El-Sayed’s Missing Tweets Show What Happens When Ideology Meets Reality

Abdul El-Sayed has a credibility problem, and no amount of mass-deleting old social media posts is going to make it disappear. The Democratic nominee for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat thought he could quietly erase his digital footprint and glide into November without anyone noticing. He was wrong.

Here’s what we know. El-Sayed, a former public health official turned progressive darling, wiped out everything he posted before July 2023. His campaign says this housekeeping was necessary to prevent old posts from being “taken out of context.” That’s politician speak for “we said things that sound terrible when normal people read them.” And CBS News found exactly what you’d expect: deleted posts comparing 9/11 to COVID-19 deaths, suggesting America’s response to terrorism was somehow morally equivalent to a public health crisis.

In one vanished tweet from April 2020, El-Sayed drew a direct line between the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered on September 11 and COVID deaths. He wanted the same outrage, the same mobilization. Another deleted post expressed hope that we’d spend the next decade “fighting a war for public health and against poverty” just like we launched the global War on Terror. Because apparently defending the homeland after the worst terrorist attack in American history is the same thing as expanding the welfare state.

But the real problem came in a 2021 post where El-Sayed mourned “3K lives” lost on 9/11 one day, then promised to mourn “approximately 1M lives” lost in three countries “perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country” the next day. Read that again. He’s equating American victims of terrorism with casualties from wars fought to prevent more terrorism. That’s not nuance. That’s moral confusion dressed up as enlightenment.

You know what’s interesting? El-Sayed isn’t just scrubbing his own questionable takes. He’s also been forced to distance himself from Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer who appeared at his campaign events and once said “America deserved 9/11” before backtracking. When you’re keeping company with people who think mass murder was justified, you’ve got more than an optics problem. You’ve got a judgment problem.

The timing couldn’t be worse for El-Sayed. He’s heading into a general election against Republican Rep. Mike Rogers as the nation prepares to mark 25 years since that September morning when everything changed. Michigan has a substantial Muslim community, and El-Sayed clearly built his political brand on anti-war sentiment and opposition to what he’d probably call America’s “interventionist foreign policy.” That plays well in certain progressive circles. It doesn’t play well with voters who remember watching the towers fall.

Adrian Hemond, a bipartisan political consultant in Lansing, nailed it when he said El-Sayed has a “quacks like a duck problem.” There’s enough troubling material, enough suspicious deletions, enough bad associations that reasonable people are asking reasonable questions. And El-Sayed’s response has been to hide behind campaign spokespeople issuing sterile statements about how he’s “always unequivocally condemned terrorism.”

If that were true, why delete the posts? If you’re proud of your record, you leave it up and defend it. You stand by what you said when you said it. Scrubbing your social media history suggests you know those posts won’t survive contact with voters who don’t share your ideological bubble’s assumptions about American power and American goodness.

This is what happens when the progressive wing of the Democratic Party tries to go mainstream. You can ride anti-establishment anger and capitalize on legitimate frustrations with endless wars when you’re operating in safe districts or friendly primaries. But statewide races require you to appeal to people who think America is fundamentally good, who believe responding to mass murder with military force was justified, who don’t appreciate moral equivalence between victims and aggressors.

El-Sayed represents a generation of politicians who grew up after 9/11, who came of age during the Iraq War’s ugliest years, who absorbed every critique of American foreign policy without the context of what came before. That worldview has consequences. It shapes how you talk about national tragedies. It influences which activists you platform and which statements you think are acceptable.

The campaign’s defense rings hollow. They claim Rogers is acting in “bad-faith” by highlighting El-Sayed’s own words. Since when is quoting someone accurately considered misrepresentation? If those posts were defensible, defend them. If they represented your genuine views at the time, explain why you’ve changed. But don’t insult voters’ intelligence by pretending that surfacing your actual statements is somehow unfair.

Michigan voters deserve better than calculated amnesia. They deserve a candidate willing to own his record, explain his evolution if it’s genuine, and demonstrate he understands the gravity of September 11 without footnotes or false equivalencies. The approaching anniversary will test whether El-Sayed can thread that needle. My guess? He can’t. You either understand why 9/11 demanded an unprecedented response, or you spend years posting takes that compare it to unrelated crises. El-Sayed made his choice. Now voters will make theirs.

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