Two fact-checkers found the Rogers claim resting on Piker's words, and the right's biggest anniversary posts were about the victims.
On September 10 Mike Rogers used his speech at the Republican midterm convention to tie Abdul El-Sayed to Hasan Piker's remark that America deserved 9/11. El-Sayed answered that Rogers had voted against the Zadroga Act's care for first responders. Piker had posted on September 9 that 'the right doesn't care abt 9/11 beyond using it for propaganda'. Robert Reich wrote that 'right-wing Trump suckups such as Mike Rogers' should be out of the Senate. On September 11 Occupy Democrats posted 'Never back down from the fascists'. Their claim is that the right uses 9/11 only for propaganda.
The narrow reading is that the Rogers attack is a campaign tactic resting on Piker's words, and that Rogers's own votes undercut his standing to run it. FactCheck.org rated Rogers's 'I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11' false on 10 August, finding the campaign pointed to Piker's comments and to no statement by El-Sayed, and PolitiFact reached the same finding on 7 August; the campaign's reply was that El-Sayed refused to disavow Piker. CBS reports Rogers voted against the 2010 James Zadroga Act and warned at the time that it 'jeopardizes the financial health of the United States', and also reports he backed financial support for victims in the immediate aftermath and calls the insinuation that he doesn't support them 'patently false'.
The wide reading is that the right as a camp doesn't care about 9/11 at all and uses the day only to spread hatred of Muslim people and justify wars. In the window the biggest right-leaning 9/11 posts in the collection ran on Saudi accountability and the 28 pages, including a widow's clip at 4.77 million engagement, and Michael Ragusa, a lifelong Republican and Giuliani's security head, called the Mamdani ceremony clip 'fake news'. At the same time the anti-Muslim posting was real and large, including Loomer's Muslim-ban demand at 419,691 impressions. The uniformity the wide reading predicts is missing; the current it names is there.
The Rogers camp's version, that El-Sayed shares the hatred behind the attacks, is checked on its own card. Each side's main evidence is the other side's words.
Three checks: on whether independent fact-checkers found the campaign's 9/11 claim resting on anything El-Sayed said, on whether Rogers's House record shows votes against responder care with a stated reason other than the victims, and on whether the right's anniversary posting ran uniformly on Muslim people with no pushback from its own side.
Being right about what happened and wrong about what it proves are different failures, so these two lines never get averaged into one score. How this works
The logic check
If the claim is right, these things should be true. Here's what we found. Each check says which version of the claim it's testing, the plain one most people would hear or the widest one the same words could carry, and whether it carries the claim's own burden or establishes the background it sits on.
If the Rogers attack were propaganda resting on a premise El-Sayed's own words do not support, the minimal reading, independent fact-checkers would find the campaign's 9/11 claim about El-Sayed unsupported by anything El-Sayed said.
Reading survivesFactCheck.org on Aug 10 rated Rogers's 'I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11' false, finding the campaign pointed to Piker's comments and no statement by El-Sayed, and quoted El-Sayed's 'America didn't deserve 9/11'; PolitiFact reached the same finding on Aug 7. The campaign's Aug 11 reply was that El-Sayed refused to disavow Piker, which concedes the premise rests on Piker. source
If Rogers's concern for 9/11's victims were selective, his House record would show votes against responder care, and his stated reason at the time would be something other than the victims.
Reading strainedCBS reports Rogers voted against the 2010 James Zadroga Act, pushed for the aid to be funded annually, and warned at the time that the bill 'jeopardizes the financial health of the United States'; CBS also reports he backed financial support for 9/11 victims in the immediate aftermath, and quotes his reply that 'The insinuation that I do not support the victims or their families is patently false.' The votes are documented; the indifference the carriers infer from them sits beside a stated fiscal rationale and an earlier record of support. source
If the right as a camp cared about 9/11 only as a vehicle for hatred of Muslim people, the strongest reading, its anniversary carriage would run uniformly on Muslim people and no right-of-center voice would push back on the anti-Muslim framing of its own side.
Reading strainedIn-window the largest right-coded 9/11 items in the lane ran on Saudi accountability and the 28 pages (Geiger_Capital's widow clip at 4.77 million engagement, Posobiec's Saudi thread), Michael Ragusa, a self-described lifelong Republican and Giuliani's security head, publicly called the Mamdani ceremony clip 'fake news', and Rogers himself said the insinuation that he does not support the victims is false. At the same time the anti-Muslim carriage was real and large: the harm corpus took roughly two dozen items from this arena in-window, including Loomer's Muslim-ban demand at 419,691 impressions. The uniformity the strongest reading predicts is absent; the current it names is present. source
The full scoring
The raw numbers behind the verdict. What R/I/P/E/L and charge stages mean: how we score.
Research verdict: mixed evidence. The research found some of what the claim predicts and not the rest.
The claim is that the Rogers anniversary attack shows that the right does not care about 9/11 and uses it only to spread hatred of Muslim people and justify wars. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact found in August that the Rogers claim rested on Piker's words, which supports the narrow version, and Rogers's votes against the Zadroga Act are documented beside a stated fiscal reason and an earlier record of support. The wider version ran into a camp whose largest anniversary posts were about the victims, including a widow's clip at 4.77 million engagement on Saudi accountability, while posts hostile to Muslim people were also large and real. The claim is partly supported.
Source record: hobocode.net Fault Line Report 2026-W37
Everything here is a plain-language cut of research published in full at hobocode.net, including the polarization methodology that defines every score on this page.