'America Deserved 9/11': El-Sayed Won't Cut Off the Streamer Who Said It

Ask a straightforward question, get a non-answer. That's the whole story here. Someone asks Abdul El-Sayed if he'll share a stage with a streamer who told his millions of viewers that America deserved to have three thousand people murdered on a Tuesday morning in September, and instead of a simple "no," we get whatever hedging performance this was. That's not a gotcha question. It's the floor.

Hasan Piker isn't some obscure figure you can plausibly claim ignorance of. He's one of the biggest political streamers in the country, and "America Deserved 9/11" isn't a stray tweet from 2013 he's since disavowed, it's a framework he's built a career on. A candidate running for U.S. Senate in Michigan, a state that lost people that day like every other state did, should be able to say clearly that he wants nothing to do with that. The fact that he can't, or won't, tells voters something real about where his coalition actually sits.

This is the pattern with a certain wing of the Democratic Party right now. They'll condemn things in the abstract, "of course political violence is bad," "of course terrorism is wrong," but the second it requires naming an actual person in their own orbit and cutting them loose, the courage evaporates. It's not a messaging problem. It's a spine problem.

Voters notice this stuff. Not because they're obsessed with online streamer drama, but because it's a cheap, low-cost test of judgment, and El-Sayed failed it in real time on camera.