Michigan’s Democrat Senate nominee has a problem he can’t shake.
El-Sayed’s response on CNN raised more questions than it answered.
And Abdul El-Sayed unraveled after facing this sick 9/11 scandal.
El-Sayed Waves Off the Piker Question
On a recent broadcast of CNN’s The Source, Democratic US Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed sat down with host Kaitlan Collins and tried to put the Hasan Piker mess behind him.
It didn’t work.
Rogers has hammered El-Sayed repeatedly for campaigning with Piker, a left-wing Twitch streamer who said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed’s response to that criticism on CNN: “It’s sad. He doesn’t really want to talk about any of the issues people are really facing. … [I]f he thinks that the issue is a streamer in California, then he’s got another thing coming.”
That’s a striking posture from a candidate who, earlier in the campaign, declined to simply disavow Piker’s remarks and instead told a Fox News interviewer that “It’s important to talk about context.” He eventually called the comment “dumb” months later, but only after sustained political pressure made the original non-answer untenable.
Piker’s 2019 statement wasn’t a throwaway remark. He said, on a livestream, “America deserved 9/11, dude.” He later walked it back, claiming he didn’t mean it literally. But Piker has also justified Hamas’s October 7 attacks, called Orthodox Jews “inbred,” and praised the “mujahideen” who attacked US soldiers during the war on terror as “brave,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. El-Sayed campaigned with him anyway.
Rogers, a former FBI special agent, has not been subtle about where he stands. “I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” Rogers said in a statement. “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”
El-Sayed’s camp frames all of this as guilt by association. But the candidate himself was the one who chose to bring Piker to Michigan and campaign alongside him at Michigan State University. That’s not guilt by association. That’s a scheduling decision.
Then Came the Lecture on Violent Rhetoric
Collins then turned to something that happened at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas — an audience member shouting “He should be shot” while US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) named El-Sayed and other Democrat candidates from the stage.
Cruz did not acknowledge the shouts. It is unclear whether he heard them from the podium.
El-Sayed used the moment to pivot hard. “I’m a dad with two daughters and I hope those daughters get to grow up and live with their dad,” he told Collins. “This is what has become norm in our politics. I mean, literally calls to violence, and the inability for anybody to actually call it out.”
He added: “When you hear that kind of call to violence, it should be shuddering to all of us. I hope that everybody who heard that is going to call it out for what it is: a call for violence that ought to be condemned across the board.”
Nobody serious is defending that shout. A single unidentified audience member yelling something ugly from a crowd is not a policy position, and any reasonable person condemns it.
But the timing of El-Sayed’s lecture is something worth sitting with for a moment.
The convention speeches that day included multiple tributes to Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder who was assassinated at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025 — exactly one year before those convention remarks. Vice President JD Vance, who was friends with Kirk, addressed the crowd and reflected on his killing. RNC Chairman Joe Gruters opened the second day of speeches by saying, “Charlie was killed one year ago today.”
Kirk was 31 years old when a sniper shot him from a rooftop during a campus event in Orem, Utah.
So Republicans were gathered in Dallas to mourn a man killed by left-wing political violence, and El-Sayed — the candidate who campaigned with a streamer who said “America deserved 9/11” — chose that occasion to tell Republicans they don’t denounce violent rhetoric.
What the Double Standard Looks Like
The left-wing domestic terrorism threat is not hypothetical. Kirk’s assassination is the most visible recent example, but the pattern is documented: assassination attempts against President Trump, the plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the sustained violence tied to the 2020 riots. The same political class that demands Republicans answer for a shout in a convention crowd spent years making excuses for organized left-wing violence that burned federal courthouses and cost working Americans billions.
El-Sayed’s pivot from the Piker question to the convention shout is a textbook misdirection. He doesn’t want to answer for his own choices — specifically, choosing to share a stage with someone who said America deserved the worst terrorist attack in its history. So he points at Republicans and demands they perform condemnation.
And CNN let him do it without pushing back on the obvious asymmetry.
The Michigan Senate race matters. Democrats need the seat to have any shot at reclaiming the Senate majority. But El-Sayed’s path to victory runs directly through the Piker problem, and calling it “sad” that Rogers keeps bringing it up isn’t going to make it disappear. Every time El-Sayed dismisses the question, Rogers gets another week of earned media connecting him to a man who put “America deserved 9/11” on the record.
And now El-Sayed has handed Rogers something else: a clip of the Democrat lecturing Republicans about denouncing violent rhetoric on the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, while still refusing to fully and cleanly cut ties with the man who said America had the September 11 attacks coming.
That’s not a great look heading into the fall stretch of a Senate race that could go either way.
Sources: Breitbart, CNN’s The Source, Washington Free Beacon, The Hill, Detroit News