The Left are out of tricks. Now it’s the same old tired playbook.
And Democrats showed their true colors with one move anyone could’ve predicted.
Two Rooms, Two Realities: How Wednesday’s Terrorism Hearing Split Into Dueling Narratives
By Wednesday afternoon, there were two completely different stories about what happened at the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the Muslim Brotherhood’s alleged U.S. network. One side showed up. The other didn’t. Here’s both versions.
Version One: A Hearing Nobody From the Other Side Would Attend
Sen. Ted Cruz opened the hearing by pointing directly at the empty seats across the dais. “You may notice that there are empty chairs on the Democrat side of the dais,” he said. “The American people should ask themselves why not a single member of the minority decided that a hearing on terrorism was worth their time? It is an embarrassment.”
Cruz didn’t stop at criticizing the absence — he tied it directly to that week’s headlines. “Abdul El-Sayed, the son-in-law of a leading member of several Brotherhood groups, won Michigan’s Democrat primary for U.S. Senate. Perfect timing for this hearing, probably explains why no Democrats are here and none intend to attend,” Cruz said. “Because their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”
Version Two: A “Political Creepshow” Not Worth Dignifying
The five Democratic subcommittee members — Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, Alex Padilla and Peter Welch — had announced their boycott in advance, framing it in a joint statement as a refusal to legitimize what they saw as a bad-faith exercise.
“Scapegoating Muslims may be a Texas Republican strategist’s idea of ‘solid gold’ to whip up their voters, but Democrats have no intention of indulging this political creepshow, particularly after the recent violence targeting places of faith,” the senators wrote. “Our focus is the costs families face thanks to rampant, non-stop Trump corruption.”
Blumenthal elaborated separately to reporters, calling the hearing potentially “an anti-Muslim, Islamophobia kind of show trial” — while noting he still planned to engage directly with Muslim community members concerned about the Brotherhood, which he called an organization that “appears to be a terrorist organization,” in the context of advocating for “tolerance and inclusion.”
The Testimony That Went Unchallenged
With no Democrats present to question her, retired FBI special agent Lara Burns delivered testimony that went essentially uncontested. Burns, who helped lead a terrorism-financing investigation against the Holy Land Foundation — once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. — argued that political discomfort shouldn’t determine which facts get examined.
“For decades, narratives have been intentionally seeded into public discourse that portray terrorist organizations as resistance movements,” she testified, adding that Americans cannot “ignore evidence introduced in federal court simply because that evidence is politically uncomfortable.”
“The history of this network is not in question,” Burns said. “It was made public decades ago, but few paid attention. Now is the time to pay attention and understand the facts.”
