‘Just a reminder this #Thanksgiving: This country was built on the systematic annihilation of Indigenous Peoples,’ Senate hopeful wrote
Michigan’s left-wing Democratic Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, called for reparations for Native Americans in a since-deleted social media post that criticized the holiday of Thanksgiving and said the United States “was built on the systematic annihilation of Indigenous Peoples,” an archived copy of the post reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon shows.
El-Sayed’s post came on Thanksgiving Day in 2019. “Just a reminder this #Thanksgiving,” he 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.”
“We owe so much more than ‘thanks,'” El-Sayed continued. “Time for Reparations.” He later replied to his own post to clarify that he was referring to the “descendants” of “Indigenous Peoples,” rather than their “ancestors.”
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The revelation comes as El-Sayed squares off against two other Democrats—state senator Mallory McMorrow and congresswoman Haley Stevens—in the hotly contested primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat. He is the most left-wing of the three major candidates, as shown by his “Indigenous Peoples” reparations tweet and other deleted posts espousing far-left views.
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, adding, “Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about.” Police “have become standing armies we deploy against our own people,” he wrote in another.
One year later, in 2021, El-Sayed repeated the debunked claim that a border agent on horseback had “whipped” Haitian migrants attempting to illegally cross the southern border. Though the agent was actually holding the horse’s rein—and subsequent investigations cleared border officials of wrongdoing—El-Sayed used the controversy to call border agents “white supremacists” and to blame the United States for illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean, the Free Beacon reported.
“Blaming horses for the dudes riding them to whip Haitian refugees is like blaming Haiti for the fact they’re coming,” El-Sayed wrote. “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?”
El-Sayed’s far-left writings have not hurt his primary campaign against McMorrow and Stevens—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. But they could come back to bite him in a general election against Republican Mike Rogers, who holds slim leads against El-Sayed as well as McMorrow and Stevens, according to the same poll.
El-Sayed’s Thanksgiving Day tweet is not his only deleted post expressing support for reparations. El-Sayed also endorsed reparations in an October 2019 post marking the death of longtime Michigan Democratic congressman John Conyers, who resigned from Congress in 2017 at the age of 88 after a number of congressional staffers accused him of sexual harassment.
“Because of Jon Conyers,” El-Sayed wrote, misspelling Conyers’s first name, “we’re talking about: Medicare for All—Reparations—Environmental Justice—American legal reform. Rest in Power, Dean.”
El-Sayed also signal-boosted other posts voicing support for reparations and framing them as a public health priority.
In October 2020, El-Sayed reposted a tweet that says, “Reparations can help end health divides and build a healthier nation,” citing an article cowritten by former New York State Department of Health acting commissioner Mary Bassett. Bassett designed New York’s policy that considered “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity” a risk factor for COIVD-19 and thus gave minorities priority access to COVID treatments. She was also ousted from her role as director of Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, which became known under her leadership as a hotbed of antisemitism.
El-Sayed also reposted an August 2020 tweet from former congresswoman Cori Bush (D., Mo.) in which she called for legalizing marijuana, freeing imprisoned drug offenders, and using “that tax revenue to begin funding reparations.” The following June, El-Sayed retweeted a post from “antiracism” activist Heather McGhee that endorsed 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.”