Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed scrubbed an old tweet trashing America on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as he faces mounting pressure from Democrats to disavow far-left streamer Hasan Piker.
Page A7From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Same demand that a candidate disavow a podcaster runs in three outlets across three days
As it ran on the front
Watch the calendar, not the outrage. Monday, a candidate deletes an old tweet. By midweek, one outlet runs that he 'faces calls from Dems to disavow' a podcaster. Two days later, a second outlet runs the headline that Democrats 'haven't distanced themselves' from that same podcaster. A day after that, a third outlet runs that the candidate 'still fails to denounce' him. Three separate publications, three separate bylines, one sentence, restocked like a vending machine.
Nobody in that chain reports what the podcaster said. Nobody reports what, specifically, the tweet said before it got deleted. The story isn't the tweet. The story is the demand, printed fresh every day or two as if it just happened, each time with the temperature turned up one notch: 'faces calls,' then 'haven't distanced,' then 'still fails.' That's not three days of news. That's one day of news run through three cycles, because a demand that never gets met is a renewable resource — you can publish it Monday, republish the refusal Wednesday, and publish the persistence of the refusal Friday, and every single edition reads like it's breaking.…
…(cont) This is the trick: manufacture a debt nobody actually owes, then bill for it on a schedule. The candidate doesn't have a legal obligation to denounce a podcaster. There is no statute, no oath, no ballot line that says you answer for what somebody else says on a livestream. But run the bill three times in one week across three papers and the reader starts to feel like the debt is real, like silence itself is the crime, and by the time anyone checks whether the underlying complaint even holds up, the news cycle's already moved the goalposts to the fourth demand.
Here's the tell: none of these three stories advances a single new fact. They advance the same fact, restated with a new verb. That's not journalism catching up to a scandal. That's a printing press running the same plate. Follow who benefits from three days of 'still hasn't' instead of one day covering whatever's actually in the budget this week, and you'll find the con every time.
“Three papers, three days, one demand nobody's legally owed — that's not news breaking, that's a printing press running the same plate on a schedule. Follow who benefits from three days of 'still hasn't disavowed' instead of one day on anything with a dollar figure attached.”
“This is a legitimate accountability question — voters deserve to know where a candidate stands, and if it takes three separate stories over three separate days to get a straight answer, that's on him for not — well, it's also possible three outlets just kept running the identical unanswered question as though it were new, which, now that I've said it out loud, is not really accountability journalism, that's just a rerun.”
The receipts
A string of news stories informs us that Democrats have “distanced themselves” from America-hating Mao-loving antisemitic terrorist-cheerleader Hasan Piker. But have they? As of this writing, I count six Democrats who have explicitly…
Now that El-Sayed is competing in a general election for the votes of normies, including many Jewish Michiganders who don’t at all appreciate what Piker has said about Israel, El-Sayed is not sure what to do.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.