Abdul El-Sayed had his chance to do the one thing normal politicians do after a primary — pivot — and instead chose to keep campaigning alongside a man who said America deserved 9/11, proving that the Democrat Party's rot isn't a bug but a feature.
This matters because Michigan is a swing state that will help decide Senate control, and the Democrat nominee just told every working-class family in the state that the 2,977 Americans murdered on 9/11 aren't worth disavowing a Marxist streamer over. When NBC's Kristen Welker asked El-Sayed directly whether he would continue campaigning with Hasan Piker, who said "America deserved 9/11," El-Sayed dodged: "I'm less concerned now with who I'm campaigning with and a lot more concerned about who I'm campaigning to." Pressed on whether he'd welcome Piker, he repeated the line: "I'm a lot more focused on who I'm campaigning to."
That's not a gaffe. That's a calculation. El-Sayed told the Washington Examiner he resists disavowing people because "I want to be held accountable for what I say and what I do, rather than this idea that we're so stuck in cancel culture." Convenient: the same party that censors your speech and deplatforms your accounts suddenly discovers free-speech principles when one of their own celebrates dead Americans.
And Piker didn't just say America deserved 9/11 once. According to the New York Post, he also praised Mao Zedong as "one of the great leaders of this world." The Washington Examiner reports Piker said he "would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time." Piker later walked back the 9/11 remark, claiming he "obviously" didn't mean it and was just referencing U.S. foreign policy's "boomerang effect." If you believe that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn with your name on it.
The money trail tells the real story. Over $80 million flooded Michigan's Democratic Senate primary — the most expensive in history, per the Post — with establishment Democrats reportedly pouring $60 million into Haley Stevens in a failed effort to stop El-Sayed. The party bosses knew this would happen. They tried to buy their way out of it. They lost. Now they own it.
Even their own people are sounding alarms. Sen. John Fetterman dared El-Sayed to keep campaigning with Piker, warning he'd "quickly find out it's easy to campaign in the echo chamber as a Democrat." Fetterman called El-Sayed's ally an "avowed communist" and said El-Sayed's posture has put the seat in play. James Carville has reportedly expressed similar concern. When the guy who invented "It's the economy, stupid" thinks your party has gone too far left, you've gone too far left.
The RNC's Natalie Baldassarre called El-Sayed "a terrorist sympathizer and an America-hating socialist" whose "refusal to distance himself from Hamas-hugging radicals like Hasan Piker reaffirms his true allegiance is to terrorist groups, not America." HotAir framed the dynamic as a "Todd Akin Strategy" in reverse — a real, obvious pattern the GOP can nationalize.
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone ran a piece titled "Why Is Everyone Scared of Hasan Piker?" — then buried the answer five paragraphs deep, listing his greatest hits: "America deserved 9/11," praise for the Chinese Communist Party, and "Let the streets soak in... red capitalist blood." The question answers itself.
El-Sayed won't renounce Piker because Piker's 3 million listeners are the coalition. The streamer isn't a liability to be managed — he's the base. The only question left is whether Michigan voters are paying attention.
