Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has called for emptying out U.S. jails in order to fight what he calls America’s “carceral state” and “structurally racist society,” @LevineJonathan reports.
Before he was locked in a tight race against former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, El-Sayed spent years as a full-throated supporter of the far-left “decarceration” movement, talking about the issue in articles and on his podcast.
Before he was locked in a tight race against former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, El-Sayed spent years as a full-throated supporter of the far-left “decarceration” movement, talking about the issue in articles and on his podcast.
@LevineJonathan In a March 2021 Substack post, for example, El-Sayed called for “de-jailing the criminal legal system” and eliminating cash bail, which he said disproportionately impacted black people “in our structurally racist society.”
Three years later, on an October 2024 episode of his podcast, he said, “What if we understood prisons weren’t meant to protect people from ‘evil-doers,’ but were designed as a form of counterinsurgent warfare waged by the state and wielded as a weapon against the very possibility of radical social transformation?”
@LevineJonathan El-Sayed also used the COVID pandemic as a way to justify emptying jails and prisons, penning a May 2020 article headlined “The CDC Must Adopt Decarceration as a Matter of Public Health.”
@LevineJonathan In an April 2020 appearance on the Decarceration Nation podcast—which is hosted by a registered sex offender—he said, “We really need to think about what it looks like to [do] decarceration, you know, at scale right now.”
@LevineJonathan A year later, in April 2021, El-Sayed published a study in The Lancet, a 200-year-old medical journal, advocating for “disinvestment from carceral systems.”
“Radically reducing the American prison population to remedy perceived racism against black people has long been an obsession for progressives. Zohran Mamdani, another Muslim progressive who runs in the El-Sayed lane, won in part by campaigning on a promise to close Rikers Island and regularly visits violent inmates there for photo-ops (Rikers has actually been formally slated for closure since 2019),” Levine writes.
While El-Sayed’s positions on Jewish people and his relationship with Hasan Piker, a volcanic antisemite, have dominated most headlines, the candidate has never walked back his extremist views on decarceration.
This is in contrast to many liberal politicians who’ve recanted statements made—during the George Floyd unrest—supporting defunding the police or eliminating cash bail.
This is in contrast to many liberal politicians who’ve recanted statements made—during the George Floyd unrest—supporting defunding the police or eliminating cash bail.
@LevineJonathan READ MORE:
El-Sayed Demanded Mass Release of Prisoners, ‘De-Jailing,’ and Scrapping Cash Bail Because of ‘Racism’: Democrat Claims US Is ‘a Carceral State’Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has called for emptying U.S. jails as part of fighting America's "carceral state" and "structurally racist society," the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.https://freebeacon.com/democrats/el-sayed-demanded-mass-release-of-prisoners-de-jailing-and-scrapping-cash-bail-because-of-racism-democrat-claims-us-is-a-carceral-state/
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