This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Diesel hit a record $6.40 per gallon this morning, up 73 percent from a year ago. “Not really my problem,” you might be thinking. “I don’t drive a semi or excavator.”

But you know who does drive semis and excavators and all the other machines that rely on diesel fuel? The people who farm your food, ferry your online orders, and repave the streets in your neighborhood. All that means the price of diesel trickles down into virtually every segment of the economy. (We’ll get into that a bit more shortly.)

Like gas prices, diesel has been rising since the US war with Iran began more than six months ago. But this particular surge was also driven by two incidents in particular: an attack on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which has made it costlier and more time-consuming to get oil out, and a Ukrainian drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure, which has forced major refineries to scale back production.

In the aftermath of those attacks, President Donald Trump implored Ukraine to stop targeting refineries. His administration has also relaxed some labor rules for fuel-truck drivers in the hopes of getting more gas and diesel moving.

There’s reportedly also talk of invoking the Defense Production Act to scale up America’s refining capacity, or even restricting diesel exports to help drop domestic prices. Not on the solution list, notably: winding down the war in Iran, which kickstarted this whole thing. 

Go a little deeper

The cost of diesel quietly raises the price of many other goods and services. This is difficult to quantify, but researchers at Brown University estimate that the extra cost paid for diesel between the start of the Iran War and the time I’m drafting this newsletter works out to roughly $374 per US household. 

Part of that cost springs from the fact that so many commercial, agricultural, and industrial machines run on diesel fuel. At the risk of sounding like one of my toddler’s “things that go” books, the list includes semis, tractors, excavators, freight trains, buses, cargo ships, and garbage trucks — to say nothing of other machines, like heavy industrial equipment and backup generators.

But part of the cost also springs from the fact that demand for diesel fuel is, compared to other goods, pretty inelastic. When the price of regular gas goes up, consumers can cut back on road trips, opt for public transit, or even contemplate an EV purchase.

Diesel-dependent industries frequently lack those options, however. As one fuel industry analyst put it in a recent column for the trade publication Oil & Gas 360, a farmer halfway through the harvest — as many are right now — can’t just stop running a combine or tractor because diesel gets pricey. 

In other words, it’s difficult for businesses to avoid or offset the higher cost of fuel. And that makes it more likely that they’ll pass on the cost to consumers, even if they’re able to absorb it for a little while.

Where will you likely see those added costs first? Your grocery bill, for one. Look for price increases on highly perishable products that travel long distances, like milk, meat, fruits, and vegetables.

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➨ Gossip more ethically. Talking about other people is interesting, common, and — often! — quite fun. But it’s neither very kind, nor particularly moral, to reduce your acquaintances to conversational trading cards. So when you gossip, consider whether your story affords its subject “the concern and respect” you’d expect yourself. If not, try a safer conversational topic: stories about your own experiences. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that “money dysmorphia” is a real (and common!) cognitive bias? It describes the irrational feeling that money is tight, when you’re actually — on paper — doing just fine. 
• Today’s trivia: What is the name of the nursery rhyme character referenced in the movie Shrek’s interrogation scene? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for a large marine mammal that recently died at a US aquarium. That would be the whale — specifically, the beluga. Three beluga whales died in an eight-day span at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium in August.

Is AI going to kill us all? 

In Silicon Valley, it’s not such a novel question. But after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon quit his job last week and posted on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a lot more people are asking. 

“This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Coxon is far from alone in his assessment — some current Anthropic employees agree — but his post struck a particular chord. The AI industry quickly weighed in, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI research. Other AI leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have done the same.

To break down whether we really need to worry about a robot apocalypse, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Wired senior writer Maxwell Zeff. According to Zeff, “there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility.” But not everyone agrees, and they certainly don’t agree on what to do about it. 

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Zeff, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Are we all going to die at the hands of AI?

There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility. 

The thing that people have to understand is that Silicon Valley has been calling for added attention on AI safety for years. So when this Anthropic researcher said last week that he was worried that AI could kill humanity in the next few years, that was shocking to many people. My parents, my family called me, and they were worried, understandably. They asked me the same question: “Are we going to die?” 

And I had to tell them, these people have been worried about AI killing all of us for years, and now it seems to be breaking through.

What was it about this statement from Jacob Coxon that broke through?

I interviewed Jacob, and the thing he said to me is that he thinks this is just the right time. Anthropic is about to go public in what could be the biggest IPO ever. The Trump administration is focused on AI in a way that no other presidency has ever been before. And of course, yes, the Hugging Face incident everyone just heard about, you talked about it on your show a few weeks ago. 

People are starting to become aware that these AI systems are getting really good, and the companies that are building them don’t seem to understand how to control them. His tweet got more than 150 million views on X. It was heard around the world. And it also was a big wake-up call to lawmakers and leaders in Silicon Valley and saying, “This is a moment for action.”

Are there people who are pushing back?

One of the most interesting pushbacks that this got was from David Sacks, who is an adviser to the Trump administration on AI. He has called out a lot of this as “doomerism” and said that these calls for AI to slow down are the AI industry warning about the technology that they’re building and advocating for regulatory capture. 

There’s a lot of skeptics in Silicon Valley who think that this is just another person in the AI safety community that is blowing the whistle. The view of a lot of venture capitalists and investors and startup founders in Silicon Valley is that we don’t need some big regulation to protect us from AI risks. We just need to uplift more players in the space.

The skeptics don’t win the day. In fact, it’s the doomers and the fatalists who do, right? Because Jacob’s call only leads to more calls right up to the top of Anthropic.

What this all leads to is [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei [posting] a blog saying that we need to “pace the frontier.” This is a call for the entire AI industry, not just Anthropic, not just OpenAI, but also Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, all the big tech companies in America, to get together and slow down their AI development. 

This doesn’t mean they’re going to stop building AI altogether. They’re still going to put their products out into the world. They’re still going to try to improve them, but they just want to make it a little slower than it would be if it was completely uncontained.

Amodei really asks for three specific things: 

• The first thing is, AI companies should have these independent evaluators inside of them. This is a common thing in other industries like the banking industry or the airline industry. People come in to make sure that these companies are doing safe things. 

• The second thing is this collaborative effort from American AI companies [on safety], and that actually will need to involve the US government to allow this to happen. The US government, he says, may need to issue some sort of waiver, some sort of law that says they can go ahead and coordinate on safety. 

• The third thing is this international slowdown, this international agreement between China and the US and Europe to say, “Hey, we recognize that this is akin to a nuclear arms race and it’s too dangerous for all of us to be competing with each other.”

All these guys are responsible for the rapid acceleration of AI models in our lives, collaborations with the Defense Department, God knows what else. And they’re all coming out over the weekend at the exact same time after this whistleblower and saying, “Yeah, dude, slow this thing down. This thing’s crazy.” Should we be skeptical?

It is very fair to be skeptical of this claim. One thing that these AI companies have realized in the last year is that AI is extremely unpopular. Recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans think AI is developing too fast. They’re worried about it. They think it’s going to take their jobs. They are not big fans. Maybe you’ve heard — data centers are not very popular. 

By calling to pace the frontier and saying, “We’re going to slow our own development down,” they notched this up as a public perception win. This is them getting out in front of this and saying, “Hey, we want to be safe. We want to be responsible.”

They’ve seen what’s happened with Meta and what’s happened with social media companies in the last two decades, and they are really cognizant of trying to get out in front of that.

Is there any truth to this major first collective freakout we seem to be having right now?

There’s a fairly large camp of people inside of AI companies who genuinely worry about the safety of these AI models. 

To go back to the Hugging Face incident, this was a case where OpenAI was training thousands of AI systems internally, and the systems escaped the sandbox that OpenAI thought was isolated from the internet and hacked into another company’s production infrastructure. The agents were colluding together on something. They were trying to deceive the humans that were testing them. And this was all happening without OpenAI knowing what was going on. 

It’s hard to understand how much of a wake-up call this is to Silicon Valley, that they don’t have their AI models under control. People worry that while in this case there was not a ton of economic damage [or] damage to real humans’ everyday lives, it’s not unreasonable to think that more capable AI systems could hack into financial infrastructure, modern-day utilities, and more critical services that are based online. 

Dario Amodei says as much in his post, that he thinks that in six to 12 months, an AI system could take down the whole internet. It’s not just that they’re trying to protect their bottom line here. But it’s possible that these calls for safety are beneficial to the companies in more ways than one.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

I logged onto Slack this morning to find an incredible and indecipherable message from one of my coworkers. I briefly thought he was having a fever dream or I had forgotten how to read English. “Even some pro-Israel folks who hate Macklemore are ripshit at Robert Kraft for Streisand-effecting this guy,” the message read.

…included were several links that eventually helped explain why “Macklemore,” “Robert Kraft” and “Israel” would ever appear in the same sentence.

For those of you who have likewise not been following the fantastic implosion of Ed Sheeran’s ongoing tour, let’s break down this wild yarn. It begins with the washed-up millennial-cringe rapper Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, better known as Macklemore, who has lately a) taken up the cause of Palestinian independence and b) been opening for Sheeran on his blockbuster, 59-date Loop Tour. 

Macklemore’s advocacy has not sat well with many observers, for reasons general (Gaza is one of the hottest buttons on earth) and particular (the rapper has a documented history of apparently antisemitic behavior, which he has since apologized for). Last Friday, the artist Pink published a lengthy criticism of Macklemore’s on-stage polemic, writing that his comments and use of violent wartime imagery had frightened many Jewish people, including her.

Around the same time, Robert Kraft — the sports magnate and Donald Trump ally who owns Gillette Stadium, outside of Boston — also allegedly notified Sheeran that he would not allow Macklemore to play his late-September show. Macklemore was subsequently dropped from the full tour. 

Both he and Sheeran say multiple venues threatened to cancel if he continued to perform. And Kraft, who is Jewish, has also confirmed that he blocked Macklemore from playing at Gillette, citing both his recent advocacy and his “history of antisemitic rhetoric.” 

But this is 2026. The backlash couldn’t simply end there. On Tuesday, the remaining opening acts and Sheeran’s backing band all pulled out of the tour in protest of the decision to boot Macklemore.

Go a little deeper

The whole roiling mess has become a cipher of some of the biggest and most explosive topics in American culture and politics: the specter of antisemitism, the limits of free speech and “cancel culture,” and the stark generational differences in Americans’ views of Israel and Gaza. 

It’s arguably no coincidence that this particular controversy erupted on the tour of two musicians who are iconic among the 30- to 45-year-old set. American millennials, as a generational and political cohort, have grown sharply more critical of the state of Israel in the past 10 years — laying the groundwork for Gen Z’s high-profile pro-Palestinian activism and driving a larger narrative shift in US politics. 

This is, in some ways, an underappreciated dynamic in the debate over American support for Israel. Campus protests, organized by 20-something college students, have come to define young Americans’ growing disillusionment. Speaking on a podcast last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “there’s work to be done” to win over Gen Z, in particular. (Macklemore, who is 43, named his pro-Palestinian protest song “Hind’s Hall” in honor of the protests at Columbia.) 

But the attitudinal shift on Israel, especially on the left, began long before Gen Z became a major political force. Americans under 30 were, for instance, more likely to blame Israel than Hamas for the 2014 Gaza war. And during the mid-2010s, millennial activists sometimes wrapped Palestinian independence into broader social justice and anti-colonialist causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement. Several of the organizations that mobilized pro-Palestinian campus protests in 2024 had similarly been around for a decade or more.

Today, of course, the shift extends beyond progressive millennials: Sympathy for Israel is down among younger Republicans, as well. It has, in fact, declined sharply across generations. 

But over the past two years, the sharpest drop has been among Americans ages 35 to 54. In other words…the exact group of people who might still be jamming to Macklemore.

One link for later

➨ Start your holiday planning now. Extravagant, I know. But advance planning — in this case, incredibly advanced planning — can help you stick to a reasonable budget, reduce holiday stress, and ultimately yield a more meaningful, festive experience. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there are more than 10,000 SpaceX satellites orbiting Earth? Proposals to put data centers in space would require so many additional satellites that stars would become less visible.
• Today’s trivia: Three of which large marine mammal recently died at a Chicago aquarium? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022. That would be CODA — an acronym for “child of deaf adults” — which notably cast Deaf actors to play its Deaf characters. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The recent history of mail voting in the United States has more twists and turns than an Emmy-winning drama. But for the cause of democracy, at least, yesterday’s ending is a happy one.

On Monday, the Supreme Court definitively blocked President Donald Trump’s many attempts to sabotage voting by mail — opining, in a three-sentence brief, that Trump can’t implement his new rules for the 2026 midterms. Or for any election, probably. 

Those last-minute rules, you may recall, would have required states to adopt new ballot envelopes and upload absentee voters’ names and envelope barcodes to a still-nonexistent online platform. Many officials argued they couldn’t possibly adopt the new measures before midterm voting starts, which would essentially cancel mail-in voting in their jurisdictions. 

The Supreme Court, of course, has been broadly sympathetic to Trump’s legal antics, even when they appear to clearly flout law or precedent. But shutting down voting just before the midterms? That’s one bridge too far for them.

Go a little deeper

Hobbling vote-by-mail was just one of Trump’s plots to meddle in the midterms, however — and several of the others are still underway. Here’s where some of the president’s most significant election maneuvers stand today: 

How worried should you be going into the midterms? That, my friend, is a question to answer in your own little heart. But I’m taking my cues from Vox’s politics editorial director, Benjy Sarlin, who recently reminded listeners of our America, Actually podcast that there are many, many institutional and logistical barriers to many of Trump’s more concerning legal machinations. 

“We’re taking it very seriously here…and nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “But it is still a very difficult path [where] so far he has had zero success.”

One link for later

➨ Skip the shrimp. A new analysis by researchers at the University of Bath and Faunalytics, an animal welfare group, attempts to quantify the amount of animal suffering required to produce different factory-farmed foods. They concluded that eating smaller animals = causing greater suffering, simply because you have to eat — and, by extension, farm and kill — so many more of them.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that American founding father Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mastodons? It’s actually one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition.
• Today’s trivia: Which English-language remake of an older French film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the former pro hockey player who founded a major Canadian restaurant chain. That would be Tim Horton, whose eponymous cafes have occasionally gotten snarled in the trade spat between Canada and the United States.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.