Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul el Sayed on Monday again defended Hasan Piker after publicly distancing himself from the Twitch streamer in the wake of concerns that he is antisemitic. El Sayed campaigned with Hasan Piker multiple…
Page A10From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
Vance calls Senate candidate 'evil'; the real controversy is a Twitch streamer and deleted posts.
As it ran on the front
Here's how it works. A sitting Vice President stands up and calls a Senate candidate 'evil.' Not 'wrong.' Not 'misguided.' Evil — the kind of word you save for people who do actual harm to actual people. And the candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, comes back with the only sane answer available: what's evil is corrupting yourself. Fine. That's a real exchange about a real word, and for about a day, it looked like the campaign might actually be about something.
Then watch what happens to the word. It doesn't stay on the debate stage. It migrates. Within days, the story isn't 'evil,' the story is a Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker, and whether El-Sayed has a 'Hasan Piker problem,' and whether he needs to 'dispatch' it, like the guy's a rash instead of a campaign volunteer with an internet show. Meanwhile CBS is taking heat over a report on El-Sayed's old, deleted 9/11 posts — posts, not policy, not a vote, not a budget line, posts — and El-Sayed's spending his news cycle defending a streamer against a cancellation effort instead of talking about, I don't know, anything that shows up in a constituent's mailbox.…
…(cont) This is the con, and it's not subtle once you see it. You call a guy evil, on the record, in a speech. That's the accusation. Then the actual controversy machine doesn't investigate the accusation — it goes and finds the smallest, weirdest, most online thing adjacent to the guy and grinds on that instead, for a week, on cable, in print, everywhere. The 'evil' charge never gets litigated. It doesn't have to. It already did its job, which was to plant the word next to the name and let the streamer story do the rest of the work, quietly, no fingerprints.
Neither man in this exchange has said much about what he'd do about your rent, your kid's insulin, or the interest on your car loan. That's not an accident. That's the whole show working exactly as designed, and the only people not getting paid for their time are the ones watching it.
“They call a guy 'evil' on a debate stage and then spend a week digging through some streamer's old posts — that's not scrutiny, that's a distraction with a production budget, and meanwhile the policy questions aren't getting airtime.”
“The Senator's 'evil' remark speaks to real concerns about the candidate's associations — associations being, apparently, a guy who plays video games on the internet, which, fine, is not evil, I'll amend that.”
The receipts
Republicans hold their trolls close. For Democrats, it’s more complicated.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Monday shot back at Vice President Vance’s comment about him being “very, very evil.” Earlier Monday, Vice President Vance went after El-Sayed at a rally in Detroit, calling him…
Vice President JD Vance also told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, to “keep my wife’s name out of your mouth.”
Abdul El-Sayed's deleted 9/11 social media posts sparked a firestorm after CBS News reported on the Michigan Senate candidate's past comments.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.