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A CNN NewsNight panel erupted into a shouting match Monday after columnist Charles Blow turned a conservative attack on Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s past association with streamer Hasan Piker back on President Donald Trump, invoking Jeffrey Epstein and Nick Fuentes.
The clash broke out after National Review columnist Caroline Downey argued that Democrats had failed to distance themselves from Piker, citing his connections with left-leaning candidates and the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) support for El-Sayed.
Blow challenged the premise.
“So now your argument is guilt by association. Is that correct?” he asked.
“No, no. You’re known by the company you keep,” Downey replied.
“You said ‘known by the company you keep’, right? So, I have a really hard time when Republicans make this argument, because I happen to have been following Donald Trump for the last 20 years,” he said. “And so the company he keeps is dictators from around the world, it is Jeffrey Epstein, it is crooks and criminals, it is Nick Fuentes having lunch with him. So you guys have the gall to talk to anybody about guilt by association?”
When Downey sought to draw an “exact parallel,” Blow interrupted: “He had lunch with Nick Fuentes!”
Project 21 chair Horace Cooper snapped that Fuentes “was at another table,” prompting Blow to pivot to Trump’s documented social relationship with Epstein.
“And there are videos of him with Epstein. Is that a problem for you? Are you OK with that? You’re OK with him having parties with Epstein?” the liberal pundit pressed.
“I am not going to relitigate this,” Cooper said.
“Oh, now you’re crying. Now you’re not enunciating like you were enunciating before, but now you’re quiet. Well, come on!” Blow shot back mockingly.
Cooper insisted there was “no truth” to Blow’s characterization before host Abby Phillip intervened to give him the floor.
Cooper then broadened the argument to Democratic candidates nationally, predicting the party could squander a favorable political environment by nominating candidates he considered too extreme.
“It is 2026. And in this year, the Democrats and the left are advantaged nationally, and they’re likely able to take back the Senate and the House,” Cooper said. “However, if they do what they did in 2018 in Georgia, in Florida and in Texas, where they run crazies, what they do is they lose, and they will come up short.”
He cited, by example, former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner before declaring: “El-Sayed is an awful candidate.”
The discussion soon spiraled into another argument over bigotry in both parties when former ABC journalist Terry Moran pointed to what he described as “skyrocketing, vicious, anti-Muslim content online” supported by the Republican Party with a “wink and a nod” while objecting to Cooper’s suggestion that political candidates could not be expected to be “pristine.”
“All of the anti-semitism that we have watched over the last three years was a wink and a nod from the left,” Cooper responded.
Moran countered: “The right has a bigger anti-semitism problem, and an anti-Islam problem and an anti-immigrant problem. And still an anti-black problem.”
Former congressional candidate Deja Foxx then returned the discussion back to Fuentes’ 2022 lunch with the president: “Nick Fuentes, he had lunch with Donald Trump. No? And you said, well, he happened to sit down. Who just happens to sit down at the lunch table with the president? Uh, a Nazi, a self-proclaimed Nazi.”
Cooper argued it had been widely reported that Fuentes had been an uninvited guest whom Trump did not know, before Blow again interjected: “What about Epstein, did he just sit down at the table?”
Downey attempted to bring the debate back to its original subject, asking: “Where did Abdul El-Sayed say, ‘I disavow my old friend, close personal friend Hasan Piker?’”
Phillip finally stepped in to end the increasingly fiery exchange, noting that El-Sayed had addressed the controversy.
“I want to be crystal clear. Nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople,” El-Sayed said in the statement Phillip read. “While politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer” – he’s talking about Piker – “we are going to be talking about gas, groceries, good schools and health care.”
“That is not a sister souljah moment,” Cooper quipped as the segment concluded.
Watch above via CNN.
The post CNN Panel Erupts as Charles Blow Trashes MAGA’s Piker Fury by Pointing at Trump and Epstein: ‘Well, Come On!’ first appeared on Mediaite.
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