We expect a few basic things from people who want to serve in the United States Senate. Honesty about who they are. The backbone to stand behind what they’ve said. And – especially as the 25th anniversary of September 11th approaches – a bedrock moral seriousness about the worst attack on American soil in our lifetimes. That shouldn’t be controversial. That’s table stakes.

So what do you make of a candidate who spent years sharing his unfiltered thoughts on 9/11 online, then quietly torched the evidence before launching a statewide campaign? That’s not the behavior of someone ready to lead. That’s damage control.

From the Daily Wire:

With less than two weeks to go before the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is raising eyebrows with deleted social media posts that reference 9/11.

El-Sayed’s campaign told Politico earlier in the campaign that he’d deleted all tweets posted prior to July 2023 in an effort “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context” – but the posts that have resurfaced in the time since then have only sparked more questions.

Questions indeed. And every answer makes the case that Abdul El-Sayed is simply not fit to represent Michigan in the Senate.

A record he’d rather you didn’t see

The resurfaced posts – verified by CBS News – paint an uncomfortable picture. In 2020, El-Sayed used the 9/11 death toll as a rhetorical stepping stone, comparing the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered that day to COVID-19 casualties. He hoped America would “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty… like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.”

Instrumentalizing 9/11 for a public health talking point is bad enough. But his September 11, 2021 post – shared on the twentieth anniversary, no less – crossed into something far worse.

“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

There it is. On the anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, El-Sayed placed the atrocity and America’s military response on the same moral shelf. Both “perpetuated ignorantly,” in his framing. One by terrorists, one by the country he now wants to serve in its highest legislative body. Remarkable.

Adrian Hemond, a bipartisan political consultant in Lansing, didn’t mince words. El-Sayed has what Hemond called a “Quacks like a duck problem.” As he told CBS News, “There’s enough quacking going on, sort of directionally, that it has raised questions for a lot of people, and he hasn’t done a very good job addressing those questions.”

And the quacking doesn’t stop with deleted tweets.

The company he keeps

El-Sayed has repeatedly campaigned alongside Hasan Piker – the socialist Twitch streamer and Mao Zedong enthusiast who openly cheerleads for Hezbollah and once declared that “America deserved 9/11.” Pressed about the relationship on Fox & Friends, El-Sayed mustered this: “Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified. Just because you appear with somebody doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything.”

That’s it. That’s the best he could do. When handed a clean opportunity to distance himself from someone who celebrated the slaughter of Americans, El-Sayed offered a tepid disclaimer and moved on. CNN later gave him another shot to renounce Piker. He declined that invitation, too.

A contrast in character

Compare that to his opponent. Republican Mike Rogers spent his career in counterterrorism and intelligence, working to dismantle the very networks that attacked us. The contrast practically writes itself – and even Democrats see the problem.

Democratic strategist Joel Payne acknowledged to CBS News that El-Sayed’s baggage is drowning out his entire message. Instead of prosecuting an economic argument against Rogers, El-Sayed is stuck relitigating his own record. When your own side’s consultants are publicly diagnosing the damage, the prognosis isn’t good.

What Michigan deserves

Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossmann offered a measured but pointed warning: no single tweet will sink a campaign, but “the general impression that he might be too extreme… that has a bigger chance” of mattering.

Here’s the core problem for El-Sayed. He deleted years of posts because he understood – correctly – that his views wouldn’t survive daylight. But scrubbing the archive doesn’t rewrite the beliefs. It just confirms he knew they were radioactive.

Michigan voters heading into November deserve a senator who doesn’t need to sanitize his convictions before asking for their trust. Especially about 9/11. Especially now.

Key Takeaways

• El-Sayed mass-deleted years of social media posts to hide controversial 9/11 rhetoric from voters.
• His deleted tweets drew moral equivalence between the 9/11 attacks and America’s military response.
• He continues to associate with a streamer who declared “America deserved 9/11.”
• Michigan voters deserve a Senate candidate who doesn’t scrub his record to survive an election.

Sources: Daily Wire, CBS News