There are few consensus opinions left in American politics. The ones that remain, now that Dolly Parton has passed away, fall neatly into two camps.
The first are policies that the United States has carried out unthinkingly for so long that both major parties’ positions have calcified into default support. Think U.S. aid to Israel or farm subsidies. Whether you’re a young politician looking to avoid alienating your peers, or a senior representative not looking to upset the apple cart, there’s little incentive to squabble over the way things have always been done.
The remaining unifier is unspeakable tragedies. Mass shootings, natural disasters and terrorist attacks send Republicans and Democrats scrambling for a camera into which they can express their sympathies. This is also somewhat understandable. Once emergency funding has been freed up, what else is there to do but send thoughts and prayers?
In this regard, Abdul El-Sayed will fit right in if he ever makes it to Washington. He proved it when Bari Weiss’ CBS News ambushed him earlier this week to toss the Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan an all-time softball: How do you feel about the Sept. 11 attacks? (Sorry if this kills the suspense, but he thought they were bad.)
“What happened on 9/11 is a disaster,” El-Sayed said. “It was a terrible attack on our country.”
“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the destruction that 9/11 wrought,” said Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, when asked Monday about resurfaced posts on Sept. 11 attacks.
“What happened on 9/11 is a disaster. It was a… pic.twitter.com/SsuYnl4iwE
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 31, 2026
CBS framed up this anti-gotcha with a story about the candidate’s deleted social media posts. In those posts, El Sayed made the grave mistake of considering the Sept. 11 attacks in context. In one, he hoped that the death toll of the coronavirus pandemic would inspire “a war for public health & against poverty” on the scale of the Global War on Terror.
CBS also boosted another El-Sayed tweet that was first revealed by the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing outlet claiming to cover “the enemies of freedom.”
“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021. “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
25 years later, there’s still a lively historical argument around how and why the Sept. 11 attacks happened. Most people would balk at Hasan Piker’s claim that “America deserved 9/11” – a statement the Twitch streamer later walked back – but you can draw a line between American-led and supported wars in Africa and Asia and the eventual attacks on American civilians. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did just that in a 2002 letter laying out his justifications for the attacks. What you can’t deny, either way, is that the deaths of 3,000 Americans and the millions of casualties in the wars that followed are both incomprehensible horrors.
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El-Sayed held to that stance in his interview with CBS News, saying that the attacks and the Global War on Terror were “awful.”
“I think all of us also look back and say, think about all the wars that were fought and how much safer do we feel like they made us?” he said. “Our responsibility is also to think about how do we build an America where we are protecting our servicemen and women from being asked to fight wars we have no business fighting that ultimately end up doing harm to people.”
A more charitable read on El-Sayed’s comments would reveal a consistent set of values. It’s a tragedy when any human life is taken, here or abroad, by a soldier or an extremist. That’s far enough from the American mainstream to be newsworthy, but it’s not the kind of news Weiss wants to make.
The Free Press founder saw something sinister in El-Sayed’s unwillingness to divorce the 9/11 attacks from context, or at least something close enough for conservative purposes. MAGA and Weiss hope to associate him in whatever small way they can with terrorism. CBS News ran the story with the following lede, which also served as its caption on X: “As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack.”
The story led to immediate backlash both inside CBS News and on social media. Staff who spoke to the media newsletter Status shared that Weiss was “personally” involved with the story’s packaging and had asked that the “headline be tweaked to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the September 11 terrorist attacks.” Concerned employees reportedly ran the story by the outlet’s standards department, to no avail.
Make no mistake, the outlet was pressing El-Sayed on this question because he is a Muslim with an Arabic name. Even so, it could have led somewhere interesting. A first-generation American teenager named Abdul almost undoubtedly experienced the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, with its extreme and accepted outbursts of Islamophobia, in a way that differed from the median American. CBS News didn’t ask him about that, and that’s not what he offered in response.
El-Sayed gave the answer that any American would and CBS News tried to smear him with it anyway.
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