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Another recipient of a Bernie Sanders endorsement has some explaining to do about a history of supporting appalling policies. To be clear, it’s not Mr. Sanders demanding an explanation. If the millionaire socialist penalized himself for backing bad ideas, he would have withdrawn from political activism in the 1960s. But Michigan voters are going to want to know why a U.S. Senate candidate won’t own up to his comments from the early 2020s. Regular readers may recall Dr. Abdul El-Sayed as the medical school grad who has described himself for years as a physician but does not appear to have held a medical license. Readers may also know him as the man who campaigns with Hamas apologist Hasan Piker. More recently Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck reported for CNN: Michigan Democratic Senate front-runner Abdul El-Sayed has faced criticism for previous comments he made about defunding the police. In recent interviews, El-Sayed has insisted he “never, never called for defunding” the police. Last week in an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt, he said he deleted old tweets supporting the movement because they were taken “out of context,” calling them “clickbait in DC.” But interviews from 2020 show El-Sayed repeatedly endorsed defunding the police, according to a CNN KFile review of
his media appearances. “We do need to defund the police,” El-Sayed said in a 2020 radio interview while specifically discussing how the slogan could undermine criminal justice reform efforts. El-Sayed’s interviews from 2020 and 2021 show him embracing the “defund the police” movement — not just uttering the phrase but supporting the key principle of reinvesting funds from the police into other public-sector spaces such as mental health and anti-poverty efforts.
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