The media’s Hasan Piker obsession is letting Republican Mike Rogers off the hookMehdi Hasan
Mike Rogers isn’t merely campaigning alongside a controversial supporter. His campaign put an extremist on its faith leadership team
Hasan Piker.
Turn on cable news. Pick up a newspaper. Log on to Twitter. It doesn’t seem to matter where you get your political news: for the past month, the leftist Twitch streamer has become one of the dominant subjects of coverage, conversation and controversy surrounding the crucial Michigan Senate race between the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and the Republican Mike Rogers.
“I can’t stop talking about him,” conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt recently admitted on Fox, the rightwing network that also can’t stop talking about Piker, day after day, from morning until night.
And it isn’t just Fox. Media analysis platform Ground News aggregated 242 separate stories mentioning Piker from across the political spectrum over the past three months – almost three stories a day.
Think about that.
Piker doesn’t live in Michigan. He isn’t running for office. He isn’t a member of El-Sayed’s campaign. Most Americans have probably never heard of him.
Yet the political press is obsessed. The incessant, relentless coverage of him is bad enough. Worse is the gaslighting – including from Democrats and liberal commentators – over why Piker has attracted so much attention, and why El-Sayed is apparently expected to spend his campaign answering for every provocative thing the streamer has ever said.
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“You can’t deploy Hasan Piker aggressively in factional primaries and then turn around after you win and say ‘why is everyone talking about Hasan Piker,’” influential liberal pundit Matt Yglesias posted on Twitter/X. “If you don’t want people to talk about him, don’t campaign with him!!”
There is just one rather large problem with that argument.
Mike Rogers isn’t merely campaigning alongside a controversial supporter. His campaign gave a Michigan-based extremist and religious bigot a leadership title in its faith outreach operation.
His name is Lorenzo Sewell.
And you’ve probably never heard of him.
Sewell, a former gang leader and Black evangelical pastor in Detroit who spoke at Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, was unveiled by the Rogers campaign last year as one of seven members of the “senior leadership team” of “Faith Leaders for Mike Rogers”.
And Sewell’s views are not exactly difficult to discover. He has publicly and proudly described Islam as a “conquering religion” and a “death cult”. He has called El-Sayed an “Islamic jihadist” who wants to impose “Sharia law all over this land”. The United States, he insists, is “not a nation of Muslims. We are a nation of Christians.”
Imagine, for a moment, that a senior member of El-Sayed’s campaign had described Judaism as a “death cult”. Imagine that he had accused Rogers of being a white nationalist terrorist. Imagine the headlines. Imagine the cable-news panels. Imagine the demands – from Republicans, Democrats and journalists alike – that El-Sayed denounce him, disavow him, fire him.
But Sewell’s vile rhetoric is only part of the story. On 18 August, the pastor co-organized the “Christian Crusader March on Dearborn City Council Meeting” with far-right anti-Muslim agitator Jake Lang. Lang was charged with assaulting police officers with a deadly weapon over his actions on 6 January 2021, before receiving a pardon from Trump. He also says he doesn’t believe the Holocaust happened “at that level” and has used the N-word and was arrested in Texas in June on a charge of making a terroristic threat.
The Dearborn “Crusader” rally co-organized by Sewell and Lang attracted neo-Nazis waving a swastika flag and wearing Nazi armbands. There were also reports of pro-KKK material being distributed during and after the event. Dearborn police made 22 arrests that day.
Again: imagine the reaction if a senior faith leader affiliated with El-Sayed’s campaign had co-organized an event that drew people wearing Nazi armbands and waving a swastika flag, and that ended with a bunch of arrests?
Would we ever hear the end of it?
And unlike El-Sayed and Piker, who first campaigned together in April this year, Rogers and Sewell’s relationship goes back much further, to the former’s previous Senate run in 2024. Rogers spoke alongside Sewell at multiple events during the final weeks of that campaign.
So you might assume that the Republican candidate has faced a barrage of questions about his political relationship with Sewell. You might assume that the same reporters demanding answers from El-Sayed about a Twitch streamer would be demanding answers from Rogers about a man his own campaign identified as part of a “senior leadership team”.
You would be wrong.
I searched the websites of the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. Not one of them appears to have mentioned Sewell in its coverage in 2026. The Times covered the “Christian Crusader” rally in Dearborn, including Jake Lang’s role in it, but made no mention of Sewell – or of Sewell’s connection to Rogers.
To be clear: this isn’t whataboutism. I am not asking anyone to excuse anything Piker has said, or saying journalists shouldn’t scrutinize him. Nor am I saying they shouldn’t question El-Sayed’s decision to appear with him.
What I am asking for is that our so-called liberal media simply apply the same standard to both candidates. If 242 stories about Piker are justified because El-Sayed campaigned with him, how many stories are justified about Sewell, whom Rogers’s own campaign named to a senior leadership team?
If El-Sayed keeps getting asked about Piker’s rhetoric, why shouldn’t Rogers have to answer for Sewell’s?
Why aren’t reporters asking Rogers whether he disavows Sewell’s description of Islam as a “death cult”? Why aren’t they asking whether he agrees that El-Sayed is an “Islamic jihadist” trying to impose Sharia law on Michigan? Why aren’t they asking him to condemn Nazi flags at a “Christian Crusader” rally organized by a senior faith leader on his campaign?
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Oh, and why aren’t top Democrats also asking those same questions, and demanding answers for them?
The near-erasure of Sewell, Lang, and those Nazi flags from the media coverage of the Michigan Senate race, combined with the silence from so many Democratic party leaders about Mike Rogers’ extremist ties, tells us something important.
Three things, in fact.
First, this was never really about antisemitism. Otherwise, why aren’t literal Nazi flags at an event organized by a Rogers ally a much bigger story than any of Piker’s remarks?
Second, anti-Muslim bigotry continues to be seen and treated as a lesser offense in American public life. Calling Islam a “death cult” doesn’t apparently merit a single panel discussion on primetime cable news.
And third, Republicans and Democrats continue to be held to radically different rules. If you’re a Democratic candidate, you have to repeatedly answer for the views of someone who isn’t even on your campaign team. If you’re a Republican candidate, your campaign can put someone on its faith leadership team who has a long record of brazenly bigoted rhetoric and never have to worry about any kind of media backlash.
That is the real scandal here. Not that Abdul El-Sayed has been asked endless questions about a controversial ally. But that Mike Rogers has been asked none.
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Mehdi Hasan is the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Zeteo
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