Among the many men Abughazaleh has managed to piss off is one of the most powerful in the country. In 2023, Elon Musk sued Media Matters for defamation after the organization published a report showing that major brands’ ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content on X. Last summer, Musk’s lawyers deposed Abughazaleh for, according to her, nothing more than “mean tweets.”
While she can’t speak about the ongoing lawsuit, Abughazaleh doesn’t hold back when it comes to Musk himself. “He wants to be liked so bad. He bought an entire website [Twitter, now X] to make people like him, and it didn’t work,” she says. “In fact, people hate him so much that he can wave millions of dollars underneath their noses and they still won’t like him. Elon Musk is a loser.”
The opportunity to confront men like Musk motivated Abughazaleh to run. Few things toughen a person faster than being an outspoken young woman on the internet. And after years of fending off trolls, Abughazaleh is ready for a bigger fight. “People are begging their representatives to do something,” she says. When members of the DOGE team forced their way into government networks, including the federal payment system, politicians “should have been standing arm-in-arm in front of every single treasury entrance. They shouldn’t have let Elon Musk’s goons in there.” The thought that Democrats sat back and let it happen infuriates Abughazaleh. “People want to know that they’re being defended and that someone cares about their rights. They gave you this job, so you should do it.” And if not, Abughazaleh adds, “I will.”
In person, Abughazaleh defies the caricature of someone shaped by internet outrage. A few days before the CNN interview, I sit with her in a café on Chicago’s North Side, where she’s hosting her first campaign “office hours.” Under skies hesitating between winter and spring, Abughazaleh radiates a kind of seasonal optimism. She’s dressed in a blue linen romper, a loose-knit fruit-themed sweater, and Cloudnova sneakers in a muted 1970s orange-and-pink colorway. She’s warm and at ease among the half-dozen strangers who’ve come to meet her.
The idea that the current system isn’t working unites the small group gathered here. And Abughazaleh intends to run a different kind of campaign, one that invests funds back into the community rather than spend money on consultants and traditional advertising. At her launch event, for example, Abughazaleh asked for period product donations rather than an entrance fee.
At this table, Abughazaleh’s strategy is met with enthusiasm—not just because she’s trying to build a ground game from scratch, but because her supporters see her approach as the only way to outmaneuver the Democratic machine.
“AOC caught the Democrats sleeping at the wheel,” one supporter says. “They thought, Hispanic girl, bartender, whatever—she’s not going to be a problem. They were wrong. And once it started, they couldn’t stop it. They had to give her a seat at the table. And now, they’ll never let themselves get caught like that again.”