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 A11From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 1 September 2026
JD Vance calls Michigan Senate hopeful 'evil'; CBS surfaces his years-old deleted posts same week.
As it ran on the front
Let's follow the timeline, because timelines are where they always get caught. A guy running for Senate in Michigan brings on a popular streamer to help him talk to young voters. The streamer becomes a liability the second the campaign starts polling like it might actually work, and the week he exits, the sitting Vice President of the United States stands on a stage and calls the candidate 'evil.' Not 'wrong.' Not 'misguided on policy.' Evil. That's a word you save for the guy you're worried about, not the guy you're laughing off.
Right on schedule, CBS runs a piece on posts El-Sayed put up and deleted years before he was a national name — the kind of digging that takes actual staff-hours, the kind that doesn't happen to candidates nobody's worried about. Nobody spends a week combing somebody's old timeline for sport. You do it because the internal polling memo says this guy's numbers are moving in a direction somebody doesn't like.…
…(cont) Here's the part they don't put in the press release: none of this requires a conspiracy with a group chat and a whiteboard. It requires an incentive structure. A candidate becomes a threat, the opposition research gets funded, the surrogate gets a talking point, the outlet gets a clickable headline about deleted posts — and every single actor in that chain can honestly say they were just doing their job. That's the con. It doesn't need a smoking gun, it needs everybody's incentive pointed the same direction at the same time, which is a lot easier to arrange than an actual conspiracy and a lot harder to prove in a hearing room.
The New York Times ran its own piece the same week asking how El-Sayed could 'dispatch his Piker problem,' as if the problem was ever really the streamer and not the fact that a candidate with real numbers makes certain people nervous enough to reach for a word like evil in a stump speech. Watch what happens to the coverage if he loses the race. Watch how fast 'evil' turns back into a name nobody bothers to spell right. That's the tell. That's always the tell, and it costs the campaign real weeks it doesn't get back.
“Every time a guy on the left starts polling, suddenly his old posts are the front page and the sitting Vice President is calling him evil from a stage. That's not journalism finding something, that's the machine finding a reason. Watch how fast the same outlets forget about it the moment he drops out of the race.”
“Vance is simply stating a moral judgment, which is different from a personal attack, and CBS is simply reporting on posts that exist, which is different from a hit piece — and if those two things happened the same week, that's a coincidence of the news cycle, not a coordinated one. I want to be clear, I'm not saying coordinated.”
The receipts
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.
Republicans hold their trolls close. For Democrats, it’s more complicated.
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.”
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.