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.
Page A7From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 1 September 2026
CBS flags Michigan Senate candidate's old posts as the Times drafts his plan to cut loose his ally.
As it ran on the front
Here's how you handle a candidate you can't beat on the issues: you don't attack the platform, you go rummaging through his old posts until you find something from years back that plays bad out of context, and CBS did exactly that to Abdul El-Sayed's decade-old, now-deleted 9/11 posts, right on schedule. Same week, the New York Times — not a tabloid, the paper of record — runs a piece built around how El-Sayed could 'dispatch' his own campaign surrogate, a streamer named Hasan Piker, like advising a boxer on which arm to cut off before the fight.
That's two of the most powerful newsrooms in the country, in the same news cycle, doing opposition research and campaign strategy for a Senate candidate's opponents, for free, and calling it coverage. Nobody had to conspire in a room for this to happen — that's not how it works, and that's the part that should worry you more, not less. The incentive just sits there: dig up the old post, then explain how the candidate should cut his own ally loose to survive the post you dug up. El-Sayed's answer is also on the record — he called the effort to sideline Piker exactly that, an effort to cancel him.…
…(cont) The stakes here aren't abstract. This is a real Senate seat, a real primary, and a candidate getting the two-step treatment — manufacture the liability, then advise the amputation. You've seen this movie before if you've been paying attention to campaigns like this one: old post, deleted post, 'here's how he should handle it' piece, repeat. The press doesn't have to want him gone. The pattern just has to be profitable, one click at a time, and it is. Two separate institutions, two separate stories, landing on the same candidate in the same seven days, and every one of the clicks on both pieces counts the same at the register, whichever outlet's masthead is on top.
“You don't need a memo for this to work — the incentive alone does the coordinating, dig up the old post, then run the piece on how he should cut his own guy loose. Watch which candidates get this treatment and which don't; that's the tell.”
“CBS was simply reporting on posts the candidate himself deleted, that's transparency, and the Times piece was analysis, not strategy — okay, it was framed as strategy, 'how to dispatch,' that's literally the headline, but analysis can be framed lots of ways.”
The receipts
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…
Republicans hold their trolls close. For Democrats, it’s more complicated.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.