Abdul El-Sayed once compared America's response to 9/11 to the terrorist attacks themselves.
Newly unearthed posts show that radicalism has socialist roots running years deeper than anyone knew.
Detroit socialists already have a word for him, and it is not capitalist.
Abdul El-Sayed's Years With Democratic Socialists of America in Detroit
Fox News Digital uncovered a 2019 post from the Detroit Democratic Socialists of America chapter welcoming El-Sayed with one word: comrade.
That was not a one-time slip.
The same chapter booked El-Sayed as keynote speaker for its 2019 fundraiser, the Douglas-Debs Dinner, alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Detroit DSA bragged online that the event was going to be "fire," with El-Sayed sharing top billing with one of the most radical members of Congress.
Between 2017 and 2020, El-Sayed spoke at six separate Democratic Socialists of America events.
He did not wander into that room by accident.
El-Sayed signed his name to a DSA-backed resolution demanding the government seize abandoned General Motors plants and convert them into "green, public use" facilities.
One hundred forty radical co-signers joined him, including Tlaib and Detroit DSA co-chair Natasha Fernández-Silber.
The resolution declared that GM's factories "are not just the property of a corporation" – they belong to the government now, in El-Sayed's world.
That is not a capitalist talking.
That is a man who thinks Washington owns your business the moment it decides it wants to.
This is the same El-Sayed whose deleted posts kept surfacing all summer.
Fox News uncovered deleted 2019 posts where he endorsed the Green New Deal by name, posts he refused to defend when a camera was finally pointed at him.
Daily Wire uncovered deleted tweets where he mourned 9/11 victims in the same breath as roughly a million lives lost overseas in America's response to the attacks.
Delete enough posts and a pattern stops looking like bad luck.
Why Abdul El-Sayed Now Calls Himself a Capitalist Ahead of the Michigan Senate Race
Confronted with his record, El-Sayed rolled out a new label for 2026: capitalist.
He told the New York Times this summer that capitalism "is about leveraging the laws of supply and demand to efficiently allocate capital expenditure to maximize value."
Then, in the same breath, he said you should be taxing billionaires' wealth and called that a capitalist position.
"I have a bad habit of reading; I'm so sorry," he told the Times, as if a vocabulary lesson could erase a decade spent organizing with avowed socialists.
Detroit DSA was not fooled by the makeover.
Organizers told Politico in July that they were actively mobilizing resources to help El-Sayed win his Senate primary.
Socialist organizers have called him, in their own words, "a longtime friend of Detroit DSA."
El-Sayed's campaign would not answer Fox News Digital's questions about whether a decade of DSA love undercuts his new capitalist branding.
Silence is an answer.
This is not the first Democrat to try this exact trick, and it will not be the last.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent years dodging the socialist label even while headlining Democratic Socialists of America events and pushing the Green New Deal.
Kamala Harris insisted during her own presidential run that she was "not a Democratic socialist," right before embracing single-payer health care and sweeping wealth taxes.
The pattern never changes: win the socialist movement's muscle in the primary, then scrub the label before the general election.
El-Sayed did not stumble into that script.
Democratic Socialists of America built an entire doctrine around it.
Movement theorist Michael Harrington called it the "left wing of the possible," and Washington Examiner reporting lays out exactly what that means in practice: ballot-access laws and fundraising networks leave socialists no real path outside the two major parties, so DSA members run as Democrats and reshape the party from inside.
There is no third-party socialist wave coming to save El-Sayed from having to hide the label.
There is only the Democratic Party, and DSA's plan to own it one primary at a time.
El-Sayed is that plan with a name and a Senate campaign attached to it.
He took the organizing muscle, the fundraiser keynote slots and the GM plant seizure petition when Detroit DSA was useful to him, and now he wants Michigan to forget all of it happened.
A Fox News poll released September 30 found El-Sayed clinging to a one-point edge over Republican Mike Rogers among likely voters, 50 percent to 49 percent.
That poll also found Michigan voters almost evenly split on whether Rogers sits too close to Trump or El-Sayed's views run too liberal, which means this race is close enough that a single bad news cycle could flip it.
El-Sayed's comrade problem is exactly that kind of news cycle.
A man who stood next to Rashida Tlaib at a socialist fundraiser and signed a petition to seize GM's factories is not a capitalist who got unlucky with his reading list.
He is a socialist who got caught on tape, in print and in his own campaign's silence, and he is betting a one-point lead survives Michigan voters finding out who actually calls him comrade.
Sources:
- Leo Briceno, "Unearthed Social Media Posts Contradict El-Sayed's 'Capitalist' Narrative," Fox News, October 6, 2026.
- Robert Schmad, "Green New Dodge: El-Sayed Runs From Policy as Newly Surfaced Deleted Posts Show Years of Support," Fox News, August 26, 2026.
- Virginia Kruta, "Abdul El-Sayed Has a Deleted 9/11 Tweets Problem," Daily Wire, August 31, 2026.
- Ron MacCammon, "The Dirty Stay: The DSA's Tea Party Strategy," Washington Examiner, July 14, 2026.
- Dana Blanton, "Fox News Poll: Michigan Voters Split Between El-Sayed and Rogers," Fox News, September 30, 2026.
- National Review, "Democratic Party Stars: Socialists," National Review, 2019.
