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 A12From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 1 September 2026
Piker forced off Michigan campaign trail; press call it El-Sayed's 'problem' to dispatch.
As it ran on the front
Follow the sequence and tell me it's an accident. A campaign surrogate gets targeted, the target's old internet posts get put in front of him at exactly the right moment, he exits the campaign trail rather than become the story — and by the time the dust settles, the New York Times isn't writing about who dug up the posts. It's writing about how El-Sayed can 'dispatch his Hasan Piker problem.' Problem. Like the man he stood next to is a stain on a shirt instead of a guy who got pushed out.
That's the trick with 'problem' framing — it moves the camera. One week it's CBS taking heat for running a report on a candidate's now-deleted posts, and by the next week the story isn't the posts, isn't who surfaced them, isn't why an outlet decided old internet history was the news of the day. The story is what the candidate does about it. The pressure campaign disappears into the furniture. The guy who has to manage the fallout becomes the subject.…
…(cont) El-Sayed, to his credit, didn't play along quietly — he called it what it was, an effort to 'cancel' his ally. That's the correct word, and it's also the word that never makes it into the headline about what he 'could' do next. Notice CBS gets to walk away from its own report with a 'takes heat' story, which is the softest possible landing for running opposition research as journalism. Nobody at CBS has to dispatch anything. Only the candidate does.
Here's the stakes: this isn't about a streamer's feelings. It's about who gets to set the news cycle for a United States Senate race — a guy with old posts and an editor with a delete button, or the minutes the actual candidate gets to explain what he's for. Every hour spent on 'dispatching a Piker problem' is an hour not spent on whatever El-Sayed actually wants to do about your kid's insurance premium. That's the whole point of the exercise, and it works whether or not the posts even mattered in the first place.
“A campaign ally gets run out over old posts somebody else dug up and timed, and within a week the story isn't the digging, it's how the candidate 'dispatches' the fallout. That's how you turn opposition research into somebody else's homework.”
“CBS reported facts, old posts are old posts, and if a campaign can't survive its own surrogate's internet history that's a vetting problem, not a media problem. Did the timing look coordinated? Coordinated is a strong word, I'd call it — journalism happening to occur at a convenient moment, which, yeah, I hear it too.”
The receipts
Republicans hold their trolls close. For Democrats, it’s more complicated.
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.