Dem Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed on Sunday refused to break ties to notorious hate streamer Hasan Piker — while hinting he wants to sock the middle class with the bill for his Medicare for All plan.
El-Sayed even left the door open to continuing to campaign with Piker in the pol’s general election matchup against Republican Mike Rogers — despite arguing that the notorious Twitch streamer’s 2019 comment that “America deserved 9/11” was dumb.
“It was a dumb statement,” El-Sayed told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He disavowed it. So yes. America didn’t deserve 9/11.
“But to sit here and play gotcha politics with a dumb thing somebody said out of context — 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,” the radical candidate said. “But we seem to want to bring back.”
Piker very begrudgingly suggested that his comment was “inappropriate” shortly after his screed against the US in 2019.
But he was later seen with a framed copy of a front-page newspaper story showing the Twin Towers in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. More than 2,750 people, most Americans, died in New York City alone on the infamous day.
Piker has also sparked controversy for claiming that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was a “direct consequence” of Israeli actions and asserting that if the terror group engaged in rape, it “doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”
At one point, he fawned over the “brave mujahideen” who injured Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and later suggested Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) should be murdered.
The Mao Zedong-loving streamer also took heat for appearing to use a shock collar on his dog during one of his streams.
El-Sayed stumped with Piker throughout his bruising primary race, which Rogers has since used as fodder for attack ads, tying him to the lefty streamer’s suggestion that the US deserved the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“I’m less concerned now with who I’m campaigning with and a lot more concerned about who I’m campaigning to,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to continue to build the coalition that’s going to beat Mike Rogers.”
During the wide-ranging interview, El-Sayed also acknowledged that his Medicare for All proposal would likely cost middle-class taxpayers, despite his longstanding emphasis on taxing the wealthy more.
“So for the average person, when you look at your W2, if you’re an employee who gets paid every two weeks or four weeks, after you pay your taxes, the next biggest check that comes off the top of your pay stub is to your health-insurance company,” he said.
“Imagine instead of paying that to your health insurance company, whose CEO makes $20 million a year, instead you paid a little bit more in taxes for health care that you wouldn’t lose if you lost your job or turned 26 or got married or got divorced.
“I think that’s a trade that’s worth making.”
Medicare for All would cost between $2.5 trillion and $3.5 trillion annually on average over a decade in increased federal spending, according to a 2020 analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The cost of implementing the program today would likely be much higher.
El-Sayed’s proposals would have no co-pays or deductibles, which is much more comprehensive than Medicare, whose Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is already projected to go insolvent in the early 2030s.
That increased expansiveness would like push the price tag up even further than what has been estimated.
The US currently has a roughly $7.4 trillion budget for fiscal year 2026, including a roughly $2 trillion deficit.
“Weird. I thought Abdul’s campaign promise was more money in your pocket. This sounds a lot like more money for the government,” Rogers chided on X in response.
