El-Sayed to attend religious convention criticized for inviting 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Abdul El-Sayed wants to be a United States senator, and this weekend he's sharing a stage with men who think 9/11 was some kind of inside job or foreign plot other than the one that actually happened. That's not guilt by association. That's a choice about who you sit next to when you're building a national political profile.

We get it, these conventions have hundreds of speakers and organizers don't vet every panelist's worldview. But El-Sayed isn't some anonymous attendee. He's a Senate candidate in a competitive Michigan race, and he presumably has a staff whose entire job is to keep him away from exactly this kind of headline. If nobody flagged it, that's an operation problem. If somebody flagged it and he went anyway, that's a judgment problem. Either way it lands on him.

Nearly three thousand Americans died on 9/11. The people who spend their time constructing alternate narratives about that day aren't harmless eccentrics, they're peddling something corrosive, and giving them a shared platform with a mainstream candidate lends them a legitimacy they haven't earned. Voters are allowed to ask why a man seeking a Senate seat couldn't find a way to skip this one.

El-Sayed will probably say the invite predates any controversy, or that appearing isn't endorsing. Fine, let him say it on the record. But "I didn't know who else was speaking" is a thin excuse for someone asking Michigan to trust him with a vote in the United States Senate.