discriminatory in practice, which means that, unfortunately, using a word that others perceive as “incorrect”, even when they’re wrong about that (which is pretty much always, including here), can have negative social consequences.
For this reason, and this reason alone, I can support the idea of gentle correction.
However, if by some miracle humans become less tribalistic, and start treating language descriptively and objectively, then there will no longer be a reason to “correct”, because we will have realized that there was nothing to correct in the first place.
(Note that this obviously excludes children and second language learners - they do produce ungrammatical sentences, but this is categorically different than saying “weary” instead of “wary”.)
Any attempt by phd candidates to retrofit an explanation for it is just “explaining away” and reflects more the overly-permissiveness of modern academia and the hesitancy (especially in humanities fields where subjectivity is like water to a fish) to make firm corrections, especially in cases where cultural relativity might be argued.
I was a (non-tenured) professor of linguistics for almost a decade, not just a PhD candidate.
Also, this isn’t “explaining away”. Linguists have known that this is how language works since at least the late 1800s, and especially by the time of de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” in the early 1910s, so I’m not sure where you’re getting “the permissiveness of modern academia”.
Language is a system built on usage, and it’s been known that that was the case for the majority of the time that we’ve been studying it scientifically. See Merriam-Webster’s article above - this is a fact that is universally accepted not only by linguists, but also by lexicographers. Merriam-Webster does have a disambiguation page on “weary vs. wary”, but I can guarantee you than within a decade they will have updated their definition to reflect usage.
I mean sure, language evolves and theoretically a dialect could emerge in which words that previously meant some things could take on completely different meanings. But if we accept that as the official “correct” stance in the field of linguistics, then the field of linguistics itself loses relevancy. Because if nothing can be wrong, then nothing can be correct either.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the study of linguistics (which is understandable, since it’s unfortunately not a commonly understood field among laypeople). Linguistics is the study of the human capacity to produce a system that we call language. The only thing we care about is accurately describing the nature of that system and how it exists in the mind of a speaker.
We have no interest in what people think is “right” or “wrong”, because these value judgments are subjective and do not in any way reflect linguistic reality - we only care about the nature of the system itself as it is actually spoken by humans, and this has always been the case.
However, we do make a distinction between utterances that are grammatical and those that are ungrammatical. This is defined, of course, by usage, and it is naturally consistent and rule-governed in all languages/dialects, both standard and nonstandard. A grammatical utterance is one that would be unconsciously produced by the linguistic apparatus of a native speaker of a language, and an ungrammatical utterance is one that would not be produced by that system.
In fact, linguistically defined, if it takes conscious effort for you to not split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions, then speaking “correctly” is actually ungrammatical!
Words will lose their meanings over time and it will become impossible to communicate across cultural barriers. You can already see this phenomenon if you pay attention to words that have taken on euphemistic meanings, especially in the contexts of intergenerational communication, which I would argue is a form of cultural barrier. For instance, “pussy” still means “cat” to many people of a certain age. That’s an extreme example, but that sort of thing can create miscommunications. Especially when it comes to more obscure innuendos or newer ones that aren’t as widely familiar to people.
Since the dawn of recorded history old curmudgeons who have seen their language change around them have decried how the youth are destroying language, how it will devolve into meaningless grunts and how we will lose all ability to communicate. This seems to be a human universal, from the ancient Greeks to the ancient Japanese.
However, after literally thousands of years of this “devolution”, we still haven’t seen this happen.
Why? Is it because we have righteous grammar warriors who fight the good fight of enforcing archaic and arbitrary restrictions?
Nope. It’s because all dialects, etc., still have self-organizing, well-defined rules of about the same general complexity. There is no “devolution” because language is an innate, universal human behavior that follows specific types of rules and general patterns. That is, linguistic systems’ interactive and negotiative nature means that they naturally self-correct - they don’t need anyone to do it for them.
As for the idea that English will splinter into unintelligible dialects, this is again countered by the facts of language usage. It’s currently valuable and important to English speakers across the world that they be able to communicate successfully with each other, and as long as this pressure exists, they will continue to be able to do so.
Once again, this isn’t because there’s a universal English police enforcing outdated rules like not splitting infinitives - it’s because the (incredibly large) speech community benefits from continuing to communicate, and so they will naturally, because that’s how humans are programmed.
To do so, of course, “English” defined broadly has already had a sort of lingua franca version of itself develop naturally, and each English-speaking place in the world already has their own variation of this organic “standard”, and yet they’re all still able to communicate among each other simply because it is necessary that they do so. Once again, this is not because of internet grammar Nazis, but because that’s literally how language works.
As for your example of intergenerational miscommunication, this will inevitably occur anyway due to language change. Miscommunication and ambiguity is inherent to language and cannot be legislated away, because, again, it’s inherent to the system.
Instead, when there is (inevitably) a miscommunication, the solution is quite simple. It’s the same solution older generations and younger generations have been using since the dawn of humankind: both speakers can simply explain what they meant, or define new terminology, and communication can proceed just as well as it did previously.
The whole basis of language is a mutual understanding of represented meanings. If we lose that consensus, then language itself begins to break down and become no longer an effective basis for communication.
This is correct, but as long as speakers are in communication with each other, this cannot happen, because that’s the nature of language. Language is communication, and its systemic nature is defined by that communication. This means that as long as communication continues to happen between the groups, their language will continue to be understandable.
Now, it is of course the case that if all communication suddenly ceased for a few hundred years, then yes, the two groups of speakers would likely lose the ability to communicate with each other. But in our modern world of super interconnectivity, that’s incredibly unlikely to happen among the vast majority of English speakers.
Carried to extremes, we find ourselves returning to meaningless/inarticulate grunts (not that we’re likely to reach that extreme, especially not within the lifetime of anyone living today; but it’s about the trajectory).
As explained above (and as demonstrated by thousands of years of human history), this trajectory does not exist, because that’s not how language works.
I hope this has been understandable and informative. I’m busy for the next four or so hours, but let me know if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense, or anything you’d like more detailed explanation of, and I’ll be happy to respond.
Again, I love talking about this stuff and will answer literally any question about linguistics that you’ll let me! :)
Being “weary” is being “tired”, is it not? It would seem to be a perfectly cromulent way to use the word.
They use it to mean “concerned” or “wary”. Like, “I’m kinda interested in the new Star Wars Galactic Racer game, but I’m weary that it’ll have some sort of AAA bullshit that will ruin my experience.” There are tons of grammar articles like this one from Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/weary-vs-wary-difference-usage) clarifying the two because of how common this has become in recent years.
I’ll edit my previous comment to make what I mean clearer.
Yes, understanding what a word means helps. I use weary, leery, and wary distinctly as I know their definitions. Being an imperfect human I also conflate other words sometimes. When it does happen, and I catch it, I attempt to correct myself as I want to impart my thoughts in a clear and comprehensive manner. Mostly. 😬
Cromulent, indeed!
Everybody knows the answer to it, answer the question
This was so great. I got goosebumps. El-Sayed has impressed me with everything I have seen.
Right-wing extremist theocratic nationalist tries to accuse progressive/cosmopolitan candidate of ties to right-wing extremism and theocratic nationalism.
Typical republican projection seen in action. I’m glad El-Sayed called it out for what it is. He seems very dextrous when it comes to being put on the spot by right-wing reactionary pundits/agitator-provocateurs.
Also, I recognize Josh Hawley’s name from 2021; pretty sure he was one of the first few congresspeople to excuse trump’s incitement of the insurrection.
The way Tommyboy just left with his tail between his legs 🤌
Bye bitch
Link to the clip this article is referring to
I heard Ted Cruz is posting a video of this interaction and is calling it a win for republicans. I dont visit those sites so I did not confirm.
Ted Cruz would call Trump shitting himself a win for Republicans
First of all, it was a grown man who introduced himself as Tommy, whose father goes by Timmy, who worked for a politician named Bobby. What’s with these weirdos who never transitioned from their elementary school names?
Secondly, what’s the deal with these White Christian Nationalists dogging anyone else over their religion? These delusional Christian psychos are literally no different from the Muslim extremist psychos they condemn. They are two sides of the same coin.
Abdul should have asked Tommy if he disavows White Christian Nationalism.
… he did, didn’t he?
He did and Tommy said no.
a grown man who introduced himself as Tommy, whose father goes by Timmy, who worked for a politician named Bobby.
It’s the South, what do you expect
It is definitely a thing in the South, and didn’t realize it until I moved out.
Religon is on a pathway to kill humanity.
Religion is just the tool, it’s the antisocial and murderous reactionary ideologies pushed through major religions that allows it. Christianity in particular does have a lot of ways of condoning imperialism etc but I believe it can be for good, there have been numerous Christian groups that broke away from the mainstream and said that to follow the scriptures required a form of socialism. I was raised with a Buddhist leaning upbringing, and it instilled in me ideals like a respect for all life and different cultures, to persue a harmony between humanity and nature, but also allows a scientific and materialist view rather than pure idealism.
Idealism is a fraud
This seems completely expected.
