The attendee who pressed Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood at a tense town hall this weekend was exposed as a former GOP staffer with “Christian nationalist ties,” journalist Marisa Kabas reported.
Saturday in Caro, Michigan, an attendee who identified himself as Tommy asked El-Sayed, who is Muslim, if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Islamist organization that the Trump administration designated as a terrorist group earlier this year.
El-Sayed said he “absolutely” disavowed the group, but pressed Tommy on his motivation for the question. After a tense back-and-forth, Tommy admitted that he suspected El-Sayed would have dual loyalties — a longstanding Islamophobic trope that casts Muslims’ faith as overriding their loyalty to the United States.
As first reported by Kabas on her Substack The Handbasket, Tommy was actually Thomas Teepell, who previously served as operations director for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) until February of this year.
Teepell’s father is Timmy Teepell, a GOP strategist who worked for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal through his climb from congressman to governor. Jindal is the founder of America Next, a conservative PAC that, according to The Michigan Daily, offered Republican college students $200 to travel to an El-Sayed event to “heckle” the Democratic candidate and ask provocative questions.
The revelations didn’t stop there.
Kabas also flagged Thomas Teepell’s ties to Sean Feucht, an ally to President Donald Trump who The Guardian described as “an election denier and leader in the Christian nationalist movement.”
As flagged by Kabas, a report from the Religion News Service described Timmy Teepell as “arguably” Feucht’s “most powerful ally,” and Thomas Teepell as an excited attendee at one of Feucht’s rallies. The report also noted that Timmy Teepell worked for Michael Farris, a conservative attorney who’s also been described as a Christian nationalist and “far-right political extremist.”
“So it appears that the ‘Tommy’ who questioned El-Sayed was no ordinary citizen of small-town Caro, Michigan, but a long-serving right-wing operative tied to Josh Hawley, Bobby Jindal, and one of the most influential Christian Nationalists in the country,” Kabas wrote.
“It appears he went to Caro looking not for real answers from the candidate, but a viral moment — which he got, just not in the way he expected.”
This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his. https://t.co/p09eMtsh0x
— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) October 18, 2026