The "mom" featured in a controversial Michigan Senate ad struggling to pay for eggs—and blaming the war in Gaza—is a Los Angeles-based actress who boasted of shutting down "a big intersection in Hollywood" as part of an anti-Israel protest and submitted public testimony calling on California to ban natural gas in new buildings, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
The actress, Kael Lalonde, describes herself as an "Artist, raised by Artists" who tells "stories through film, poetry, painting, mixed media and even jewelry making." She says her work "is a manifestation of the belief in the use of Art as a means for holistic healing and trauma transmutation." Lalonde is the founder of Free Will Films, a Los Angeles-based "Independent Production Company" that touts its work producing social media ads for the Redondo Beach steakhouse Pacific Standard Prime. She is also the star of Eyes Within You, an independent short film following a woman who "chooses to take care of her dying Mother at home and in facing her greatest fears finds herself as an Artist in the process."
Lalonde's best-known work, however, is almost certainly her role in Cenk Uygur's ad supporting the left-wing Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed. It depicts a couple in a grocery store who link the price of eggs and bananas in the United States to Israel and its fight against Hamas in Gaza. "We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians," Lalonde says as her actor husband picks up a carton of eggs. The ad goes on to accuse El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, of dual loyalties.
Anti-Israel activism is nothing new for Lalonde, who boasted of attending a "Ceasefire Now" protest in November 2023—just weeks after Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack—that saw activists shut down Hollywood Boulevard. "Tears fell hard as did the rain," Lalonde wrote in a June 2024 Instagram post featuring video footage from the protest. "We shut down a big intersection in Hollywood and I stayed standing for hours longer than I should have because of my pain." A year later, in August 2025, she called on her followers to participate in a "Global Strike for Gaza" by making "no purchases of any kind on Thursdays." Lalonde's post accused Israel of "moving to ethnically cleanse Gaza City."
Lalonde has also engaged in activism that is not aligned with the affordability message presented in Uygur's ad. In June 2021, she signed a letter organized by the left-wing environmental group Sierra Club California calling on California's energy commission to "end its reliance on dangerous and dirty fossil gas" by banning the use of natural gas in new buildings. The policy would lead to higher energy bills due to the higher cost of electricity compared with natural gas, according to the National Association of Home Builders. The Michigan House passed a bill in 2025 to prevent local governments from banning natural gas in new buildings, though the measure stalled in the Democrat-controlled state Senate.
"What choices we make now matter," Lalonde wrote in the Sierra Club letter. "Please choose to help the earths [sic] crisis and need for serious changes to take place to be saved and sustained."
Uygur's use of a left-wing Los Angeles actor opposed to America's natural gas industry in his Michigan ad is at odds with the "populist" message the spot purports to present.
Uygur—the cofounder of the left-wing media company The Young Turks and the uncle of anti-American streamer and El-Sayed campaign surrogate Hasan Piker—produced the ad through his firm Rad Ads, where he's a partner, while the outside group Rebellion PAC is paying to distribute it, the Free Beacon reported. Uygur is featured on the PAC's red-and-blue-themed website outlining the "Populist Plank," a policy platform that includes "higher wages," "money out of politics," and "paid family leave."
Lalonde, however, has advocated for less popular left-wing policies. In addition to the Sierra Club letter, she submitted public comments to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in July 2020 calling on the board to "divert funding away from the District Attorney to expand immigrant and pretrial defense." Los Angeles was experiencing a significant surge in murders at that time.
The man portrayed as Lalonde's husband in the spot is also an actor, according to a Free Beacon facial recognition search, which identified the man as Johan Stein. His IMDb credits include the independent film Lift and the digital mini-series Secret Affair With My Husband's Boss, which follows a lawyer who "discovers her husband's affair and starts a BDSM relationship with her client—her husband's mistress's spouse." Stein plays "Doctor Tim," who only appears to feature in one episode.
Lalonde, who did not respond to a request for comment, touts an earlier version of the Michigan ad, which ran in support of Uygur's short-lived 2024 presidential campaign, on her website, describing it as a "Ceasefire Ad" meant to "raise awareness about how much the American taxpayers [sic] money was actually paying to send bombs in Gaza." Uygur has faced intense criticism over the ad since relaunching it in Michigan. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called it "desperate" and "a case study in antisemitism," while former president Barack Obama's ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, said it's "entirely possible to oppose aid to Israel … without promoting the fiction that such aid, or Israel itself, is responsible for what Americans pay for their groceries."
Though the ad suggests that Israel has driven up the price of a dozen eggs in the United States to $7, egg prices have dropped since President Donald Trump took office, falling from an average price of $4.95 per dozen in January 2025 to $2.27 in August 2026, according to NPR. An avian flu outbreak, rather than "killing Palestinians," explains the fluctuation.
In response to a request for comment, Uygur said, "Are you people lunatics." He asked whether the Free Beacon was "trying to target random actors we used in ads who had nothing to do with the script?"
"Are you reporters or a bunch of thugs working for the powerful, trying to target any innocent American that questions Israel?" Uygur asked. "When radical Zionists complain about an ad we did, that means it was incredibly successful. Because they'll whine about anything that criticizes their beloved Israel."
Stein could not be reached for comment.
The group's ad also prompted criticism from El-Sayed's primary opponent, congresswoman Haley Stevens, who said, "This type of fearmongering about Israel is wrong. It is not a winning strategy for any state. It does nothing to help Michigan Democrats win up and down the ballot." El-Sayed's campaign distanced itself from the ad in a statement, saying it "is not affiliated in any way with the Abdul for Senate campaign." The campaign did not disavow the ad's contents.
