Miranda Devine: Don’t let Abdul El-Sayed fool you — he and his DSA cronies are in prime position to take over the Democratic Party

Abdul El-Sayed is the latest Islamo-socialist terrorist-sympathizer star of the Democrat Party, after squeaking to a win in the Michigan Senate primary Tuesday.

Although he underperformed his poll numbers and the predictions of his media boosters, the lockdown-loving health bureaucrat has accelerated the radical left’s conquest of the Democrat Party from within.

If El-Sayed can pull off a victory in November in the Midwest, in the swingiest of swing states, what will stop a Marxist heading for the White House?

Abdul El-Sayed speaks at an election night watch party on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, in Detroit, Michigan. ZUMAPRESS.com

This menacing hard-left takeover is disastrous for Democrats and frightening for America, but it is also a potential golden opportunity for the GOP — if they don’t screw it up, which is nowhere near certain.

El-Sayed has slyly distanced himself from his early roots in the Democratic Socialists of America faction of the party, and declares himself a “scientist” and not a socialist, but nobody is fooled, least of all the DSA.

Like his comrades, he has a vast trove of deleted social media posts expressing his true hard-left beliefs — including defunding the police (and its modern-day version of abolishing ICE) and prison abolition — as he tries to shape-shift into a harmless progressive palatable to the average fair-minded American fed up with politics as usual.

The level of deception skills involved in this metamorphosis has pundits praising him as a “political athlete” and likening him to Bill Clinton.

But his extremism is not hard to detect, no matter how flowery the language disguising it.

In his first speech Wednesday morning after claiming victory, he issued a veiled threat to Republican opponent Mike Rogers: “By the time we’re done, you are not going to have safe quarter [in Michigan] from people holding you accountable.”

Last year, after a terrorist attack on a synagogue and preschool in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield by a Lebanese-born Hezbollah sympathizer, El-Sayed said: “Hurt people do hurt people and the circumstances happening 6,000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here.”

Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!

When he revs up his base, he gives them the blood and guts they seem to crave: “When they go low, we don’t go high. We take them to the mud and choke them out.”

He may be more careful with his language these days but you can tell a man by the company he keeps.

El-Sayed enjoys a bromance with self-appointed DSA mascot and dog-torturing Twitch-streamer Hasan Piker, who once said America “deserved” the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and recently dressed up, unironically, as Mao Zedong, whom he calls “one of the great leaders of the world.”

Piker also has flirted with assassination fantasies, according to a video clip from last year doing the rounds of social media in which he is in on stage with Taylor ­Lorenz, the former New York Times journalist who wrote she felt “joy” at the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by the “handsome . . . morally good” Luigi Mangione.

In the unverified video, Piker compliments her on her article about Mangione “and great video when you said ‘someone has to do it.’ ” The audience laughs at this allusion to assassination and Piker says, “See! When I say that, everyone knows exactly what it means, which shows there’s a lot of anger, a lot of resentment and untapped revolutionary potential,  and it’s a great opportunity for organizing.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (L) and influencer and left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker (C) stand with Wisconsin Gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong during a campaign rally for Hong on August 2, 2026 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Getty Images

Cocky candidate

Any normal candidate for a normal party would want nothing to do with such repellent views.

But like Mayor Mamdani, El-Sayed has campaigned with Piker and posted workout videos with him.

El-Sayed was so cocky on election eve that he publicly celebrated with Piker at a pool party.

He also boasted he will beat Rogers by five points.

Even in Michigan, surely that kind of hubris won’t go down well in a general election.

Piker was also jubilantly counting his chickens before they were hatched at El-Sayed’s alcohol-free watch party Tuesday night: “This is just the beginning,” he crowed.

“It’s not just Michigan; it’s not just Wisconsin. We will hopefully continue this movement all across the United States of America.”

Ah, Wisconsin.

When Rogers talks about the Democrat “crazy train” he will have to find room up front for Francesca Hong, the Dems’ Wisconsin gubernatorial favorite who faces a primary next week.

Like Piker and Mamdani and every other DSA stooge, she is now trying to distance herself from the radical beliefs that catapulted her to political prominence.

Among her pearls of wisdom, she has said she wants to abolish the police and Thanksgiving, that tipping is “racist,” and white people are so terrible that she can’t stand watching them eat but she unfortunately has “proximity to whiteness” due to the fact her son is half-white.

She also once issued a barely veiled death threat to President Trump.

“About f—ing time we 86 Trump.”

The Luigi wing of the party has found its voice.

Democrats seem incapable of controlling the beast within.

A few hours after El-Sayed declared victory Wednesday, Democrat senators boycotted a Senate Judiciary hearing on the malign influence of the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America, claiming it to be an exercise in “Islamophobia.”

No wonder they are running a million miles, since El-Sayed’s father-in-law, who helped fund his campaign, has links to the Muslim Brotherhood as the former president of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and founding member of the Islamic Society of North America, which were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial.

Terror groups

Chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood have been declared terrorist organizations in the US, following the lead of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and El-Sayed’s parents’ homeland of Egypt.

El-Sayed and his wife met at the University of Michigan through the Muslim Students Association, which has been described as a “Muslim Brotherhood front.”

It will be up to Mike Rogers to convince Michigan voters that El-Sayed is unsuitable to be their senator.

Rogers is a strong candidate with genuine Michigander working-class roots, as a one-time auto assembly-line worker who went on to serve as a US Army lieutenant and then an FBI special agent in Chicago, investigating organized crime.

His track record through seven terms representing Michigan in Congress is positive, and as the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he was one of the strongest critics warning about the economic and national security threats posed by China, including its hollowing out of the middle class in the former industrial heartland of Michigan.

But the polls are tight and Rogers has his work cut out for him against a younger, silver-tongued foe fueled by a movement giddy about its newfound power.

He is also tied to Trump, whose poll numbers are sagging as an unpopular war drags on, and for whom Americans’ cost of living remains a sore point.

The president telling Fox News Tuesday night that he deserves an “A-plus” on the economy was not the right message for a sullen electorate.

A little humility would go a long way.