Far-left Muslim who backs ‘gender transitions’ wins Democrat Senate primary in Michigan

An epidemiologist and the son of Egyptian immigrants, El-Sayed is the former director of Wayne County, Michigan’s, Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services. He defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens (MI-11) 48.5 percent to 47.5 percent for the nomination and will go on to face Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers in the general election.

El-Sayed’s fellowship profile from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans offers a window into his “progressive” brand of politics, noting that socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) named him to former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 Unity Task Force for Healthcare and that his failed 2018 bid for governor ran on an “unapologetically progressive platform” that was endorsed by Sanders, far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and far-left publication The Nation.

His campaign website touts a litany of far-left positions, including opposition to mandatory voter ID, “abolishing” U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), an “explicit mandate” to “environmental justice” (including codifying agencies’ power to regulate greenhouse gases), “taxing billionaire wealth,” the “right” to “reproductive and gender-affirming care,” and “automatic” Medicare for All, i.e., universal government-run healthcare.

In 2020, he was among the public health officials who backed COVID-19 lockdown policies while rationalizing Black Lives Matter protests as a legitimate exception. During the campaign, he falsely denied having ever advocated defunding the police, then when called on past comments by CNN, said “I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets.”

Alarmingly, El-Sayed “has collected more than $115,000 from individuals who work for or have held leadership roles with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and formally designated or labeled as such in Florida and Texas,” Fox News reports.

Notably, despite his left-wing extremism on so many issues, El-Sayed’s victory appears at least partially attributable to his capitalizing on bipartisan reservations about the artificial intelligence industry, from the overtaking of human jobs to the potential dangers of the technology itself.

“I believe we must develop clear ‘rules of the road’ for AI development that governs which hands this technology falls into and requires us to better test and understand the models being developed,” he says. “This includes clear safety testing standards for frontier models; liability and incident reporting standards; compute controls, including ‘know your customer’ requirements for compute providers; and the creation of an independent technical agency with real enforcement power, like to the Food & Drug Administration, for AI.” He also advocates “comprehensive federal zoning guidelines” for the construction of data centers.

El-Sayed’s victory was a defeat for the Democrat Party establishment, which backed Stevens, and will now serve as a test case for the statewide appeal of far-left ideology in Michigan, with the answer potentially deciding control of a Senate that Democrats are currently projected to just barely retake.