Abdul El-Sayed, Pure Bullshit

Abdul El-Sayed is running for the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Gary Peters’s seat, against Haley Stevens. The reel is from Based in WA, posted October 19. The line on it is stopabdul.com, look for yourself. Facebook’s own title on the post: 87K views, 3.2K reactions.

The page he is told to look at plays two clips, then a stack of posts from @AbdulElSayed. On the first clip the caption reads: under my leadership, our state will not expend a dime of state taxpayer resources enforcing federal immigration policy. On the second: do police really need to use guns?

That guns line is a University of Michigan talk from October 22, 2020, “Systemic Racism as a Public Health Issue.” The rest of the sentence, in the same talk: do we need as much of a police force? Then: spend the money on what roots out poverty, rather than on policing poverty.

The tweets are dated. June 8, 2020: most major U.S. cities spend way too much on police departments and way too little on schools, health departments, recreation, and housing. “Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about.” Same day: don’t call it defund, call it a refund — a refund on the tax dollars that “fund military police & brutality,” then spend them on housing, public health, schools, libraries, parks, and infrastructure. February 13, 2021: “The Senate just voted to excuse a man who inspired, organized, & directed terrorism against our democracy. Why are we treating Trump differently than other terrorists?”

In June 2020, on Detroit Public Radio, he said he had not used the words. “So, you’ll note, I didn’t say ‘defund the police,’ I just described what needed to be done.” Then he described it: “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.”

On the campaign he told CNN’s Kasie Hunt, “I deleted all the tweets, because I didn’t want them to be taken out of context like this.” The campaign’s spokeswoman, Roxie Richner, said one word was never enough to explain the criminal-justice system, and that what he wants now is the Wayne County 2023 line: better recruitment, retention, and retirement funding so officers come from the communities they serve.

Deleting a tweet is not a new position. The June 8 posts are one sentence each. The context is the sentence. He has not walked the rest of it back. On October 3, 2026 he told the Detroit Free Press he has called for abolishing ICE since 2018, and that Medicare for All — no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles, the line on the later post in the same scroll — will be the first bill he co-sponsors.