Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Democrat running for Michigan's open Senate seat, deleted a Thanksgiving Day social media post in which he called the United States a nation "built on the systematic annihilation of Indigenous Peoples" and demanded reparations for Native Americans. An archived copy of the 2019 post, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, is the latest in a growing trail of scrubbed posts that reveal just how far left El-Sayed's views run, and how eagerly he has tried to hide them before a general election.
The post went up on Thanksgiving 2019. "Just a reminder this #Thanksgiving," El-Sayed wrote. "This country was built on the systematic annihilation of Indigenous Peoples, whose ancestors suffer some of the highest rates of homelessness, joblessness, and mortality today."
He continued: "We owe so much more than 'thanks.' Time for Reparations." He later replied to his own post to correct himself, clarifying he meant the "descendants" of "Indigenous Peoples," not their "ancestors." The post has since been deleted. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Free Beacon.
The Thanksgiving reparations post is not an isolated case. It sits alongside a lengthening list of deleted social media entries that, taken together, paint a portrait of a candidate who held, and publicly championed, positions well outside the mainstream, then quietly erased the evidence.
El-Sayed deleted posts in which he called to defund police. "U.S. cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty," he wrote in one 2020 post first reported by CNN. "Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about." In another post from the same period, he wrote that police "have become standing armies we deploy against our own people."
Those are not the words of a moderate trying to win a purple state. They are the words of a candidate who embraced the most radical slogans of 2020, and then tried to memory-hole them when the political winds shifted.
In 2021, El-Sayed repeated the debunked claim that a U.S. border agent on horseback had "whipped" Haitian migrants attempting to cross the southern border illegally. Subsequent investigations cleared the border officials of wrongdoing; the agent had been holding the horse's rein. But El-Sayed used the false story to call border agents "white supremacists" and to blame the United States for illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean, as the Free Beacon previously reported.
"Blaming horses for the dudes riding them to whip Haitian refugees is like blaming Haiti for the fact they're coming. How about asking how our policies decimate Caribbean & Central American (and so many other) countries, and why we allow white supremacists to police our borders?"
That post, too, was deleted. The pattern is clear: say something incendiary, wait for the news cycle to pass, then scrub the record.
The Thanksgiving tweet was not El-Sayed's only deleted post endorsing reparations. In October 2019, he marked the death of longtime Michigan Democratic congressman John Conyers, who resigned from Congress in 2017 at age 88 after multiple staffers accused him of sexual harassment, by praising his legacy on reparations, Medicare for All, and environmental justice. "Rest in Power, Dean," El-Sayed wrote, misspelling Conyers's first name as "Jon."
El-Sayed also signal-boosted other posts framing reparations as a public health priority. In October 2020, he reposted a tweet stating, "Reparations can help end health divides and build a healthier nation," which cited an article cowritten by Mary Bassett, the former New York State Department of Health acting commissioner. Bassett designed New York's policy that considered "non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity" a risk factor for COVID-19, giving minorities priority access to treatments. She was later ousted from her role as director of a Harvard human rights center that became known under her leadership as a hotbed of antisemitism.
The broader pattern of Democrats trying to bury inconvenient evidence before voters can see it is hardly unique to Michigan. But El-Sayed's case is especially brazen because of the sheer volume of scrubbed material.
In August 2020, El-Sayed reposted a tweet from former congresswoman Cori Bush calling for legalizing marijuana, freeing imprisoned drug offenders, and using "that tax revenue to begin funding reparations." The following June, he retweeted a post from activist Heather McGhee endorsing reparations as "seed capital for the nation we are becoming: a multiracial society that has paid its collective debts and lets all who have contributed to its great prosperity finally begin to benefit from it."
El-Sayed is competing against two other Democrats, state senator Mallory McMorrow and congresswoman Haley Stevens, in the primary for Michigan's open Senate seat. He is the most left-wing of the three major candidates. And right now, he is winning.
A recent poll commissioned by the Michigan political news outlet MIRS found El-Sayed with 28 percent support, compared with 18 percent for Stevens and 17 percent for McMorrow. The same poll showed Republican Mike Rogers holding slim leads against all three Democrats in hypothetical general election matchups.
That general election math is where El-Sayed's deleted posts become more than a curiosity. Michigan is not a deep-blue state. It swung to Trump in 2016, narrowly went for Biden in 2020, and remains one of the most closely contested battlegrounds in the country. A candidate who called for defunding police, smeared border agents as white supremacists based on a debunked story, and repeatedly endorsed reparations would face serious headwinds with the suburban and working-class voters who decide Michigan elections.
El-Sayed's apparent strategy, delete the posts, hope nobody notices, and run as something more palatable, is a familiar playbook. It is also the kind of political maneuvering that voters and donors are increasingly punishing when it comes to light.
What makes El-Sayed's case worth watching is not just the content of the posts, though calling Thanksgiving a celebration of "systematic annihilation" and demanding reparations is a position most Americans flatly reject. It is the deletion itself. Candidates who hold controversial views and defend them at least show voters the courtesy of honesty. Candidates who hold those views, broadcast them, and then erase them when they become inconvenient are asking voters to trust a version of themselves that does not exist on the record.
El-Sayed's campaign has not explained why the posts were deleted. It has not said whether he still holds the views he expressed in them. It has not responded to the Free Beacon's request for comment at all.
That silence is itself a kind of answer. A candidate confident in his positions does not scrub them. A candidate running from his own words has already told you what he thinks of the voters he is trying to win, he thinks they would not vote for the real him.
Democrats across the country continue to face scrutiny for sloppy and misleading public filings, and the party's internal debates over how far left to tilt remain unresolved. In Michigan, El-Sayed's primary lead suggests that the Democratic base is comfortable with his views, or at least the ones he has not yet managed to delete.
Republican Mike Rogers and his team are no doubt archiving everything. In a general election, the deleted posts will not stay deleted. And Michigan voters will get to decide whether a man who spent years calling for reparations, defunding police, and smearing border agents, then tried to hide all of it, deserves a seat in the United States Senate.
Voters who have seen Democrats stumble over their own paperwork in Virginia courtrooms may find El-Sayed's digital housecleaning familiar. The instinct is the same: say one thing when it is convenient, then pretend it never happened when the audience changes.
The internet, fortunately, has a longer memory than any campaign strategist would like. And in Michigan, that memory may matter more than any poll.
