A former member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who lives in Michigan issued a dire warning against extremism in American politics, and ripped far-left, progressive Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as dishonest and “sanctimonious.”
“So, I think that it’s up to everyone to not sit on their hands, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, we all need to be out there,” Jake Altman told Fox News Digital. “We all need to be supporting candidates who love this country, who want to deliver for Michiganders. We should not be leaning into this sectarian politics. My fear is we’ve seen the left wing of the Democratic Party import the politics of Hezbollah into the United States, and now we’re living with the sectarian aftermath of that.”
Altman, who formerly worked for several labor unions, said the DSA began adding fanatical far-left factions, including Marxists and Leninists, around 2014 and 2015.
He claimed that at the time, similar far-left actors were taking control of labor unions, intending to use well-meaning workers as pawns in a much larger political battle to push the Democratic Party further left. That was about the time he left the movement, which he said has become “very susceptible to extremist takeover.”
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“That’s not America,” he said. “We want… a broad, tolerant America. We want pluralism here. We don’t want to be at each other’s throats. I’m just — we have to stand up and say ‘no’ to this.”
Tensions between the DSA and Democratic Party have reached a boiling point — nowhere more evident than in Michigan — where El-Sayed, who has palled around with socialist streamer Hasan Piker on the campaign trail, is facing difficulty rallying the party’s moderates in support of his candidacy.
“So, I’ve met Abdul several times,” said Altman. “I worked very closely with his dad when his dad was union president of the AAUP local I worked for. So I have, you know, I think I have a pretty good read on the guy.”
Mohamed El-Sayed, Abdul’s father, is an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University, where he served as president of the school’s AAUP chapter and led a faculty strike in 2022.
“When I was at the Democratic Party convention, the recent Democratic Party nominating convention, [Abdul El-Sayed] recognized me,” Altman continued, clarifying that he was referring to April’s contentious Michigan Democratic Party endorsement convention. “He was working a line that I was standing in, and he recognized me, and he asked me, ‘why all the hate?’ ’cause I had been critical of the campaign up to that point.”
Altman said Abdul El-Sayed told him that his campaign “doesn’t do that,” apparently claiming that his campaign wasn’t engaged in political mudslinging.
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“We see that the guy is not a straight shooter, he’s not an honest broker,” said Altman. “He, himself, said that his primary opponent, who I was supporting, couldn’t string two coherent sentences together. I mean, the idea that he is somehow above it all is just not true. He’s the most sanctimonious man in Democratic Party politics, and that’s going a long way because there’s a lot of sanctimony in that party.”
As for the DSA, according to Altman, it is unrecognizable compared to just a decade ago.
“So, you had this older generation that was very tolerant, part of a broader liberal tradition, engaged in a productive way with the Democratic Party, not a destructive way as we see today,” Altman explained.
Part of that tradition, he said, was a total rejection of communism. But recently, the party voted to lift its ban on Leninists, allowing the proliferation of extremism among the party ranks.
“We’ve seen in August 2025 that DSA at the convention voted to remove its prohibition on having Leninists operating within the organization,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t get any clearer than this.”
He bemoaned current DSA co-Chair Megan Romer, whom he described as a “Marxist-Leninist” and “fan of the Cuban regime.”
Romer traveled to Cuba last year with a group of 40 far-leftists, where she hyped the communist country as “care-focused vs. production-focused,” blamed the United States’ blockade for the country’s food shortages and mass emigration, and said the country has “the most LGBTQ-friendly constitution in the world.”
Meanwhile, Abdul El-Sayed continues his attempts to try to win over moderate Democrats while also campaigning against Republican former congressman Mike Rogers ahead of the crucial 2026 midterms that will determine whether Democrats regain control of either or both chambers of Congress.
Abdul El-Sayed has been dogged by questions about his affiliation with Piker, whom he invited on the campaign trail during primary season. He has refused to condemn Piker, choosing instead to brush him off as a “streamer from California” who has little connection with the Michigan race.
Piker said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11,” and has also praised Mao Zedong and Communist China, said capitalists should be murdered in the streets and spewed a litany of antisemitic comments.
Fox News Digital reached out to El-Sayed’s campaign.
