Hasan Piker added to his vault of controversial statements on Thursday, calling the United States “worse” than al Qaeda, the radical Islamist terrorism network that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Piker said that “pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes,”
Page A2From§Eachthe noon edition — 17 September 2026
Piker calls the U.S. worse than Al Qaeda; Detroit News calls El-Sayed's deletions the real scandal.
As it ran on the front
On Aug. 27, per The Hill, Abdul El-Sayed told Semafor he had "no plans" to campaign with Hasan Piker, the streamer and friend who had surrogated for him through the primary. The distance did not hold. By Aug. 31 the Washington Examiner had counted six Democrats who had condemned Piker's remarks blaming Jews for violence against them; El-Sayed was not among them, and that same day CBS published a piece linking his old, innocuous comments about the Sept. 11 attacks to fresh political risk. A Tuesday, Sept. 1 report from Status, relayed by Common Dreams, claimed CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss had been personally involved in that piece — a claim, not a confirmed fact. On that same Sept. 1, El-Sayed told The Hill that Trump was turning him into the "main character" of the midterms, and the Washington Examiner reported he was ripping the effort to "cancel" Piker — publicly defending the same man he had told Semafor, five days earlier, he had no plans to appear with.
By Sept. 2 The Hill described him walking a "political tightrope." On Sept. 10 the Republican National Committee aired a convention ad built around a "meat pic" of Piker in his underwear, using the image to cast Democrats as communists; Piker called himself "flabbergasted." On Sept. 13, El-Sayed told The Hill he was not "interested in having a conversation about streamers in California" — Piker broadcasts out of Los Angeles, a distinction El-Sayed keeps drawing and Piker keeps erasing.…
…(cont) He erased it again this week. On Sept. 17 the Washington Examiner reported Piker's answer when asked whether the United States is worse than al Qaeda: "pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes." The same day, Fox News reported that the Detroit News had endorsed Mike Rogers, framing its case against El-Sayed as a pattern of hiding his past; the editorial itself faulted him for deleting thousands of old social media posts. El-Sayed did not put those words in Piker's mouth, and Piker's posts are not the ones the Detroit News is counting. Every week he declines a conversation about one man's timeline, a different one ends up costing him — this week, his own.
“Guy spends two weeks telling everybody it's not about the streamer, and it turns out the hometown paper never cared about the streamer — they went straight for his own deleted posts. That's the tell: when you spend that much energy managing what you won't talk about, somebody eventually just reads what you already put online. Whole Senate seat's riding on a guy who can't outrun his own timeline, let alone somebody else's.”
“Look, deleting a handful of old posts is just good digital hygiene, everybody's done it — this isn't a pattern, it's a Tuesday. And a hometown paper endorsing the other guy over some old tweets doesn't mean anything, papers make calls all the time, that's just — well, it's the paper he's actually run in front of for years, so maybe it means something. But nobody serious is talking about deleted posts, they're talking about a streamer three time zones away, keep up.”
Earlier in this story
- El-Sayed's vow to avoid Piker lasts four days before Piker says US out-terrorizes Al Qaeda 'pound for pound.' By Chip · the coffee break edition, 17 September 2026
The receipts
The Detroit News endorsed Mike Rogers for Michigan's Senate race while blasting Abdul El-Sayed for deleting thousands of past social media posts.
· El-Sayed says Trump is making him 'main character of the midterms' from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Bari Weiss Personally Involved in CBS News Hit Piece on Abdul El-Sayed: Report from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Jon Ossoff condemns Hasan Piker's rhetoric as streamer declares mainstream media 'crisis of credibility' from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
· Hasan Piker flabbergasted over ‘meat pic’ featured in ad at RNC midterm convention from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.