Watch: Even 'Morning Joe' Couldn't Help But Call Out Abdul El-Sayed for His 'Disingenuous' Attempt to Dismiss Radical Connections
Abbott and Costello. Bert and Ernie. Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker.
There you have it: Three duos that basically don’t work without the other half. Unfortunately for El-Sayed, a radical with a thin public service resumé who managed to win the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan based in large part on getting a boost from the “America deserved 9/11” Twitch streamer, he now has to pretend that the other half of the duo doesn’t really exist.
But as an El-Sayed interview this week with MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough showed, that isn’t going to be easy — and it shouldn’t be.
As you’ve probably heard if you’re paying attention to the Michigan campaign, where Republican nominee Rep. Mike Rogers is using the Piker alliance to great effect, El-Sayed is hiding behind the fact that a “streamer from California” whom he just happened to campaign with shouldn’t be a big deal. He agrees with some things the guy says, he doesn’t agree with everything. He doesn’t have much connection to him and Piker certainly wasn’t instrumental in his win.
Appearing on “Morning Joe” on Friday, El-Sayed continued this line — even though Scarborough, to his credit, wasn’t really buying it, particularly since Piker is again in the news for saying that al Qaeda is better, “pound for pound,” than the United States.
“You have said, though, ‘Oh, he’s just a California streamer.’ He was a California streamer who’s actively engaged in your primary campaign,” Scarborough said.
“Don’t you think it’s disingenuous just to call him, like, a ‘California streamer’ when you know the guy, you campaigned with the guy, he was a big part of your campaign?”
“He wasn’t a big part of my campaign. We had him to Michigan once,” El-Sayed said.
This is only slightly true: While Piker did a campaign stop with El-Sayed in Michigan once, El-Sayed also spent the night before the primary at a pool party where Piker was the guest of honor — albeit a party that wasn’t hosted by the campaign, but might as well have been.
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spent the night before Tuesday’s crucial Democratic primary at a pool party with far-left streamer Hasan Piker — a figure who has praised Mao Zedong, said “America deserved 9/11,” and made controversial comments about Hamas.
The event in… pic.twitter.com/zMGiwiIvsD
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) August 4, 2026
The deflection continued: “I’m on your show, Joe, because I want to talk to the audience who’s watching you right now,” El-Sayed told Scarborough. “And the problem in our democracy too often is we say who we cannot talk to, rather than asking, ‘How do we bring these folks back into an electoral fold?’ There are some things [Hasan Piker] has said that I agree with.”
That, again, is profoundly disingenuous, again, considering that Piker has said we deserved the 9/11 attacks, that the street should run red with the blood of landlords, that Donald Trump had an assassination coming, and other such faux pas that can’t just be ignored because the guy says a lot of stuff on Twitch and, you know, weird things come out when you’ve been on camera for eight hours. Even in short-form interviews, he comes across this way:
👀 NEW: @hasanthehun joins @alexthomp on the Season 3 premiere of The Axios Show in what Piker called “the most contentious interview” he’s done.
Piker claims that “pound for pound,” America conducts more terror around the world than al-Qaeda. pic.twitter.com/c8xFVvbixl
— Axios (@axios) September 17, 2026
In a new NYT interview, Hasan Piker says that many “understand” Luigi Mangione killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson because Thompson himself was guilty of “social murder” pic.twitter.com/4f9bPdsxU5
— Pirate Wires (@PirateWires) April 22, 2026
So yeah, not just something El-Sayed can wave away. Scarborough being Scarborough, he spotted El-Sayed the fact that even Ronald Reagan, during his first runs for office in California, said “he had a Bircher problem” — as in members of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, which was still quite active back then, supporting his campaign.
“So I totally get that,” Scarborough said. “I’m just saying, if you just call him a ‘California streamer,’ that seems to minimize what he did in the primary. That’s the only thing I’m asking you. Do you think that minimizes that?”
El-Sayed’s answer in TL;DR form: Uh, gas prices. Donald Trump.
“Here’s my issue at the end of the day, right? He is a streamer in California. And the issue that everybody’s focused on is the price of gas and groceries in Michigan,” El-Sayed said.
“Meanwhile, you’ve got a guy like Mike Rogers who literally goes to Dallas instead of showing up to a debate in Detroit to campaign with Donald Trump, who not only says crazy stuff every day but does crazy stuff that costs you money — the tariff war, the war in Iran. And so it’s frustrating to me that I never hear about Hasan Piker on the doors. I never hear about him outside of conversations that are had like this.”
Even MS NOW calls out Abdul El-Sayed for trying to distance himself from Hasan Piker after campaigning with him:
“Don’t you think its disingenuous to call him a California streamer when you know the guy, you campaigned with the guy, he was a big part of your campaign?” pic.twitter.com/2opXuIPF8a
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 18, 2026
At that point, Scarborough reverted to his MS NOW form and appeared to let El-Sayed off the hook, implying that it’s Republicans who are being disingenuous by using Piker as a straw man to attack the Democratic candidate (“bullsh*t” was the word he used), but even MS NOW viewers should have seen enough by then to figure out the truth.
For those of you who missed it, the primary to replace outgoing Democratic Sen. Gary Peters featured a bunch of candidates, including a more accomplished progressive, Mallory McMorrow. El-Sayed had a limited record as a Wayne County health official and some success campaigning within Michigan’s not-insignificant Muslim community, but not a lot to recommend him to voters aside from that. Polls demonstrated that.
Then, Piker got involved. Yeah, he was a lightning rod — but if this primary season has taught us anything, it’s that lightning rods are perfectly fine with the Democratic base. McMorrow dropped out and El-Sayed eked out a victory over the marginally sane U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
Now, after securing the nomination due to the Piker vote — young, progressive, and America-hating — he now has to win a general election where that doesn’t resonate. So while Piker’s in the background effectively saying that of course El-Sayed has to distance himself from a “Twitch streamer in California,” he’s still not just a Twitch streamer in California but a mouthpiece for the base that got El-Sayed into this position in the first place.
As duos go, El-Sayed wants us to think that this is Calvin and Hobbes, and that Piker is Hobbes: Totally real during the primary process, but an imaginary friend somewhere out there in the fake world of social media during the election. Michigan voters shouldn’t buy it. And neither should the rest of the country.
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