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Fear is all Republicans have, and they want you afraid of Muslims

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November's midterm elections, which will determine which political party controls Congress, are less than 10 weeks away. And Republicans, already likely to lose control of the U.S. House, are now in danger of losing the U.S. Senate too.

Time for a Republican boogeyman to frighten voters – a revival of Islamophobic rhetoric.

A standing election time tradition in the Republican Party is to pick some group – Chinese Americans during COVID-19, LGBTQ Americans in 2024 – to present as an un-American threat to the rest of us. But this Republican Party has run short of ideas on everything from how to fix our economy to which scary people we should be scared of.

So we're getting a retread.

Republicans want you afraid of Muslims

President Donald Trump made anti-Muslim prejudice a major part of his first campaign for president in 2016, and then applied it to how he ran his first term.

Two weeks ago, Trump sullied his second term some more by claiming at the White House, "We have jihadists being elected all over the place."

Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former Detroit public health official who won the Aug. 4 Democratic primary in Michigan for the U.S. Senate, is the new face of fear for the Republican Party.

U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, puts anti-Muslim prejudice at the very center of his campaign for........

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