Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed scrubbed his internet history when he started running for office. He claimed he did this to prevent people from taking things out of context but really this was just an excuse so he could delete old posts that might create problems for him. Today CBS News highlighted a couple of tweets regarding 9/11 which are gone but still archived somewhere.
El-Sayed's past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface, including two deleted social media posts verified by CBS News that have not been previously reported. In those posts, he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.
In one, from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization. In another, El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped "that means we'll 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."...
In another deleted post, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021: "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."
I guess the through-line here is that he's suggesting we've made too much out of 9/11 relative to other issues he thinks deserve more attention. That seems to be a pretty common view on the Left so I'm pretty sure this won't matter to his base. Maybe it would matter to some moderates though.
Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, said El-Sayed's deleted social media posts are unlikely to damage his campaign on their own, but they feed a narrative pushed by his opponent that he holds fringe views.
"Is any specific tweet going to matter for the general election? It seems unlikely," Grossmann said. "But does the general impression that he might be too extreme [...] will that make a difference? That has a bigger chance of doing so."
That seems about right to me. I don't think the tweets are a knockout but they might add to the sense that his views on some pretty fundamental topics really are different. He was asked about the tweets by CBS and he pivoted to attacking Trump and the war with Iran.
"There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the destruction that 9/11 wrought,” said Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, when asked Monday about resurfaced posts on Sept. 11 attacks.
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 31, 2026
“What happened on 9/11 is a disaster. It was a… pic.twitter.com/SsuYnl4iwE
So, again, my take is this isn't helping El-Sayed but it's also not ending his run or anything like that. But a lot of left-wing Democrats seem to still have a hangover from last week's discussion of El-Sayed and Hasan Piker. Many of them are denouncing CBS News as a chorus.
.@CBSNews shame on you. You are showing us how racist and bias you are. Targeting Abdul like this is intentional and coordinated. Disgusting. https://t.co/zh5cImt2Pv
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 31, 2026
Hi @CBS @CBSNews @bariweiss do you think it's super offensive and disgusting and Islamophobic to do a tweet about the potential first ever Muslim Democratic senator which begins by referencing 9/11? https://t.co/vLWH0BWF7D
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) August 31, 2026
what an insane headline. this is why the ellison’s bought cbs and put bari weiss in charge. https://t.co/YUuFK6zlue
— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) August 31, 2026
Zionists are functionally Klansmen. Bari Weiss's CBS News is a racist, segregationist, genocidal propaganda rag. https://t.co/RMT1puo72w
— Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) August 31, 2026
Despicable anti-muslim woke right garbage from the house CBS account https://t.co/i0XX4Phl1c
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) August 31, 2026
this reads as if Bari Weiss's CBS News is deliberately trying to insinuate that Abdul El-Sayed did 9/11 or is somehow connected to 9/11 and now must answer for that https://t.co/02uGPQAKHS
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 31, 2026
It just goes on and on like this. I don't think this shows El-Sayed was connected to 9/11 but he did comment on it as an adult and I think the fact that he deleted those comments (along with a lot of other stuff) suggests he'd rather voters not get a clear sense of his real feelings.
Anyway, I think the real concern isn't CBS News' headline, it's the same concern these same people had last week when El-Sayed refused to distance himself from a guy who said America deserved 9/11 and who said, more recently, that American Jews defending Israel would invite attacks on themselves.
"And you want to know why? Because people don't f*** with Israel any longer," Piker said. "And if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone's going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews."
Several minutes later, Piker added: "You're running around, basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as basically Jewish ISIS, and you're saying, as Jews, this is all we care about. You're making antisemitism worse."
El-Sayed and Piker are extreme but as I said above, I don't think that hurts them with the base. It certainly would have 25 years ago, but not these days.
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