In Wednesday’s televised debate between the candidates for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed (D) once again faced criticism over his personal and family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. State and Treasury Departments designated branches of the organization as terrorist organizations in January because “they explicitly and enthusiastically support terrorist groups like Hamas.” But, once again, El-Sayed vehemently denied the allegations. The denials are unsurprising (what was he supposed to say?). But the denials also provide a reminder that most politicians read from the same cynical playbook.

Former FBI agent and Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) did not beat around the bush. “Being bought off by the Muslim Brotherhood, having donors to his campaign from Hamas that support Hezbollah is not a problem?” he challenged El-Sayed. “If you are going to go to the United States Senate, we need to know: are you for America or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?”

El-Sayed responded, “He keeps raising this question about this association with an organization I’ve never been a part of, because my mom, who’s a nurse in Missouri. It doesn’t make any sense. And it’s actually really quite beneath you, Mike. It’s really quite beneath you to call into question my loyalty to the Constitution.”

But Rogers is not the only one raising these questions. The issue came up in an interview with NBC News last week, prompting El-Sayed to respond, “I have no ties, we have no ties.”

The reason why the media and other candidates keep talking about El-Sayed’s family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood is that his family members themselves made the connection. In 2012, El-Sayed’s half-sister Eman Abdelhadi tweeted that her family in Egypt “has long been MB” and “supports the #MB in Egypt.” Abdelhadi, a professor at the University of Chicago, has since celebrated the anniversary of October 7.

In 2012, El-Sayed himself expressed support for the Islamist president Mahamad Morsi, who came to power after the Arab Spring, and who openly allied with the Muslim Brotherhood. Days after he granted himself broad new powers, 46 “leaders of the Egyptian community” in the U.S. signed a letter to “support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president” and “call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.”

The 33rd signature on that letter was “Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed” of New York, corresponding to El-Sayed’s time at Columbia University.

“El-Sayed has never addressed why he decided to sign the 2012 letter making the ask of Egypt’s then-Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi,” noted the Washington Free Beacon, “and has repeatedly ignored Free Beacon inquiries about the matter. His campaign even refused to discuss the letter for a sympathetic New York Times piece published Wednesday that discussed El-Sayed’s Muslim Brotherhood ties.”

Perhaps the reason why El-Sayed has refused to address the letter is because getting into the specifics of his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood would make his frequent denials harder to sustain. El-Sayed could not even claim, for example, that such ties are from a misguided era of his life, and that his convictions have drastically changed. El-Sayed’s views have remained substantially the same since the first Obama administration (when he also published his research on “interethnic mating”).

Indeed, according to the Free Beacon, at least six men who co-signed the 2012 letter with El-Sayed have donated $25,850 to his 2026 Senate campaign, and at least three donated to his 2018 campaign for governor. Among these figures are Dr. Hany Saqr, who was listed in a 1992 phone directory for Muslim Brotherhood leaders, which federal authorities “seized from the Virginia home of an alleged Hamas operative.”

In other words, the evidence tying El-Sayed at least to the social network of the Muslim Brotherhood is strong enough to warrant a more substantive response than repeated bare denials.

Unfortunately, politicians have long found it expedient to lie rather than admit to damaging information. As Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in 1513, “the prince [or any ruler] must consider … how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible.”

To this end, and many others, Machiavelli counseled public officials to engage in shameless deception. “Our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word,” he wrote. “But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.”

Indeed, that calculation lies behind every lie of every politician: “he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.”

In particular, Machiavelli applied this counsel of deception to a governing official’s moral character. “It is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them,” he wrote. “To have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright.”

El-Sayed is not the first politician to respond to allegations with firm and repeated denials. Some, perhaps, were accused without merit, and simply made no elaboration because they had nothing to add. But the sinful nature of man and the ambition of his heart make it certain that many politicians have also denied allegations that were true — at least until a convenient time (like after an election). Examples (of both parties) are not hard to discover, but the most pressing issue is El-Sayed, who appears to be deceiving Michigan voters as to his true feelings towards an anti-American terrorist organization.