No, Abdul El-Sayed Never Said America "Deserved" 9/11 — Mike Rogers Did

The words trace to Hasan Piker, a left-wing Twitch streamer with a following in the millions, who said on an August 2019 livestream — while reacting to a Joe Rogan interview with Rep. Dan Crenshaw — "This is so insane. America deserved 9/11, dude." ^[2] Piker was suspended from Twitch for a week and, days later on The Young Turks, walked the comment back, saying he'd been referring to how U.S. Middle East policy fueled extremism, not endorsing the attacks: "I should've used more precise and better use of the language there." ^[3][2]

El-Sayed's link to the quote is one step removed even from Piker: Piker headlined two campaign rallies for El-Sayed in Ann Arbor and East Lansing on April 7, 2026, drawing large crowds and — by his own account — becoming "the evening's biggest draw, and its biggest lightning rod." ^[4] El-Sayed shared a stage with Piker; he did not adopt Piker's 2019 remark as his own, and the two rallies took place seven years after Piker made it. ^[4]

Notably, before El-Sayed's primary win, Rogers himself attributed the quote correctly — telling audiences El-Sayed "campaigned with the guy who said 'America deserved 9/11'" — before shifting to attributing the words directly to El-Sayed once the general-election matchup was set. ^[3]

El-Sayed has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the idea Rogers accuses him of holding. On Fox & Friends the same morning as the April 7 rallies, he said: "Of course I don't think 9/11 was justified." ^[2] On Meet the Press on August 9, after Rogers' attack had gone viral, he said flatly: "Yes, America didn't deserve 9/11." ^[2]

El-Sayed did decline to disavow Piker personally, framing calls to do so as "cancel culture," and later joked about the controversy onstage: "Apparently, the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were going to campaign with Hasan." ^[1][4] Declining to denounce a controversial ally is not the same as adopting that ally's seven-year-old remark — the distinction fact-checkers say Rogers' attack erases. ^[1]

The false attribution didn't stay confined to Rogers' own accounts. Right-wing outlets and campaign surrogates repeated it through August, and the attack arrived alongside other efforts to cast El-Sayed, who is Muslim, as foreign or extreme — including the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee's push to refer to him by his full name, "Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed," and Fox News host Jesse Watters repeatedly labeling him a "Michigan Muslim" without applying comparable religious identifiers to other candidates. ^[3]

El-Sayed's campaign has characterized the pattern, including the 9/11 misattribution, as Islamophobic. ^[3] Multiple independent fact-checkers — PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Straight Arrow News among them — reviewed the claim separately and reached the same conclusion. ^[1][2][3]

FALSE. Abdul El-Sayed has not said America deserved the September 11 attacks; he has said the opposite, on the record, multiple times. ^[2] The line Mike Rogers put in his mouth belongs to Hasan Piker, a 2019 remark Piker made and later walked back, years before he ever appeared alongside El-Sayed. ^[2][3]

PolitiFact rated Rogers' claim Pants on Fire, its harshest rating, noting the attack traffics in stereotypes linking Muslim candidates to terrorism. ^[1] FactCheck.org reached the same verdict, finding no reporting from any major outlet supporting Rogers' framing. ^[2] The timing — Rogers correctly crediting the quote to Piker before the primary, then reassigning it to El-Sayed the moment El-Sayed became his general-election opponent — indicates the misattribution was a deliberate campaign choice, not a one-off error. ^[3]