Last week Linfield hosted the Northwest Media fest, which included guests from a variety of media careers. One of the guests was Moustafa Bayoumi, a journalist, professor, and bestselling author. He gave this year’s Erickson Lecture, an event hosted by the English Department. His speech was titled “How To Lose Friends and Influence the Wrong People: Muslim American Publics and the 2024 Election.” His speech, however, he admitted had been edited due to recent events in Israel.

Bayoumi began his speech by discussing Muslim Americans and the communities shifting political views over the past several years. He described polls taken during the 2016 election and the years following that showed that the Muslim community in America was generally more liberal than the average citizen, and a majority had voted for someone other than Trump. Over the several years he noted that Muslim Americans have become more conservative, in part due to Republicans finding ways to align themselves with Muslim voters while still harboring anti-Arab sentiments.

Bayoumi then discussed the importance of voice and storytelling. He approached this subject by discussing comedian Hasan Minhaj, who has faced scrutiny around the legitimacy of some of the stories he tells. Bayoumi asserted while comedy is a platform where the can be stretched for comedic effect, the fact that Minhaj’s presentation of his jokes closely resembled a news format, Minhaj deception did warrant backlash. Bayoumi also discussed how the stories that were told were unique to Arab experience and by fabricating or exaggerating the stories, Minhaj is encouraging the belief that anti-Arab sentiment and violence in America is not real.