OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
12:13 PM – Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has defended his connection with controversial internet personality Hasan Piker, who previously expressed his belief that the United States “deserved” the Islamist terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
“Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pressed El-Sayed about whether he planned to continue campaigning with the socialist/Marxist Twitch streamer during an interview on Sunday. She pointed to Piker’s controversial past statements, including a remark where he characterized the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas as “a lesser evil than Israel.”
Additionally, during a 2019 Twitch stream in which he reacted to GOP Representative Dave Crenshaw, an Iraq War veteran, Piker said, “America deserved 9/11, dude. F*** it, I’m saying it. Like, we totally brought it on ourselves.”
Twitch is an interactive live-streaming service owned by Amazon that focuses heavily on video games, esports competitions, music broadcasts and creative arts.
El-Sayed brushed off his controversial statements, nonetheless, saying he preferred to focus on “who I’m campaigning to.”
“I think we have this notion sometimes on shows like this that we cannot or should not talk to certain groups of people,” El-Sayed said. “And I’ll tell you that the three million people who listen to Hasan are people I want to make sure understand that there’s a pathway into our politics around getting money out of politics so we can get money back in pockets and pass Medicare for All.”
Doubling down, the interviewer then asked if Piker would “disavow” the previous comment that America deserved 9/11, mentioning that Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had already denounced it as “a dumb statement.”
“Of course. Of course. It was a dumb statement. And, of course, I think Hasan, himself, would say that was a dumb statement. He disavowed it. So yes. America didn’t deserve 9/11,” El-Sayed affirmed.
However, the Michigan Senate nominee pushed back against the scrutiny, characterizing the focus on Piker’s past remarks as “gotcha politics” and “cancel culture.”
“But, you know, to sit here and play gotcha politics with a dumb thing somebody said out of context, that they disavowed themselves, to say, ‘Oh, well, what does that mean about what you think?’ I want to be held accountable for what I say and what I do rather than this idea that we’re so stuck in cancel culture that all of us agreed was a bad idea back in 2020, but we seem to want to bring back,” El-Sayed remarked.
El-Sayed expanded his reach among young far-left Democrat voters by joint-campaigning with Piker ahead of the early August primary. El-Sayed is a practicing Muslim and Piker has described himself as a non-practicing Muslim.
The affiliation became a broader issue within the Democrat party about how candidates should respond to controversial figures. The primary also represented the tension between the far-left progressive and centrist factions of the party, with El-Sayed narrowly defeating Representative Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), the more moderate option.
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