Here we go again.
Abdul El-Sayed is a Democrat running for an open Senate seat in Michigan. El-Sayed launched his campaign back in April and, at the time, a big issue was whether or not he would support Chuck Schumer to continue in leadership if elected.
“Anybody who tells you that they’re going to unilaterally oppose one potential candidate without knowing who the alternative is, is either unnuanced or unsophisticated,” said Abdul El-Sayed, who officially launched his bid for Senate on Thursday. “So I want to know who is available, who is actively seeking the leadership. I’ll make a decision from there.”
It’s a tacit rebuke of state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and other Democratic candidates who have said recently that they would oppose Schumer amid an intraparty fight over his handling of a GOP-backed government funding bill.
Despite this moderation, El-Sayed is a progressive who previously ran for governor in the left lane.
El-Sayed took up the left lane during a 2018 bid for governor, when he was endorsed by progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), but he lost to now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Very briefly then, El-Sayed is a progressive who is trying to dial his leftism back just enough to get himself elected. So it’s probably no surprise then that he a) was a big supporter of defunding the police in the past and b) deleted all of his social media comments about defunding before running for the Senate. Andrew Kaczynski at CNN has the goods.
The former Detroit health director deleted his entire X history sometime before launching his Senate campaign in April, a move that highlights how progressive Democrats once aligned with “defund” policies are now distancing themselves from a slogan that remains deeply unpopular with voters.
“Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about,” El-Sayed wrote in a since-deleted post from June 2020.
“The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people,” he added in another June 2020 post…
A CNN tally of his deleted tweets found he posted about a dozen times in support of the “defund the police” movement.
His comments weren’t limited to posting things on Twitter. He contributed to a University of Michigan seminar in the summer of 2020. Here’s the video of his full remarks. If you want a good sense of his views at the time, have a listen. I’ve cued this up to a section where he concludes police are racist and we’re spending too much money on them. “Do we need as much of a police force?”
He made similar comments in other venues.
“Defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets and investing more in the means of educating and empowering and engaging communities,” El-Sayed said in another 2020 local press interview.
He’s also one of the health experts who decided that mass protests were okay so long as they were on behalf of BLM. All of these tweets were found by Andrew Kaczynski:
In this one he suggests defunding the police to fund health departments.
And one more in which he mocks the idea that police lives are lost and that those lives matter.
Graham Platner, another progressive (socialist) running for the Senate in Maine also did his best to disappear social media tweets in which he was critical of the police prior to running for office. Just some of what he said:
In one deleted comment, in a thread about a Black army lieutenant who was held at gunpoint and pepper-sprayed by police during a traffic stop, one Reddit user wrote, “Bastards. Cops are bastards.” Platner replied, “All of them, in fact.”
Platner also frequently weighed in on police violence, arguing that misconduct was “a problem that extends deep into the profession as a whole” and rejecting claims of accidental shootings after incidents such as the killing of Minneapolis Black man Daunte Wright, writing, “F**k these cops.”…
There’s yet another socialist who openly hated the police but this one just won the race for mayor of New York. Unlike Platner and El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani didn’t even delete his anti-police tweets. Of course he was running in NYC and not in Maine or Michigan. We’ll have to wait and see if that matters.
Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points.
Help us report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.
