In what may have been the most explicitly racist rant out of the Republican Party this campaign season, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday broadly disparaged Arabs and Muslims, saying, “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce — they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Field prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

Kennedy was arguing against the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. After Kennedy was rightly criticized for his rhetoric, he doubled down Friday with a nearly 4,000-word post on X that contained even more anti-Muslim hatred and offensively pitted Jewish people’s accomplishments against what he says are Muslims’ lack of accomplishments.

“It’s going to be a hate election,” one Republican operative told Axios in July. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”

As they fear a historic defeat in the midterm elections, Republicans all over the country are making a desperate wager. Like a gambler whose pockets are almost empty, they’re putting their last chips on the square marked “bigotry.”

“It’s going to be a hate election,” one Republican operative told Axios in July. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”

This campaign of hate targets El-Sayed, but it’s not only directed at him, and the implications are broad and wide. Republicans are also unabashed with disparaging Latinos, Somalis (who are generally Muslim) and transgender people.

If he wins, El-Sayed will be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. And in the campaign’s closing weeks, Republican rhetoric about him — which has always been full of dark innuendo clearly meant to play to anti-Muslim bigotry — has shifted into an uglier register.

“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” President Donald Trump said at a rally in Michigan. He likes to call El-Sayed “Mohammed,” in case anyone missed the point. Vice President JD Vance accused El-Sayed of “engag[ing] in explicitly anti-white racial hatred,” not bothering to cite anything “anti-white” El-Sayed has ever said.

Every American Muslim is well familiar with the charge that simply by virtue of their identity, they must be terrorists, or at least sympathize with terrorists.

“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,” said El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, in a debate.

With the governor’s race surprisingly close, Gov. Greg Abbott is charging that his opponent, Gina Hinojosa, who is Catholic, “supports Sharia law, she supports Sharia communities.”

“His family, they don’t just flirt with terrorism, they helped fund Osama Bin Laden,” said Sen. Tim Scott, offering one of the most outrageous claims.

Other senators have joined the chorus. Appearing at a rally in Ohio — not Michigan — Sen. Bernie Moreno called El-Sayed “just an affront to me as an American.” Not something El-Sayed said or did, but his very existence. “Do you think he understands that concept that our rights come from God Almighty? That Jesus came here for our salvation?” Moreno asked. In keeping with what El-Sayed told a man with Christian nationalist views in a viral moment two weeks ago, it seems that it’s Moreno, not El-Sayed, who is unclear about religious freedom and the Constitution.

Never one to miss an opportunity for demagoguery, Sen. Ted Cruz called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” said he could wind up on the Senate Intelligence Committee and then offered this prediction: “If I am correct that he is a passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result.” And if I am correct that Cruz is a cannibal serial killer, he might eat half his Senate colleagues, preventing the chamber from having a quorum for floor votes. I can’t be any less correct than Cruz is.

If there’s another epicenter of anti-Muslim bigotry outside Michigan, then it would have to be Texas, where the GOP primaries were a festival of hate-mongering as candidates competed with one another to see who could spew the most venom at their Muslim neighbors. And now with the governor’s race surprisingly close, Gov. Greg Abbott is charging that his opponent, Gina Hinojosa, who is Catholic, “supports Sharia law, she supports Sharia communities.” But worry not, good Christians of Texas. Abbot said, “What I’m focused on doing is making sure that we ban Sharia law, Sharia cities, Sharia compounds.”

Be racist but subtle about it used to be the Republican strategy, as legendary strategist Lee Atwater explained in a 1981 interview: Talk about “forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff,” and you expect the public to understand you’re being racist but you maintain plausible deniability.

No more. In the last election, Trump and Vance propagated one of the most repulsive lies in modern political history, saying that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets. Trump regularly goes on racist rants against Americans of Somali descent: “You know, 98% of the people that we have here [from] Somalia don’t work — they don’t really have to work because they steal so much … Can you believe [it], low IQ and they live better than you do.”

Meanwhile the White House promotes anti-Latino racism, and in this campaign, Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars fomenting hatred against transgender people, perhaps the most vulnerable and powerless minority group in the country.

The people who planned and executed this campaign of hate should never be forgiven. But in the end, the question we have to answer isn’t about them; their moral depravity is obvious. The question is about us.

Will we turn our backs on the idea of an America in which everyone can practice their faith, everyone has an equal right to participate in politics and everyone has an equal claim on our nation’s promise? Will we reward the politicians who want us to be our worst selves?

This election will give us one answer. But the question will come up again, because there will always be those who see bigotry as a tool they can use to achieve power. We just have to keep beating them.

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