A bitter clash over the legacy of September 11 has thrust Michigan’s U.S. Senate race into the national spotlight, pitting Republican Mike Rogers against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and drawing an unexpected intervention from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The controversy centers on comments El-Sayed made years before his current campaign, during a 2021 appearance on the “America Dissected” podcast.
Speaking on September 7, 2021, El-Sayed told listeners that “9/11 scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people,” according to the New York Post.
He added, “When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them.”
Those remarks lay dormant for years before resurfacing this month, just as the country marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
Rogers, a sitting U.S. representative and El-Sayed’s Republican rival for the Senate seat, seized on the resurfaced comments immediately.
He declared that “it is disqualifying for a US Senate Candidate to believe that Americans should ‘center’ their grief from 9/11.”
Rogers went further, calling El-Sayed’s remarks “disgusting” and stating that they make him “completely unfit to serve in public office.”
The dispute might have remained a routine campaign skirmish had Carlson not weighed in through his members-only newsletter on Friday, according to Mediaite.
Rather than joining fellow conservatives in condemning El-Sayed, Carlson defended him outright, writing that “El-Sayed did not celebrate airplane hijackings or cheerlead Al-Qaeda; he simply said that the U.S. conducting terrorism of its own in response to 9/11 was not exactly an appropriate reaction. He is obviously right.”
Carlson used the newsletter to make a broader argument about the human cost of America’s post-9/11 military campaigns, particularly the Iraq War launched under President George W. Bush.
“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,” Carlson wrote. “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, had tens of thousands of American military casualties, and catalyzed the creation of ISIS.”
He pressed the point with a specific casualty estimate, writing, “That means the U.S. slaughtered enough civilians to account for dozens and dozens of 9/11s. And that is a conservative estimate.”
Carlson did not stop at defending El-Sayed. He turned his newsletter into a direct attack on Rogers, questioning why the congressman’s own record should be exempt from scrutiny.
“Hold on a second. Disgusting? Understanding that the Bush administration was wrong to kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, even though, again, Iraq did not do 9/11, is disgusting?” Carlson wrote.
He continued the attack, stating flatly, “We are really not sure who Mike Rogers is, but if anyone in Michigan’s Senate race is ‘unfit to serve in public office,’ it is him.”
Carlson closed his argument with a comparison designed to illustrate the scale of wartime casualties, invoking sports venues to make his point.
“Slaughtering thousands of innocent people is atrocious no matter who is responsible,” he wrote.
“If Rogers is deranged enough to think that Jihadis are evil for murdering enough Americans to fill a Division III hockey arena, but that the Pentagon deserves two thumbs up for killing enough to pack Ohio State’s football stadium multiple times, then he cannot possibly have the judgment necessary to adequately serve the needs of American voters.”
El-Sayed’s Senate bid has weathered other controversies tied to his past political associations, including his prior campaign appearances alongside Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
El-Sayed distanced himself from Piker only after securing his party’s primary nomination, a shift that came under scrutiny from critics during the primary campaign.
The Michigan contest between Rogers and El-Sayed is considered one of the most closely watched Senate races of the current election cycle.
Carlson’s intervention marks one of several instances in recent months where his commentary has broken sharply from mainstream conservative media positions, particularly on matters involving U.S. foreign policy and military intervention in the Middle East.
Neither campaign has issued further public comment since Carlson’s newsletter was published.
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