Why I’d Vote for “Obadiah Jesus”
Every election cycle, the political consultant class reaches into the exact same exhausted bag of tricks when they want to fear monger working-class voters. Tricks that distract them from the real issues that affect them; like doubling rent or medicine that costs as much as a car payment.
It’s an easy scheme: find a democratic candidate whose name isn’t Anglo-Saxton in origin. Then repeat it into a microphone with sinister inflection, and let societal fear and 9-11 trauma do the rest.
We’ve been watching it play out for weeks in the 2026 Michigan Senate race. Critics and Republican campaign ads keep leaning heavily on the Democratic candidate’s middle name: Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. They want suburban voters to hear “Mohamed” and imagine a shadowy threat to Western civilization. Framing him as an archaic caricature of a man instead of a guy trying to regulate price-gouging power utilities, corporate healthcare and housing monopolies. So let’s do something Washington strategists don’t expect: let’s translate both candidates’ names into plain English.
If you grew up in the English speaking western world, you probably know a dozen guys named Josh. You went to school with a Josh. A different Josh coached your kid’s Little League team. Maybe a Josh fixed your transmission. Josh is the quintessential, harmless guy-next-door name.
Except “Josh” is just the informal name of Joshua. And Joshua is the direct English translation of the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic name Yeshua—the exact same name borne by Jesus of Nazareth. When translators converted the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, they wrote Joshua. When they translated the New Testament from Greek (Iēsoûs) into Latin (Iēsus) and eventually into English, they wrote Jesus. They are the exact same name.
Now look across the Mediterranean to the Arab world. The single most common name in that region is Mohamed. Why? For the exact same reason Western parents named their boys Joshua, John, Matthew, or James. They want to bless their newborn son with the name of a righteous prophet, hoping he’d grow up to be an honorable, moral man. To two billion Muslims, Mohamed is the Arabic cultural and devotional equivalent of Josh.
In Arabic, Mohamed comes from the root ḥ-m-d, simply meaning “the praiseworthy.“
And his first name? Abdulrahman breaks down into ‘Abd (“servant of”) and Ar-Raḥmān (“the Most Merciful”). So we’re criticising a name that means “servant of the most merciful and praiseworthy”. The ancient Hebrew Bible has the exact same name: Obadiah (‘Ōḇaḏyāh, “servant of Yahweh”). Strip away the right-to-left script, ignore the fact that his middle name is his fathers first name and the candidate being painted as an alien insurgent is literally Anglicanized as: Obadiah “Josh” El-Sayed.
Compared to “Mike Rogers” it sounds foreign, scary… different. So let’s do the same thing to his opponent, Michael Joseph Rogers. “Michael” is a historical Hebrew war-cry meaning, “Who is like God?”. “Joseph” originates as an agricultural prayer meaning “May God multiply the crops or sons.” While the last name “Rogers” comes from an old Germanic dialect, meaning “Son of the Famous Spear-Wielder.”
Put them side-by-side, and one guy is named after mercy and praise, while the other is named “who is like God may multiply his fruits as the child of a famous spearman”. If it sounds like word salad it’s because it reduces to linguistic gobbledegook. If voters actually judged our two candidates by what their ancient roots say, we’d be picking between an Old Testament monk and a Saxon tribal warlord.
So why does the media play this game every eighteen months? Because of our society’s codependency on Middlemen. Throughout human history, established power structures have despised two things above all else: outsiders who rise from nothing, and movements that bypass traditional upward movement. Keeping voters distracted by rage bait and manufactured identity panic are good for securing established business interest and their corporate sponsors.
When the historical Muhammad united the fractured tribes of 7th-century Arabia, the established merchant aristocracy in Mecca panicked because an orphan with no royal blood was telling people that character mattered more than inherited wealth. When early Islamic thinkers jump-started the scientific revolution—arguing that studying medicine, algebra, and the movement of the stars was an act of worship—they cut out the need for superstitious middlemen.
So when a doctor and epidemiologist tells voters that access to lifesaving medicine shouldn’t depend on a private insurance company’s quarterly profit margin, the corporate donors panic all over again. Entrenched political and corporate monopolies survive by keeping the public artificially divided. If a consultant or PAC can get you arguing over whether a candidate’s name sounds “too foreign,” you won’t notice that both your grocery and utility bills are being price-gouged by the very PACs funding those ads. They want you terrified of a 7th-century name so you don’t look at a 21st-century business practice. It’s more imperative than ever though that we look past the illusion if we ever want to reign in the expenses dragging down our lives.
I get it, 9/11 created generational trauma the likes of which the United States hadn’t seen since 1941. Conflating the actions of a few murderous individuals with that of an entire culture is never a good place to stand. By that token should we judge every Christian by the actions of abortion clinic bombers or the Westboro Baptist Church?
Ancient history was brutal across the globe. The Romans clear-cut entire forests in Judea to crucify dissidents by the thousands while calling it the “Pax Romana”, or “Roman Peace”. The Byzantines held down political rivals and poured boiling vinegar into their eyes in the name of imperial Christian order. Tribal Arabia fought generational blood feuds over water rights.
Every modern society dragged itself out of a violent past. But holding a modern American candidate responsible for ancient Near Eastern geopolitics—simply because his parents gave him a common, loving blessing name forty years ago—is pure theater.
A name doesn’t vote on the Senate floor. A name doesn’t set the price of prescription drugs, fix crumbling water pipes, or vote on whether your job gets shipped overseas.
The next time an attack ad tries to scare you with a candidate’s middle name, ask yourself: “what are they trying to distract me from?”
I don’t care if a man’s name traces back to a famous spear, a Hebrew or Arabic prophet. I care whether he answers to corporate lobbyists or the working people he’s sworn to serve.
And on that metric, I’ll take Obadiah Jesus every single time.