This past Sunday, Michigan Congresswoman and former Michigan Senate Primary candidate Haley Stevens broke with her party to endorse the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers. This development comes after both a contentious primary and an intense personal feud between Stevens and the Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. This also comes after Steven’s fiance, Jason Turkish, had endorsed Rogers three days prior. The real question is: How did we get here, and what does this mean for the remaining days before the race? To really understand how we got to this point, we must look at the critical issues and positions that were expressed by Stevens and Sayed during the Democratic primary. Rep. Stevens is staunch supporter of Israel and the war in Gaza, denying genocide and advocating for continued military support to the Israeli government. Dr. El-Sayed is the antithesis of these positions. He has consistently acknowledged the UN-backed categorization of Israel’s actions as genocide, does not support continuing military aid to Israel, and has advocated for redirected domestic spending for Michigan and the rest of the United States. It has been made evidently clear in the United States that aid to Israel and the conflict in Palestine have increasingly dominated election and news cycles. The more Israel has continued its brutalization of the Palestinian people and region, the more American political parties split and deviate from their policy agenda, preventing true progress. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been met by immense challenges to their unity and party solidarity. On the left, you have the Democratic Socialists that decry the smallest infraction upon their pretentious and unrealistic moral code, as seen with DSA and pro-Palestinian supporters protesting New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for attending a vigil for innocent civilians killed in the 2023 Hamas terror attack in Israel. On the right, you have a more right-wing populist faction that is undyingly loyal to President Trump. This has led to many political actors in the conservative world abandoning and attacking well established Republicans like Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, who was recently defeated in his Republican primary under accusations of antisemitism relating to his stance on the United States-Israel relationship. Another angle to look at here is private interest spending and donations. The American- Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent over $35 million in support of Steven’s primary bid, which resulted in making the Michigan Democratic primary for senate the most expensive in American history. Steven’s mutual embrace of private interest money explains well why she has now endorsed a man who has constantly spouted Islamaphobia, stood by President Trump’s demonstrably detrimental policy agenda, and is an overall antithesis of everything the Democratic party stands for. She has now become no better than the radical partisan actors of the new American political world, hell-bent on making one issue out of a plethora of policy positions, a dealbreaker in supporting the nominee of her own party. Her betrayal to not just the people of Michigan, but Democrats nationwide, will be immortalized as a catastrophic marker of the state of our political atmosphere. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole.
By Theodore Maher
Photo credit: CNN On Wednesday Oct. 28, Democrat Mary Peltola’s team was facing an investigation into attempts to have two Dan Sullivans run in the Alaskan senate race: Dan J Sullivan and Senator Dan S Sullivan, the Republican incumbent. Sullivan Jr. is an independent candidate and a former forestry technician with more than 20 years of teaching experience. His policies revolve around sustainable resource development, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare. New York Times reports that the Democratic nominee for Senate had spent months recruiting candidates to peel votes from Sullivan, who is the current U.S. senator seeking re-election for another six-year term. There seem to be attempts to recruit spoiler candidates in the Senate race. Does this mean there was election interference? President Donald Trump said that Peltola should drop out of the Senate race and be prosecuted, while Peltola’s team denies any wrongdoing. “I knew nothing about any other candidates on the ballot, except for me and the incumbent,” Peltola said. Based on these reports, I would like to say I agree with Trump and his comments regarding the matter. I’m concerned with voter confusion, as in someone who goes to vote for the senator on Nov. 3 would be confused as to why two similar names appear on the ballot. I also side with political integrity. In an ideal world, there is transparency and politics are void of corruption, but this is sadly far from reality. There are official investigations in the past where Peltola has acted out of character, such as using racial slurs, so she clearly isn’t who she portrays herself to be when appearing on camera. So, I believe this is something that does deserve federal investigation. It’s a delicate matter and something not to be dismissed. Ultimately, elections should be decided by the voters, not by political strategies designed to manipulate the outcome. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole.
By Felipe Cisternas
Imagine being forced to leave your home right now. Saying goodbye to the life you once knew — the home you love, the city you navigate like the back of your hand, the country you’ve known for so long. Imagine walking past your neighbor’s door for the last time and taking your final steps on the street you’ve walked along countless times. Imagine the immense pressure of deciding within minutes where the next chapter of your life will unfold. Imagine this all happening because your people face systematic persecution and mass killings right in front of your eyes. You fear for your own life and worry tirelessly about your loved ones. Imagine not knowing when, if ever, you’ll come back. For countless Armenian families, this was the devastating reality of the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian Genocide began in 1915, when Ottoman Turkey carried out mass killings and forced deportations of Armenians from their ancestral homeland. Although 1915 marks the conventional beginning of the Armenian Genocide, Armenians had experienced persecution and massacres in preceding decades, and the violence continued even beyond that year. During this period, many survivors fled in desperate search of safety and peace elsewhere in the world, hoping to have a fresh start to safely preserve the culture they had been forced to leave behind. Some of those families found refuge in Jerusalem, where Armenians had already lived for centuries. As Ara Daglian so eloquently explains in a University of Washington article, Armenians first arrived in the fourth century, and the community stayed stable for centuries. Then, between 1915 and 1920, thousands of refugees fleeing the Armenian Genocide arrived in Palestine, most settling in Jerusalem. They did more than just survive there. Armenian silversmiths, goldsmiths, tailors, and photographers opened shops and joined the city’s economy. A printing press and the Gulbenkian Library preserved Armenian knowledge and literature. Still, more than a century after the Genocide, Jerusalem’s Armenian community is being made to feel unwelcome. In the first three months of 2026, the Religious Freedom Data Center, an Israeli monitoring group, recorded 33 incidents of harassment against Christians in Israel, most of them in Jerusalem. Between April and June, that number nearly doubled. In August, police arrested six people — five of them minors — after they were filmed spitting at the entrance of St. James Monastery in the Armenian Quarter and throwing stones at the walls. Later, four more were detained for spitting at the Armenian Patriarchate. Then, in September, a 9-year-old Armenian boy was pepper-sprayed while riding his bike through Jerusalem. He is one of the many targets of a surge in harassment centered on the Armenian Quarter. Today, an estimated seven million Armenians live outside of Armenia. Together, they constitute the Armenian Diaspora; communities that have endured hardships across generations while building lives far beyond their ancestral homeland. Despite the geographic distances separating them, these communities remain connected through a shared commitment to preserving Armenian identity. On the surface, preserving that identity may seem like a duty that falls solely on Armenians. However, looking deeper, it becomes clear that societies must also recognize their role in this. They must also uphold the rights and dignity of the Armenian communities that live alongside them. So where does the responsibility of the societies around them begin? The answer is simple. Regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion, we all share one fundamental trait: our humanity. The obligation of inclusivity is not born of shared suffering but rather of shared humanity. Disregarding this shared humanity comes with severe consequences. The recent incidents of harassment targeting Jerusalem’s Armenian community illustrate why global inclusivity is crucial. What does inclusivity look like in practice? It looks like a child riding his bike home from school without checking over his shoulder. It looks like the entrance to a monastery being just a door, not some kind of target. It looks like a neighbor who sees harassment and says something instead of keeping quiet. Authorities should treat spitting, stone-throwing, and assault against Christian clergy and residents as the hate incidents they are and make the results of these cases public. People everywhere can learn the history of the Armenian Genocide and recognize the Armenian communities that live in their own cities. All of us, wherever we live, can ask the same question: who is made to feel unwelcome, and what exactly are we doing about it? The Armenian Genocide left many lessons behind. One of the most important is what happens when a society decides that some people matter less. Inclusivity means understanding that every life is dear to the person living it as ours is to us. Humanity is the home we already share. No one should be made to feel like a mere guest in it. Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole.
By Maya Balmanukyan
Follow Us