It's All in the Family: Abdul El-Sayed's Radical Sister Called for a 'Stateless, Communized Society' and Was Arrested for Spitting on Cop

Abdul El-Sayed wants Michigan voters to see a nice ad about step-grandparents in mid-Michigan talking up his tenure as Wayne County health director. Fine, that's politics. But if you're going to run "family roots" as your closing argument, don't be surprised when people ask about the rest of the family tree. And in this case the rest of the tree includes a sister who wants a "stateless, communized society" and got herself arrested for spitting on a police officer.

We're not in the business of holding candidates responsible for every relative's opinions. People have weird uncles and radical cousins, and that's not usually a story. What makes this different is that El-Sayed is the one inviting scrutiny of his family by turning them into campaign props. He put grandma and grandpa in a commercial to vouch for his character. That's a choice, and choices like that open the door to the obvious follow-up: what does the rest of the family believe, and does any of it track with the candidate's own politics?

That's especially fair given who El-Sayed is. This isn't a moderate Democrat with a stray radical relative. He's run on Bernie-style democratic socialism for years, cast himself as the anti-establishment insurgent, and built a national profile doing it. A sibling calling for the dissolution of the state and getting cuffed for assaulting a cop isn't some random data point plucked out of nowhere. It fits a pattern of who this candidate is comfortable being associated with, right up until the cameras are rolling and it's time to look wholesome for mid-Michigan.

Voters can decide for themselves how much weight to give a candidate's family. But they deserve the full picture, not just the sanitized ad version. If El-Sayed wants credit for his roots, he doesn't get to pick and choose which branches count.