Abdul El-Sayed, the man who just won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday night, once sat down on his podcast and delivered this diagnosis of American life: "Capitalism has become the thief of sex."
El-Sayed made the remarks on a 2021 episode of his podcast "America Dissected," in an episode titled — and this is real — "Talkin' Nerdy About Gettin' Dirty." His guest was sex educator Emily Nagoski, and together they explored the apparent crisis of Americans having 13% less sex than in the late 1990s. El-Sayed's conclusion wasn't stress, or phones, or the general state of modern dating. It was the economic system that built the country. "Subordinating that most natural human act to the tyranny of our ever-so-busy lives, it's just one way capitalism steals our sex from us," he explained.
He also helpfully identified another culprit: "the absolute libido killer that is the existence of children in your home." So capitalism and kids. The two things most Democratic Socialists of America members have already eliminated from their lives.
El-Sayed beat U.S. Representative Haley Stevens in Tuesday's primary and will now face Republican Mike Rogers in the general election in November. He's backed by the same DSA infrastructure that boosted Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His policy positions read like a Sanders rally setlist. But the networks covering his win are already sanding off the edges, describing him as a "practical progressive" and a "capitalist" — which is an interesting label for a man who thinks capitalism is conducting a heist on the American bedroom.
El-Sayed wasn't making a joke. He wasn't riffing. He was presenting a thesis: that the free market economy has made Americans too busy, too stressed, and too distracted to have sex at the rates they once did. "Sex positivity isn't about being exposed to the highlight reel picked and pruned version of sex," he added, taking aim at Instagram and OnlyFans in what might be the one sentence in the entire episode that accidentally makes sense.
But the core claim — capitalism is why you're not getting laid — is the kind of take that only survives inside a very specific ideological bubble. The 13% decline in sex frequency since the late 1990s tracks almost perfectly with the rise of smartphones and social media, not with any particular shift in economic systems. Americans in the 1990s weren't living under socialism. They were living under the same capitalism, just without a glowing rectangle in their pocket at 11 p.m.
The media sanitation effort is already underway. El-Sayed is being positioned as a mainstream Democrat with crossover appeal — a doctor, a public health expert, a serious person. The DSA backing gets a brief mention. The Hasan Piker connections get no mention. The podcast where he blamed free enterprise for a national dry spell gets filed under "opposition research" rather than "things the candidate actually believes and said out loud and published."
Mike Rogers doesn't need to write attack ads. He just needs a sound guy and a clip from "Talkin' Nerdy About Gettin' Dirty."