Staff Reports
Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El‑Sayed recently scrubbed old social‑media posts that compared the U.S. wartime response to 9/11 with other national tragedies. The deletions came just as the country was headed into the 25th anniversary of the attacks, and they have turned into a new campaign headache for his Michigan Senate bid against Republican Mike Rogers.
What El‑Sayed deleted and why it matters
Journalists verified two removed posts that had not been widely reported until this week. One post from the COVID era compared pandemic deaths to the nearly 3,000 killed on 9/11 and argued America should wage a long “war for public health” the way it launched a global war on terror. Another post on the anniversary of 9/11 said he mourned the “3K lives” lost and then wrote that he would mourn “~1M lives… perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.” Those sentences are now gone from his accounts. Deleting an old post doesn’t make the words disappear from public record — or from voters’ memories.
Campaign explanation: a blanket scrub or damage control?
El‑Sayed’s campaign says it wiped material older than July 2023 to stop old posts from being taken out of context. The campaign also points to past statements where he called the hijackings “craven terrorist attacks” and told a national show he did not think 9/11 was justified. Fine — a candidate can condemn terror. But sweeping away old posts during a hotly contested race looks less like context and more like clean‑up duty. Voters deserve straight answers, not social‑media housekeeping.
Ties to Hasan Piker and pressure from Democrats
The timing is worse because El‑Sayed campaigned with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker during the primary. Piker once said “America deserved 9/11,” later tried to walk that back, and Democrats have urged El‑Sayed to disavow him. Senator John Fetterman and Representative Brad Schneider are among those who have asked for a clean break. El‑Sayed’s refusal to “be interested in a conversation about a social media person in California” reads as shrugging off a real political liability.
Clean‑up, not a conversion — and why voters should care
There’s a simple test here: if your words don’t match your campaign schedule, you delete them. It’s called political math. Calling for accountability isn’t cruelty — it’s common sense. Michigan voters deserve to know whether a candidate truly puts victims of terrorism above rhetorical comparisons, or whether he’ll tidy up inconvenient statements whenever the polls tighten. Screenshots live forever. Treat deletions as what they are: a campaign strategy, not an apology.
