Too Fun to Check: El-Sayed Refuses to Renounce Hasan ‘America Deserved 9/11’ Piker

Give Abdul El-Sayed at least some credit for consistency. After tossing red meat during primaries to drive base turnout, most politicians will shift to the center afterward to compete in the general election. Radicals get pushed quietly to the side, and when they don’t cooperate, the candidates will offer soft renunciations like, “This isn’t the Jeremiah Wright I once knew.”

El-Sayed, however, won’t play that game. This weekend, NBC’s Kristen Welker pressed the new Democrat nominee for the Senate on his alliance with Hasan Piker, the radical Marxist who claimed, “America deserved 9/11.” Will El-Sayed continue to have Piker as a campaign surrogate and ally, Welker asked?

El-Sayed changed the subject rather than answer:

NBC: Hasan Piker has said “America deserved 9/11,” do you plan to continue to campaign with him?

EL-SAYED: “I’m less concerned now with who I’m campaigning with…”

NBC: “Would you welcome him though?”

EL-SAYED: “I’m a lot more focused on who I’m campaigning to.” pic.twitter.com/2kyYIyNic7

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 9, 2026

Kudos to Welker for pressing the point on NBC, of all platforms. Maybe the M-SNOW divorce really did mean a change of posture. 

That won’t suffice in Michigan, however, especially with Mike Rogers ready to turn the primary into a referendum on Islamists and Marxists as opposed to Donald Trump. This is precisely why the Democrat Party establishment spent a rumored $60 million on Haley Stevens in the last weeks of the primary and convinced Mallory McMorrow to withdraw to prevent the vote split that took place anyway. The risk for Democrats will be that Piker’s presence on the campaign trail for El-Sayed will make it easier for Republicans to nationalize the Michigan Senate race and make the entire midterms about Communists and terror sympathizers infiltrating their party.

It’s the Todd Akin Strategy, this time with an Uno Reverse card that can really stick. The longer Piker stays a surrogate and campaign figure for El-Sayed, the more this strategy will erode positions in races Democrats need to win. It’s not just El-Sayed and Piker, either, but also Darializer Chevalier, Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, and the ghosts of Graham “Der Oysterführer” Platner in Maine. Democrats had to work overtime to make Akin into a “pattern” in 2012, but the patterns in 2026 are not just real but also spectacularly obvious. And Piker makes them even more acute.

With that reality setting in, the usual Democrat stenographers are now attempting to rehabilitate Piker as a way to take pressure off of El-Sayed and other Democrat candidates. Rolling Stone Magazine ran a flatulent attempt yesterday titled “Why Is Everyone Scared of Hasan Piker?” Jim Geraghty skewered it this morning for burying its own lede:

“Why Is Everyone Scared of Hasan Piker?” asks the headline at Rolling Stone. Five paragraphs later, correspondent Josh Eells writes:

Among his greatest hits: “America deserved 9/11.” “There’s a lot we can learn from” the Chinese Communist Party. “Let the streets soak in . . . red capitalist blood.”

The question in the headline doesn’t seem like such a mystery anymore, huh? There are progressives out there who can make their case for their worldview and who don’t argue that the worst terrorist attack against Americans in history, that killed 2,977 people and 441 first responders, was “deserved.” There are progressives out there who can acknowledge the downsides of the Chinese Communist Party and its autocracy and horrific human-rights record. And there are progressives out there who do not explicitly call for the streets to be soaked with blood.

The profile features Piker complaining that he keeps getting “hammered” for “four quotes” after generating “more than 10,000 hours of content.” Mmm, indeed, no one ever gives him credit for all the times he didn’t argue that al-Qaeda was justified. …

Piker says out loud all the things that other leftists either don’t think at all, or have the good sense to not say out loud in front of a microphone and camera recording them — “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th,” and that he described the sexual violence of 10/7 as “rape fantasies.”  Piker said has “no issue” with Hezbollah, that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state of Israel,” “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time” and “the biggest terrorist internationally is the Republican Party.” He’s claimed Orthodox Jews are “inbred,” contended Zionism is “mental illness,” called the Houthis “moral,” and said his favorite flag is the one of Hezbollah.

Want to bet that Rogers and the NRSC have ads cut with every one of those statements? Want to bet that the NRSC is adapting them to races in Texas, Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio? Under the Akin Rule created by Claire McCaskill and Democrats in 2012, this is fair game in every Senate and House race. And the pattern has become so apparent in the Democrat Party that it’s a far more accurate attack in this cycle than it was 14 years ago against the GOP, too.

In that sense, we should all be glad that El-Sayed refuses to renounce his fellow terror/Marxist sympathizer. It makes the argument much easier for the GOP to make, and for voters in Michigan to understand. 

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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