Michigan Democrats’ newly anointed Senate candidate blamed gun rights and “right-wing media” for a 2023 mass shooting at a Nashville Christian school at the hands of a mentally disturbed woman pretending to be a man.
In a now-deleted podcast in April 2023, Abdul El-Sayed claimed that the school shooting wasn’t a “trans problem” but “a gun problem.”
“After this shooting in Tennessee, right-wing media wanted to talk about the identity of the shooter who happened to identify as trans,” El-Sayed said during his opening monologue on the podcast, according to a story first reported by the Post Millennial.
The far-left Senate candidate was referring to Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old trans-identifying psychopath who stormed into the Covenant School, a Christian elementary, on March 27, 2023 and fatally shot six people, including three third-graders. She was shot and killed by a responding police officer before she could take more innocent lives.
Hale left behind a “manifesto” — multiple journals, in fact— filled with extreme leftist ideology, deranged entries laboring on her apparent white guilt and an urge to “kill all the white kids,” as well as plans laying out her deadly errand.
How the PM obtained the audio from El-Sayed’s “The Right to Have Healthcare!” podcast is not clear from the story.
The Federalist reached out to the campaign on Wednesday seeking clarification. As of publication, El-Sayed’s press office has not responded to the request for comment.
‘School Shootings Are Not A Trans Problem’
His far-left positions on gun control may have played well in this month’s Michigan Democratic Party primary, but they won’t sit well with voters in a state where one in every three households owns a gun. Perhaps that’s why El-Sayed has scrubbed so many of his old videos and social media posts.
The socialism-supporting Democrat who doesn’t like to be described as a socialist reportedly goes on to say in the now-deleted podcast that, “School shootings are not a trans problem, school shootings are a gun problem and [conservatives] are trying to dissuade us from talking about the real issue here, which is too often it’s the case that almost anyone can get any gun anytime and take it anywhere, like a school.”
First of all, there is a growing trans violence problem, much more so than the accomplice media likes to acknowledge. As John R. Lott Jr. wrote earlier this year in The Federalist, “Transgender-identifying shooters commit mass public shootings and active shootings at rates far above their share of the population. In 2024, for example, transgender-identifying individuals accounted for a share of active shooter attacks that was at least 12 times larger than their share of the population.”
And El-Sayed’s myriad complaints against gun ownership are really just regurgitated talking points from the dubious gun-control lobby. But the Senate candidate seemed to take things a step further in another 2023 podcast when he insisted that the Second Amendment could use a “tweak.”
‘A Sense of Resentment’
On his America Dissected podcast, the doctor-turned-politician discussed what he titled “The Contagion of Liberty.” He noted the shootings at the Nashville elementary school, which had occurred just days before.
“That’s right. Another elementary school got shot up this week. This time it was a Christian private school in Tennessee where a shooter killed three adults and three children, all under nine years old,” he says, according to the transcript. The audio remains online.
He then goes on to again hammer “right-wing media,” which he asserts “have chosen to concentrate on the shooter, a former student at the school who identified as trans, arguing that the attack was some kind of broader attack in an escalating battle between trans people and Christians.”
El-Sayed is wrong again, at least as the Covenant Killer is concerned. An assessment by The Counterterrorism Group, which specializes in detecting, deterring and defeating terrorism, finds that it is “almost certain” that the motivation of the person of interest — Hale — “was a sense of resentment for attending this school.” Hale had been enrolled at Covenant years before. Her manifesto details her animus for the people involved in the private Christian elementary school.
“POI likely had grievances towards the Christian institution, its teachings, and the perceived religious narrative opposing freedom of gender identity,” the assessment states. “This attack highlights the importance of monitoring individuals with grievances over their religious school experience, especially those of LGBTQA+ individuals.”
But the identity politics-steeped El-Sayed lays the blame for the murder of three white children and the three Covenant employees at the feet of “an epidemic of gun violence in this country,” which “has nothing to do with trans people.”
“It has everything to do with the unfettered access to guns,” he said.
‘If I Could Tweak One Thing’
Then, as so many of his socialist friends are fond of doing, the Michigan Senate candidate goes on to “Imagine what America might be if we took access to health care as seriously as some people take access to guns.” He’s a huge proponent of single-payer healthcare. Government-run healthcare. In fact, he wrote the book on Medicare for All.
“If I could tweak one thing about the Constitution, it would be two words in the Second Amendment from the right to bear arms to the right to have health care,” he said. “Guns take a lot of lives in America. Health care, health care saves them.”
‘Just Wrong for Michigan’
El-Sayed has attempted to walk back many of his more controversial — or politically difficult — radical statements from the past. CNN and other corporate media outlets are reporting that the newly minted Democrat nominee for Senate in swing state Michigan had deleted dozens of old video that could bite him in November’s general election. But many of the comments, like his call to “tweak” the Second Amendment, live on.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said resurfaced comments from far-left candidates are “making it easier” for GOP candidates this election cycle. In short, crazy isn’t faring so well in the general election season.
“I’m certain that Abdul El-Sayed is making it easier. Because he is inconsistent with Michiganders of either side of the aisle,” Scott told CNN’s Manu Raju over the weekend.
“By the way, he’s someone who wants to defund police, defund ICE, who wants to abolish our concept of a border,” he added. “He’s just wrong for Michigan.”
