The Rogers claim rests on Piker's words, and the right's largest anniversary post was a widow demanding answers on Saudi Arabia.
On September 9 the pro-Rogers super PAC Great Lakes HQ released an ad tying Abdul El-Sayed to Hasan Piker's 2019 clip, and on September 10 Mike Rogers told the Republican midterm convention that El-Sayed and Piker together attack America. Piker posted on September 9 that 'the right doesn't care abt 9/11 beyond using it for propaganda' and on September 11 that 'these cynical monsters exploit the trauma of 9/11'. Dimitri Lascaris wrote on September 11 that Trump 'is doing precisely the same thing' as George Bush did with 9/11. Their claim is that the right exploits 9/11 to justify wars.
The narrow reading is that the Rogers attack is a pretext resting on a premise El-Sayed's own words don't support. FactCheck.org rated Rogers's claim that he was 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 rated the same attribution Pants on Fire 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', reports that he backed financial support for victims in the immediate aftermath, and quotes his reply that the insinuation he doesn't support them is 'patently false'.
The wide reading is that the right as a camp cares about 9/11 only as a pretext for wars, surveillance and racial agitation. The largest right-leaning anniversary item in the collection is Geiger_Capital's clip of a widow calling out Saudi Arabia and four administrations from the Ground Zero podium, at 4,767,365 impressions; Loomer ran three posts on Terry Strada and the Saudi files and Posobiec ran the 28 pages, all about the victims and accountability for the attack. In the same window the administration was at war with Iran, the Rogers ad and speech ran as described, and Loomer's anti-Muslim anniversary posts were numerous. The pretext use is present; the uniformity the wide reading predicts isn't.
The other side of this pair, the Rogers camp's claim that El-Sayed shares the hatred behind the attacks, is checked on its own card. Each side's main evidence is the other's words and acts.
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 no stated reason beyond the politics, and on whether the right's anniversary posting ran only on the uses the claim names, with nothing on the victims themselves.
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 a pretext 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' 'I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11' false, finding the campaign pointed to Piker's comments and to no statement by El-Sayed, and quoted El-Sayed's 'America didn't deserve 9/11'; PolitiFact rated the same attribution Pants on Fire on Aug 7. The campaign's Aug 11 reply was that El-Sayed refused to disavow Piker, which concedes that the premise rests on Piker. source
If Rogers cared about the victims only as a pretext, his House record would show votes against responder care with no stated reason beyond the politics, and no record of support for the victims outside a campaign.
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 pretext for wars, surveillance, and racial agitation, the strongest reading, its anniversary carriage would run only on those uses and on the framed candidates, with no right-coded carriage on the victims themselves or on accountability for the attack.
Reading strainedThe largest right-coded anniversary item in the collection is Geiger_Capital's clip of a 9/11 widow calling out Saudi Arabia and four administrations from the Ground Zero podium, at 4,767,365 impressions; Loomer ran three posts on Terry Strada and the Saudi files and Posobiec ran the 28 pages, all on the victims and on accountability for the attack. In the same window the administration was at war with Iran, Rogers' ad and speech ran as described, and Loomer's anti-Muslim anniversary items filled the harm corpus. The pretext use is present in the carded attack and in the harm corpus; the uniformity the strongest reading predicts is absent. 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 camp's anniversary attack on El-Sayed shows that the right does not care about 9/11 and exploits it to justify wars, mass surveillance and racial agitation. 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 sit 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 and Saudi accountability, including a widow's clip at 4,767,365 impressions, while the pretext use it names is present in the Rogers attack itself. 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.