Case file 11-02-B. Subject: a Michigan Senate candidate, a 60 Minutes camera, and the newest argument for opening the girls' locker room: phones exist.
I've been in the tunnels a long time. I've seen a mother rat chase a cat off her nest with nothing but rage and a bottle cap. She did not stop to ask whether the cat had already seen her kids on the internet.
Here are the facts, per the New York Post and the Daily Wire. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, sat down with CBS News' "60 Minutes" in an interview that aired Sunday, two days before Election Day. Correspondent Ross Douthat asked him about transgender athletes on girls' sports teams.
"I think we manufacture these social issues," El-Sayed said.
Then he explained why, and this is where the case file got thick.
"All the world's information [is] in your pocket," he said, per the Post, referring to smartphones. "The notion somehow that you are going to prevent your child from being exposed to something that you may find disagreeable, and that that is going to be because of school, is so profoundly outdated."
He added: "I think it's really important for us to recognize that the free flow of information is actually a beautiful thing."
Detectives, I put down my magnifying glass. I picked it back up. I put it down again.
Let me walk you through the logic as entered into the record. A parent in Grand Rapids is worried about who is changing next to her 15-year-old daughter after volleyball practice. The candidate's answer is that her daughter owns an iPhone.
By that standard, nothing is a problem anymore. Your kid can watch a car crash on YouTube, so why bother with seatbelts. He can Google a stranger's van, so the van is fine. She can read about a locker room, so the locker room is basically already open.
The parents didn't manufacture the issue. A Pew Research survey cited by the Post found 73% of Americans are uncomfortable with leaving girls' sports open to transgender competitors. That isn't a manufactured issue. That's a supermajority. In Washington, they'd call it a mandate. On 60 Minutes, apparently, they call it Wi-Fi.
His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, called the remarks "completely unacceptable." That was the short version. The long version is every mom in Michigan who drove 40 minutes to a Saturday tournament, paid to park, and is now being told her concerns came from her data plan.
He also said he is "not running to govern sports." Fair enough. He's running for the U.S. Senate, the body that votes on the laws that decide who plays on which team. Small detail. Easy to miss when the information is in your pocket.
I took the case back down to the mother rat with the bottle cap. I read her the quote. I explained the free flow of information. She listened politely, then chased me out of the tunnel too.
Case remains open. The candidate says the issue was manufactured. The parents say they didn't build anything; they just showed up to the game. And the mother rat says she'd love to hear more about how beautiful the information is, from the other side of that bottle cap.
The Demorat is satire. This article is a parody based on real news reports and is not meant to be taken as literal fact.
The real story that inspired this
