Lame Democrat endorses lamer Democrat.

“As Governor I’ve had one strategy. Get. Things. Done.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declares from a kitchen table in what appears to be a tradwife frock.1

“That strategy informs everything that I do. And that’s why I’m endorsing Haley Stevens for the U.S. Senate.”

“JUST like me, Haley will do whatever it takes to get things done for the people of Michigan.” [What fucking things? Stevens has been famously evasive about her policy plans).

Stephens is a “centrist” Democrat—you know, the kind that are the future of the party because young voters find them profoundly inspiring—perhaps best known for giving a fiery speech in which she yelled, "ISRAEL COMES TO ME IN MY DREAMS!"

Abdul El-Sayed, an American of Egyptian descent, has been critical of Israel, or more specifically of sending U.S. tax dollars to Israel to murder kids. He’s by far, clearly, the better candidate: young, attractive, thinks on his feet, has truly progressive politics and doesn’t have wet dreams about a foreign apartheid state committing genocide with U.S. dollars.

Whenever he’s asked about Israel, and he’s always asked about Israel because he’s Muslim, he deftly points out that he prefer U.S. tax dollars be spent fixing Michigan schools. Despite the inoffensiveness of that position, Stevens is slightly edging him out in polls after a mountainous influx of cash from pro-Israel groups. The campaign against El-Sayed is as hideous as any in recent memory, with baseless insinuations of sexism, racism, entirely invented links to the disgraced Grant Platner, a fake flyer claiming he’d been endorsed by the Republican incumbent Mike Rogers, and some lady in the Democratic state apparatus claiming that he plays Arabic music at his events.

Let’s take a look again at Whitmer’s pitch: they’re both girl bosses2 WHO GET THINGS DONE FOR THE PEOPLE OF MICHIGAN.

Respectfully, I’d like to bring up something Whitmer did not get done for a person of Michigan.

In 2017, I got an assignment to profile pot prisoners with outrageous prison sentences. One of them was Michael Thompson. In 1994, Thompson had sold three pounds of pot to the manager of a car muffler shop in Flint, Michigan. It turned out the man was an informant working with a Michigan drug task force. After Thompson’s arrest, they searched his house and found a few guns.

He was sentenced to 40-60 years. In the more than 25 years he’d spend in Michigan prison, he lost his only son and his mother, whose funeral he attended in shackles.

I’d write about the case for years, getting to know Michael to the point where he’d nag me to drink tea with honey if he detected a cough with the same tenacity as my mother. Really the nicest, most inspiring man, who organized counseling sessions for young men behind bars, advising them to be better fathers and role models for their sons as he no longer had the chance. He watched murderers go free. He watched Michigan legalize weed, and politicos like Whitmer chirp about the economic benefits.

In 2019, after Michigan legalized marijuana I wrote a story for The Intercept that caught the attention of the activist Shaun King. King went nuts, making Thompson’s plight go super viral. He started a hugely popular campaign inundating Whitmer’s office with calls for the commutation of Michael’s sentence.

Here’s the point I’m getting at: in 2019, it is literally impossible for Whitmer’s office to have not been aware of the case. Secondly, she had 100% authority to grant clemency.

And she didn’t. He had to wait two years. It doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s a lot for a man in his late 60s. During that time he got a serious case of Covid. He was not in great shape—prison diet does not optimize health—and I seriously thought he’d die. At some point, because of Covid restrictions, he had to wash his clothes in the toilet. Whitmer could have freed him at any point.

But no, he had to go through the process. My stomach turned watching him genuflect before a smug parole board. You could tell they were probably going to — eventually! — set him free but he had to wait, to go through the process, the process being a proud, dignified man in his late 60s begging for forgiveness and promising he’d “changed,” eyes downcast—when the political establishment should have been begging him for forgiveness for taking more than two decades of his life.

Haley Stevens would not have freed Michael the first day she’d heard about his case. I think El-Sayed would have. No, not because I’m worshipful of any politicians (except Mamdani come on I’m only human) but because he clearly sees that young progressives want bold, controversial actions rooted in justice, not centrist platitudes and fealty to processes of an inhumane, broken system.