Tucker Carlson has inserted himself into Michigan’s U.S. Senate race, on the side of progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, defending the candidate’s inflammatory comments about 9/11 while training his fire on Trump-backed Republican Mike Rogers.
In his Friday newsletter, Carlson declared El-Sayed “obviously right” after resurfaced remarks put the Democrat on the defensive for arguing that Americans fail to “center” the millions harmed by the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks. Carlson stopped short of a formal endorsement, but urged Michigan voters to keep Rogers “far away from Washington.”
The remarks at issue came from a 2021 podcast.
“9/11 scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people. When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them.”
Four days later, on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, El-Sayed posted a since-deleted message that mourned the nearly 3,000 Americans killed before pivoting to U.S. war casualties abroad.
“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
The associations don’t stop there. El-Sayed has embraced radical left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, the same Piker who declared “America deserved 9/11” and later displayed a framed front page of the attack in his studio as what can only be described as a trophy.
Rogers called it exactly what it is.
“It is disqualifying for a U.S. Senate candidate to believe that Americans should ‘center’ their grief from 9/11,” Rogers said, adding that El-Sayed’s attitude toward the attacks was “disgusting” and made him “completely unfit to serve in public office.” Rogers is no backbencher on these issues; he chaired the House Intelligence Committee and spent years on national security matters that El-Sayed apparently views through the lens of American culpability.
Carlson dismissed all of that and went after Rogers instead.
He argued El-Sayed was merely criticizing post-9/11 U.S. wars rather than defending the hijackers, a distinction his critics will find cold comfort given El-Sayed’s choice of allies. Carlson zeroed in on Iraq, contending the war made no sense and helped spawn ISIS.
“Your typical Fox News viewer is likely oblivious to this, but America’s response to 9/11 blew the original attack out of the water. George Bush’s subsequent war in Iraq, which made no sense considering Iraq did not do 9/11, got hundreds of thousands of innocents killed.”
Carlson went further, writing that U.S. actions amounted to “dozens and dozens of 9/11s,” and called that a “conservative estimate.”
He then flipped Rogers’ own language back on him, asking, “Hold on a second. Disgusting?” before concluding that Rogers, not El-Sayed, was the one “unfit to serve in public office.”
Let that land for a moment. A former Fox News host, once a reliable hawk who backed the Iraq War, is now running interference for a Democratic Senate candidate whose ideological allies think America had 9/11 coming, and doing so against a Republican with President Trump’s endorsement and a serious national security résumé. Whatever Carlson is at this point, he is not a conservative. Michigan voters should notice.
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