Abdul El-Sayed condemned US response to 9/11 that ‘scarred millions’ in resurfaced podcast comments

Abdul El-Sayed is running for a Michigan Senate seat, and it turns out he once told a podcast audience that Americans need to stop "centering" their own grief over September 11th because the response to it "scarred millions" of people elsewhere. That's not a slip of the tongue. That's a worldview, and it's the kind of thing that surfaces on old podcasts because people say what they actually believe when they think nobody outside the audience is listening.

Nearly three thousand people died that morning. Firefighters walked into buildings that were coming down. Families are still finding out details about how their relatives died two decades later. Asking Americans to de-center that grief, on a podcast, as a matter of political framing, is a strange thing to think is a persuasive point rather than an obviously alienating one. Mike Rogers called it disqualifying, and it's hard to argue he's reaching. This isn't a debate over foreign policy tradeoffs after the attacks, which is fair territory. It's a comment about whose grief gets to matter and how much.

What's notable is the reflex underneath it. There's a certain strain of commentary that treats American loss as something to be immediately contextualized, qualified, and weighed against everyone else's suffering before it's allowed to just be loss. Most voters don't experience their own history that way, and they notice when a candidate does. El-Sayed can try to explain the clip away, but the instinct it reveals is the actual story here, not the eight seconds of audio.