NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday”: Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller
CBS News’s “Face the Nation”: DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.); Palantir Technologies CTO Shyam Sankar
CNN’s “State of the Union”: DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin; Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate and self-described “capitalist” Abdul El-Sayed has deep socialist ties that run straight through New York City’s radical elite, The Post can reveal.
A newly surfaced, now viral 2019 photo tied him this week to notorious Israel-hating socialist Linda Sarsour, who at the time proudly called him DSA’s “newest member.”
The bombshell photo ties El-Sayed to powerful Democratic Socialists of America activists like Sarsour, exploding his debate-night claims that he’s not part of the far-left group.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed got backing for his 2018 campaign for governor and his 2026 Senate campaign from New York socialists.Getty Images
The scandal erupted just after a fiery televised showdown Thursday against GOP rival Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who trails El-Sayed by a razor-thin 3 points in the RealClearPolitics average.
But the connection is no one-off encounter — a Post review has found Sarsour has backed “Uncle Abdul” for nearly a decade — and it’s now part of the secret to his surprising success.
Sarsour, 46, is a figure of national reputation whose efforts helped give rise to NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani — the nation’s first socialist mayor.
She helped deliver the lefty “Squad” in Congress after serving as executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and co-founding online mobilizing group MPower Change – while facing repeated accusations of antisemitism along the way.
“Linda Sarsour has spent years building a political network to elect far-left candidates who share her anti-American worldview, and Abdul El-Sayed has hardly concealed his own hardline ideological commitments,” said Jesse Arm, vice president of the Manhattan Institute.
“The ascendant far left is not merely a collection of radical candidates, but an organized political movement with the infrastructure and relationships to translate its Islamist-sympathetic, anti-Western agenda into political power.”
Sarsour’s support for El-Sayed dates back to his failed 2018 bid for governor against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.), when she drove with Muslim activists from New York to Michigan to back him, gushing that she was “transformed” by meeting him and that God had “sent me the Abdul El-Sayed for Governor campaign.”
“It led me to my beloved communities in Michigan to build, strategize, inspire and expand an electorate,” she wrote, adding that she had coached another socialist — future “squad” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — by telling her “you were made for this” before her own successful run.
Katherine Brezler posted an image of Michigan candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed online, tagging New York Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour and writing that she “says this is a pic of me and the newest member of @detroitdsa.”KatBrezler/X
She appeared with him onstage in Ann Arbor, Michigan at a town hall in December 2017 she told the crowd, “I have the audacity to believe we can make history and put the first Muslim governor in office” and said she wasn’t beholden to any political party but is drawn to El-Sayed because he is a progressive.
Then she boasted of raising an eye-popping $27 million for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign in a month. “Every one of us has something to give,” she said.
Eight years later, her support is unwavering.
“It’s very CLEAR to me and has been. @AbdulElSayed is THE CHOICE for U.S. Senate race in Michigan!” Sarsour posted on Instagram in May, urging people to knock on doors for him. “So proud of Dr. Abdul and his incredible movement.”
Linda Sarsour has gushed about El-Sayed online and donated to his Senate campaign.USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Sarsour, who didn’t respond to a call seeking comment, donated $1,000 to El-Sayed’s Senate campaign a week before the Aug. 4 primary, the same amount she gave to socialist New York House candidate Darializa AvilaChevalier, who wrote an incendiary post about using the American flag as a napkin.
Sarsour’s allies and political associates regard her as a power broker and mentor in the growing socialist movement.
She has played a controversial role in progressive politics since emerging as an organizer of the 2017 Women’s March, only to step down under pressure two years later. She has helped mentor Mamdani’s political circle, backed the boycott movement against Israel, faced accusations of antisemitism and argued that feminism is incompatible with Zionism.
She also built a long trail of incendiary statements about Israel and occasionally the US, which she accused of being built on “genocide & slavery.”
The Michigan-born El-Sayed has an NYC connection. He lived in the Big Apple from 2015-2018 while attending medical school at Columbia University. That stint caused him residency issues in his gubernatorial campaign when he needed to demonstrate residency in the Wolverine State.
The Detroit DSA account responded to the post by writing “Welcome to the team comrade @AbdulElSayed!” But El-Sayed calls himself a capitalist and his campaign told The Post: “Abdul has said he is not a socialist. He is a capitalist and he has never been a member of the DSA.”KatBrezler/X
El-Sayed is backed by Gustavo Gordillo, 38, co-chair of the DSA’s NYC chapter. Gordillo, 38 — who The Post in August revealed is living in his parent’s $1.5 million Brooklyn home after faking working-class credentials — snapped a picture of fellow socialists aboard an August flight to Detroit to campaign for El-Sayed in his primary fight against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.).
“At LaGuardia going to Detroit and everyone on the flight is going to canvass,” he hyped on X.
It was El-Sayed’s apparent connection to the Detroit branch of the DSA and Sanders that came together in the 2019 photo which threatens to close the purposeful distance he keeps from the socialist party.
In the photo, Katherine Brezler, who works for the Queens borough president, smiled for a selfie with El-Sayed, tagging Sarsour and writing that she was pictured with “the newest member of @detroitdsa.”
The Detroit DSA thanked “friend and ally” El-Sayed after he backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) campaign for president.DetroitDSA/X
The Detroit DSA chimed in: “Welcome to the team comrade @AbdulElSayed!” The group added: “@OrganizerJess36 — you did it!”
That appears to be a reference to Jessica Newman, a Detroit DSA member who helps run the Michigan Education Justice Coalition, and who once posted about getting “cuddles” from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s French bulldog.
AOC herself gushed at a fundraiser Monday that an El-Sayed victory would prove lefties can win “anywhere.” She plans to join him on the campaign trail for a three-stop bus tour in Michigan, she announced in an Instagram post Friday night.
Brezler, speaking as a private citizen and not for her city employer, told The Post her comment about El-Sayed being in the DSA was just “a little jokey joke on the Internet.”
The Detroit DSA also touted El-Sayed as a “longtime friend” and highlighted his appearance at its 2019 Douglass-Debs dinner, named in part for socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs.
Sarsour has been called a mentor to up and coming socialists, and helped nurture Mayor Mamdani’s campaign. She wrote that God “sent me the Abdul El-Sayed for Governor campaign campaign.”Anadolu via Getty Images
The group saluted El-Sayed that February after he “signed onto our bold demand to seize abandoned GM plants & convert them to green, public use,” in a reply to the future candidate’s since-deleted X post.
Critics wonder what El-Sayed really stands for.
“There’s a real fear that these DSA candidates or DSA-adjacent candidates are beholden to a hardcore activist class,” said Jake Altman, a former Boston DSA member who says he left the group in disgust. “He’s brought this mob into the Democratic Party and he’s going to turn them loose again.
“What is the agenda he’s pushing? Clearly he can’t say the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] is a danger to the United States and he can’t say that Hezbollah, a terror group, is a danger to the United States. He’s going to be doing the bidding of the IRGC and Hezbollah in Washington, DC.”
El-Sayed’s campaign rejects the suggestion that he is a socialist or a DSA member.
“Abdul has said he is not a socialist. He is a capitalist and he has never been a member of the DSA,” campaign spokeswoman Roxy Richner told The Post.
Not everyone is convinced.
“It’s a charade,” Stu Smith of the Manhattan Institute said of El-Sayed’s insistence that he is not a socialist — a posture that he says is politically advantageous in a statewide election.
“It’s just bizarre how they really do go out of their way to kind not say they are a member of DSA. Anyone would see if it quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, and floats like a duck, it’s a duck. It just defies imagination on some fronts.”
Growing up in Venezuela, I watched the socialist strongman Hugo Chávez use the politics of resentment to turn a rich country to ruins. He promised an oil-funded utopia, but we got hunger, blackouts and a murderous dictatorship.
I know what happens when legitimate economic frustration becomes moral condemnation — and when citizens are encouraged to blame their problems on a single group that is supposedly taking something from them.
It is why I’m increasingly alarmed as I see the same socialist ideas of popular resentment becoming increasingly popular in America today.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attends CultureCon 2026 in New York, Oct. 3, 2026.Getty Images
I know what they say. I used to say it too. They claim that democratic socialism isn’t the same kind of socialism that devastated my homeland — or Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, China, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and so on. Venezuela wasn’t really ever socialist, so they say, and the reason Cuba is poor is because of US sanctions.
They’re wrong.
Venezuelans didn’t vote in 1998 to become Cuba, or even a socialist country — and we, too, dismissed warnings from Cubans who told us Chávez was not the moderate democrat (and capitalist) he presented himself to be.
Members of the army are seen during riots in Caracas, Venezuela, on March 1, 1989.Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Chávez didn’t use the word “socialism” in his first six years in office. When he ran for office in 1998, his rhetoric was tame compared to the anti-capitalist ideas spouted by today’s DSA.
But he grew increasingly radical and eventually called his movement “socialism of the 21st century,” as he pledged to make Venezuela more like Cuba. He expropriated companies and pulled a TV station off the air. He imposed price controls and opened government grocery stores. He fired oil executives who challenged his direct takeover of the industry on live TV. He corrupted the judiciary, put political loyalists in charge of the military and brought in Cuban security operatives to sniff out dissident generals.
Before Chávez, Venezuelans had legitimate grievances about inequality and corruption. Chávez directed their anger at the rich, Yankee imperialists, business owners and the journalists who dared to question his policies.
Looters are seen in a supermarket during riots in Caracas, Venezuela, March 1, 1989.Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Socialist policies caused massive food shortages, leading to rampant childhood malnutrition and starvation. It caused the largest peacetime economic collapse in modern world history, and the largest displacement crisis in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
Yet somehow socialism is gaining popularity in the US.
I understand why: Historical evidence doesn’t matter as much as political slogans mouthed by charismatic politicians, which are what sway voters.
Once a movement convinces its supporters that a particular group is not merely pursuing its interests but actively harming society, increasingly extreme policies and even persecution become easier to justify.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returns to office in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 13, 2002, two days after he was ousted from the Palace of Miraflores and arrested by the military. Thousands of protesters still thronged the streets, but in a first step toward reconciliation Chavez made conciliatory moves toward the state oil monopoly.Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
America’s political debates are increasingly falling into that dynamic, and New York politics serve as a great example of it.
I was particularly troubled when Mayor Mamdani filmed a video outside billionaire Ken Griffin’s Manhattan penthouse to promote a tax on second homes. He described the measure as targeting the “richest of the rich.” Griffin later said he believed the video had put him in harm’s way, and it probably did. What I found particularly unsettling is that Mamdani was turning a private citizen into a target of resentment. It reminded me of Chavez pointing at buildings and ordering their expropriations on live TV when I was a kid.
And the use of resentment to accumulate power is not a problem exclusive to the left. The right also engages in toxic populism, with its own set of villains used as a cover for policies that erode our fundamental rights. Instead of billionaires, landlords, and corporations, they go after immigrants, “globalists” and the media — like Chávez.
Marcel Granier, director of the Venezuelan RCTV private broadcast and president of the 1BC Corporation, arrives at the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Caracas, Feb. 8, 2010. Granier went to the OAS to present a document regarding the government’s order to close opposition network RCTV, along with five other cable television stations, for refusing to air President Hugo Chavez’s speeches.AFP via Getty Images
As Marcel Granier, the director of Venezuela’s most important TV station, Radio Caracas Television, which Chávez forced off the air in 2007, noted in a new documentary that I narrated about the collapse of my country, “Totalitarianism isn’t a switch you flip.” It’s “a process that gradually takes over.”
It takes over when we decide that defeating our enemies is all that matters. Listen to Venezuelans like me who saw their homelands gradually destroyed. We’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well.
Germania Rodriguez Poleo is a New York-based journalist and narrator of Reason’s upcoming film, “Escaping Venezuela,” which premieres in New York on Oct. 13.
On October 8, 2026, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that the Department of Labor will not accept any new PERM applications (Permanent Labor Certification) or process any pending applications involving a list of prominent tech firms. The action is being enforced amid ongoing federal investigations into alleged abuse of employment-based immigration programs.
This decision elicited outrage from a myriad of Democrats, but the group most flustered by the situation is undoubtedly Indian migrant workers and representatives. India is by far the greatest beneficiary of America's H-1B migrant worker program, and it's not even close.
Over the past ten years alone, over 8.7 million H-1B visas have been given to Indian nationals. Roughly 70% of all H-1B approvals every year go to Indians.
There are a number of reasons why this level of targeted immigration is a problem. The first reason is that these visas are often exploited as a stepping stone to gain a green card and permanent residency in the US.
H-1B visas are supposed to last for only a few years at most, but migrant workers can remain in the US for far longer. This is done through the PERM certification process, which allows employers to sponsor migrant workers for a green card, which can then be used to gain full citizenship after a few years. Trump's suspension of PERM extends to a number of major tech firms including: Microsoft, Adobe, and Capgemini, along with Indian companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and Cognizant.
The tech industry has been used as a pipeline for third world immigration for decades - Corporations have systematically eliminated hundreds of thousands of American jobs in favor of migrant workers because these workers take 17% to 40% less pay to fill certain rolls.
For example, Vice President JD Cance cites an ongoing investigation into Microsoft. He says that the company is suspected of firing over 6000 American tech workers, then used the visa machine to import over 6300 H-1B recipients along with helping 3000 others receive green cards. The vast majority of these workers are from India.
India’s foreign ministry pushed back on the announcement. They said the U.S. action “does not advance the shared ambitions of both countries.” They specifically called Vance’s description of foreign workers as “indentured servants” unwarranted and "deeply offensive."
Politicians in the US with an Indian background were also angered by the block of PERM, perhaps because these representatives have a habit of using their positions to also barter H-1B and green card access for their compatriots.
The panic on social media was palpable, with Indian accounts raging over the potential loss of US economic access. Their primary argument? That the US tech industry is dead in the water without them because the US doesn't have enough "brilliant" tech engineers to fill the necessary job roles. They claim that their "service" to the US economy earns them the right to permanent residency, but that's not how these things work.
These people agree to get paid to do a job, they are not entitled to citizenship just because they are willing to work for less. And let's consider their logic for a moment: If Indian tech workers are so highly skilled and bring so much value, why isn't India one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world? Why don't these workers bring any added value to their own economy? Why is India 150th in the world per capita?
Probably because the "high IQ" Indian tech worker narrative is a scam.
Their only value on the global market is their willingness to work for low wages. But why do Indians work for so much less? It's important to understand that US companies are offering a commodity on top of the otherwise low pay - And that commodity is permanent US residency. These companies are essentially selling access to US citizenship in exchange for cheap labor.
It's quite the deal for tech firms if you think about it. They get thousands of cheap laborers, and they get to use a commodity that requires minimal cost. Microsoft might pay around $4000 on average in attorney's fees to apply for a migrant worker to get PERM status, but they save tens-of-thousands on every migrant worker salary. The people who suffer most are American workers who get replaced.
Indian tech workers make a yearly salary of around $12,000 to $20,000 in their home country. A job in the US makes them significantly more, even with the pay cut. This money is often wired from the US back to India where US dollars have far greater buying power than the Rupee. Access to the US economy is a gold mine for third world migrants.
India's economy also benefits indirectly from H-1B immigration. India is the largest beneficiary of remittances in the world. The country received approximately $40 billion in cash transfers from the US every year, which is larger than the majority of India's budget for subsidized programs like welfare. It is 7% of the government's entire annual budget. That's massive.
So, it makes sense why there is a complex fraud network on both sides of the ocean to make Indian immigration happen. Indian workers are notorious for using fake degrees to get H-1B approval, but many US companies look the other way because they want the low wage labor. The Indian government backs the fraud because they get billions of dollars in cash flow into their economy on the back end. And the migrants happily participate because they get a much higher chance of gaining US citizenship, which is one of the most valuable commodities in the world.
It's one of the biggest economic rackets on the globe. It's also a key vehicle for the multicultural invasion of the US. There is no benefit to the American people to import millions of third world migrants, and it's about time that someone did something to stop the chain of abuse.
