Tlaib-backed Senate candidate in the hot seat after deleting 'defund the police' social media posts

By Fox News · Fox News

A Michigan Senate candidate backed by "Squad" Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and other far-left politicians quietly deleted old social media posts he made online espousing support for the "defund the police" movement between 2020 and 2021. This anti-law enforcement rhetoric became a flashpoint for Democrats during the summer of 2020 and during the Biden years. The anti-police rhetoric was also a major issue during the New York City mayoral race as mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani faced immense backlash for his past anti-police rhetoric, compelling the candidate to go on Fox News at one point to apologize for what he once said. "Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty," El-Sayed wrote in a June 2020 post on X, then-Twitter, just several weeks after the death of George Floyd. "Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about." "The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people," El-Sayed said in a separate post on social media from around the same time. REPUBLICANS TARGET 2 KEY DEMOCRATIC RACES WITH MAMDANI CONNECTION STRATEGY El-Sayed's past social media posts, which were first reported by CNN , include about a dozen posts that espoused support for the "defund the police" movement. "When we make a choice to invest in policing in a majority black community, rather than to invest in public schools, that choice is influenced by systemic racism," El-Sayed said during an interview for Michigan Online that was posted to YouTube around the same time as his social media posts that have now been deleted. "When we talk about the question of quote-unquote defunding the police," he continued, "it's a question of asking how do we right-size government away from the racist ideologies that have led us to investing in war material for policing rather than public health for children." El-Sayed, a former executiv…