I’m writing this on Tuesday afternoon, ahead of a night I already know is coming but haven’t yet seen unfold. Tuesday night brings a rally in Dearborn, Michigan — an anti-Islam demonstration complete with a pig roast, timed deliberately to needle the local Muslim community. It’s organized by a man named Jake Lang. At 7 p.m., the city council will hold its regular meeting, and Lang plans to show up and speak. That meeting was supposed to happen in City Hall, but security concerns forced it to relocate to a local library. Lang has simply moved his rally to the same library and is now claiming, without evidence, that “the Islamic City Council is running scared.”
The event has been branded online as a “Christian crusader march on Dearborn City Council meeting,” complete with AI-generated crusader imagery on the promotional poster. One of the event’s co-sponsors, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, posted that flyer himself. Lang responded to it with the phrase “crusade or be replaced” — a direct nod to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that has become a load-bearing idea in far-right politics. Lang says he plans to arrive with twenty armed security personnel.
Jake Lang is a familiar figure in far-right provocateur circles. He was present on January 6th, was charged with assaulting a police officer, went to prison for it, and has since been pardoned. He’s 31, ran an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in Florida, and has settled into a role as a traveling agitator, particularly against American Muslims. Lorenzo Sewell is a different kind of figure entirely. He’s African American, leads a church in Detroit, delivered one of three benedictions at Trump’s 2025 inauguration, and spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention. He hosted Trump at his church and helped broker relationships between the 2024 Trump campaign and Black church leaders across the Detroit area — an outreach effort that was, by most accounts, fairly successful. Sewell has real standing with the White House faith office and has been photographed with Trump repeatedly. He has genuine ties to the administration, which is precisely what makes his involvement here notable.
Lang speaking at Lorenzo Sewell’s church
This past Sunday, Lang spoke at Sewell’s church, and the language he used was ugly by any measure. He described “mongrel third worlders” in the Detroit area “multiplying like cockroaches” — dehumanizing rhetoric wrapped in the language of scripture, invoking the New Testament question of why there is “a spirit of fear” in Detroit. After he finished, Sewell and other church leaders laid hands on him and prayed over him. There was no flinch, no note of condemnation — the moment was presented as part of the church’s message. It’s worth sitting with that: a majority-Black church in Detroit, led by a close ally of the Trump administration, blessing a man who had just used openly dehumanizing language about immigrants.
Understanding why this matters requires some background on Dearborn itself. It’s often described as the only U.S. city with a majority-Muslim population, though that claim doesn’t hold up cleanly under scrutiny. What’s factually true is that Dearborn has a majority Arab population, largely of Middle Eastern and North African descent — a group that includes plenty of Arab Christians alongside Muslims, since there’s no official religious census. What is true is that Muslims are prominently represented in civic life there: the mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, is Muslim, as is the police chief, Issa Shaheen. It’s a thriving Muslim community that has weathered more than its share of targeted hostility over the years.
Provocateurs looking to make a spectacle out of anti-Muslim sentiment have returned to Dearborn again and again. Terry Jones, known for attempting to burn Qurans publicly, targeted the area repeatedly in 2011 and 2012; when police tried to get him to sign an agreement limiting his actions, a federal judge ruled that requirement unconstitutional. In 2012, a group called the Bible Believers brought a pig’s head to Dearborn’s Arab Festival and told attendees they’d burn in hell, prompting a hostile crowd reaction and intervention by Wayne County deputies — only for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to later rule that the county had violated the group’s First Amendment rights by not doing more to protect them. Jake Lang himself has cycled through this same playbook in Dearborn multiple times, and each time, his right to do so has been upheld.
Earlier this month, during one of these visits, Lang was actually assaulted — struck from behind, by his account with a rock, caught on video. Police formed a protective barrier and moved him to safety; three men have since been charged. It’s worth noting, given Lang’s claims that police won’t protect people like him, that Chief Shaheen says officers were on the scene ensuring everyone’s safety within 30 seconds of his arrival. Despite that, Lang has continued escalating: attempting to burn a Quran at the Islamic Center of America, hurling slurs at residents, and promoting Tuesday’s protest on Alex Jones’s show, pulling national far-right attention toward what would otherwise be a routine local council meeting. Asked by a reporter if he expects violence, Lang said, “Does the sun rise in the east?” He’s also said the Muslim community is “gonna freak out” — language that reads less like prediction than intention.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Just days before Lang was assaulted, Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, overcoming more than $65 million in outside spending — including roughly $30 million from AIPAC — aimed at stopping him. If he wins in November, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate; he’s already the first Muslim nominated for the seat by either major party. Researchers tracking anti-Muslim posts online found a roughly 70-fold spike in volume on the day he won his primary, a surge that wasn’t confined to Michigan but appeared nationwide. The dominant theme in those posts was to brand him a jihadist with invented ties to Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood — claims made without evidence. Trump himself weighed in, calling El-Sayed “a communist loser who hates Jews and Israel” and framing his nomination as good news for Republican prospects. Trump and others have taken to using El-Sayed’s full name, Abdulrahman Muhammad El-Sayed, in what reads as a deliberate othering tactic — the same maneuver used against Barack Obama’s name years earlier. There’s nothing unusual about the name itself; it’s simply the fuller version of the “Abdul” he goes by. El-Sayed has stayed even-keeled about it, essentially saying this is the only card his opponents have left to play.
Chief Shaheen has tried to defuse the moment directly, posting a video in both English and Arabic urging residents to stay home, avoid counter-protesting, and deny Lang the reaction he’s chasing. His reasoning is sound: groups like this show up for one purpose — provocation and attention — and if nobody responds, they have nothing to work with. Lang typically draws small crowds on his own, and there’s a real chance few people show up with him at all. One Dearborn resident, William Ali, put it well: if Lang wants to bring a pig’s head or hold a roast, so be it — Muslims don’t hate pigs, they simply don’t eat them, and the whole gesture is rooted more in ignorance than any real theological offense.
The bigger picture here is about coalition-building. Antisemitism is currently a fault line within Trump’s base — a live wire pulling apart pieces of that coalition and feeding a breakaway “America First” faction. Islamophobia, by contrast, tends to unite it. Jake Lang is, by most measures, a fringe figure who hasn’t had much success drawing crowds. Lorenzo Sewell is not fringe — he has real influence within the administration, having been given one of the coveted inauguration prayer slots, a privilege not extended lightly. Muslims make up only about 1.5% of the U.S. population, concentrated in places like Dearborn but numerically small in the national picture, which makes them a vulnerable target for exactly this kind of organized demonization. What’s unfolding looks less like spontaneous outrage and more like an electoral strategy — an attempt to make Abdul El-Sayed and Muslim Americans broadly into a unifying enemy ahead of the midterms.
Expect more of this rhetoric in the months ahead, because it’s serving a political purpose for the people deploying it. For anyone who isn’t Muslim but who values pluralism and religious freedom, this is a good moment to stand with Muslim friends and neighbors, who are likely to face a great deal more pressure and hostility as this strategy plays out. That’s what it looks like — a piece of a broader plan by figures like Sewell and Lang, and elements of the Trump administration itself, to find their path to victory through division. Standing against that hate, and standing with our neighbors, is worth doing now.
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