The Great Erase: El-Sayed, Platner, and McMorrow deleted the posts. They kept the politics.
Progressive candidates are scrubbing their old posts. Then they open their mouths.
On March 12, a man named Ayman Ghazali drove a vehicle packed with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Preschoolers were inside. The FBI later called it a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism targeting the Jewish community. Ghazali’s brother had been a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, killed in an Israeli airstrike a week earlier.
Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat running for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, posted a statement condemning the attack. Then he kept talking.
“Hurt people hurt people,” he said. “Violence is a cycle.”
He repeated the sentiment on April 7, while campaigning next to leftist streamer Hasan Piker — a man Michigan State’s Hillel chapter had just publicly called an antisemite. “I also think it’s just critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6,000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here.”
Six months earlier, El-Sayed had quietly deleted thousands of his old tweets, including roughly a dozen praising the defund-the-police movement. CNN’s KFile dug them up. The deletions were supposed to be the cleanup. His comments about Temple Israel were the tell.
Scrubbing the receipts is easy. Scrubbing his worldview is harder.
They built this machine
Less than a decade ago, digging up old tweets was the hottest blood sport on the internet. The game went like this: someone gains popularity or signs a big deal, and like clockwork, a screenshot from 2009 surfaces. The public struggle session would commence. The price of survival was a public, performative apology. Refuse, and you're hounded until you bend or your career takes a hit.
Kevin Hart in 2018 is the example everyone remembers. He got offered the Oscars, then tweets from 2009 to 2011 resurfaced, the ones with “anti-gay” language. Hart didn’t apologize the way the internet demanded. He stepped down from hosting instead. He went on to be fine, but the lesson landed: a tweet from a decade ago could cost you the room.
Cancellation was the dominant tool the left used to enforce its worldview. It peaked through the pandemic and during the BLM riots. Even as Democrats began losing elections and people started pushing back, the muscle memory held on.
Which is why I am not surprised by what is happening. The left, who spent fifteen years policing speech and assigning “accountability” by digging through social media archives, is now running candidates whose digital trails are a liability. They know the rules because they created the game. They know what the internet does with old posts because they spent years using it as a weapon.
So they’re trying to delete their way out.
There was a time when forgetting was easy. You watched the nightly news, read the morning paper, and what you said in the past stayed in the past unless somebody went hunting in a library microfiche. The internet put an end to that. Video clips don’t yellow, screenshots don’t decay, and articles exist online now specifically to dig. Because the internet never forgets.
The Great Erase
Progressive candidates climbing toward federal office are deleting old social media posts by the thousands, and the people in their orbit are doing the same. I’m calling it the Great Erase. The moment a candidate launches a campaign in a state that wouldn’t elect who they really are, the archive starts shrinking.
This isn’t new. Politicians have always tried to outrun their pasts. What’s changed is the volume, the timing, the technology, and the strategy. These cleanups aren’t isolated. They cluster.
A quick gallery of the deleters:
Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan Senate Democratic primary. Deleted defund-the-police posts calling police “standing armies we deploy against our own people.” Now campaigns with Hasan Piker, says Israel is as evil as Hamas, and minimizes a Hezbollah-inspired terror attack on Jewish preschoolers as a cycle of pain.
Graham Platner, Maine Senate Democratic primary. Deleted Reddit posts where he called himself a communist, described all police as bastards, and said rural White Americans “actually... are racist and stupid.” Also deleted comments praising the tactics of Hamas terrorists who murdered Israeli soldiers in 2014. The phrase he used about the raid: “an all around well executed and successful small unit raid.” Janet Mills, the moderate establishment Democrat the party recruited to stop him, dropped out on Friday. Platner is the presumptive nominee now.
Mallory McMorrow, also Michigan Senate Democratic primary. Deleted roughly 6,000 tweets before launching her bid as the moderate alternative. The deletions: Trump-Hitler-Stalin-Putin parallels, complaints about Middle America, a 2016 fantasy where the coasts secede from the rest of the country and nominate Obama as prime minister, and bragging about voting in California two years after she says she permanently moved to Michigan. Her campaign, called them “normal tweets by a normal person.”
Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor. The deletions around him are a small ecosystem. His incoming administration started scrubbing Adams-era posts from the official @NYCMayor account in January, including two posts about combatting antisemitism that went up on his predecessor’s last day. His wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, deleted her entire X account in March after the Washington Free Beacon surfaced years of posts praising Palestinian terrorists, including a 2015 repost glorifying a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She’d also liked Instagram posts celebrating the October 7 attacks, one of which called the rapes Hamas committed a “mass hoax.” His pick for Director of Appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, deleted her entire X account the day after the ADL surfaced posts where she’d written about “money hungry Jews” and called the Far Rockaway train “the Jew train.” She lasted one day in the role.
Amir Makled, candidate for the University of Michigan Board of Regents. Deleted retweets praising Hezbollah martyrs and Hassan Nasrallah, along with a repost of Candace Owens calling Israelis and Jews demons who lie, cheat, and murder. Then opened as a featured speaker at the El-Sayed/Piker rally in Ann Arbor.
Aftyn Behn, Tennessee Democratic congressional candidate. Deleted tweets supporting defunding the Nashville PD. Dodged questions about it on Fox News.
A lot of deletions for a coincidence.
