The president’s popularity is floundering, Americans paychecks are under perpetual strain, and the United States is waging a pointless, unpopular war in the Middle East. Republicans are betting that some virulent Islamophobia can revive the enthusiasm of a weary base. The 2000s never ended, they just got way more online.
Capitol Hill was roiled this week by a series of anti-Muslim statements from Rep. Andy Ogles . The Tennessee Republican has a well-established reputation as a MAGA hardliner less focused on legislating than on throwing culture war grenades into the news cycle to generate coverage for himself. He hurled another big one on Monday: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie,” Ogles wrote on social media.
The post was the latest in a long series of Islamophobic posts authored by the congressman. His pinned post on X was recently a poll asking users if they agreed that “Islamic immigration is a threat to the United States?” Earlier this month, he wrote that “America and Islam are incompatible,” and that it was “time for a muslim ban.” A graphic he shared Monday described Islam as a religion of “rape,” “pedophilia,” “beheadings,” “female genital mutilations,” and “jihad.” Ogles has also shared plenty of comments from fellow conservatives defending his bigotry.
Regrettably, yet unsurprisingly, Ogles is part of a large and growing cohort of Republicans latching onto Islamophibic rhetoric as a way to continue to stoke fear of non-white and cultural otherness while avoiding the growing patch of thorns of the Trump administration’s last year of immigration enforcement, which is so unpopular that the White House is now reportedly telling Republicans to stop talking about mass deportation.
Last month, Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) made a public show of declaring that if he was forced to choose between “dogs and muslims,” the choice was “not a difficult one.” He later introduced legislation to “protect puppies from Sharia” (whatever that means). On Tuesday, Fine told Newsmax that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, should be deported.
“I have one word: deport. The fact of the matter is Mamdani hates America. He should be stripped of his citizenship and deported,” Fine said, adding: “Everybody apparently forgot 9/11 who voted for him.”
Trump has also leaned into attacks against Muslim communities and activists, targeting Somali-Americans in Minnesota as part of his immigration crackdown despite most of the community being of legal status. In one December Cabinet meeting, Trump referred to Somalian migrants as “garbage” being let into the country. The president’s administration has revived the “Muslim ban” restricting immigration from Muslim-majority countries that Trump implemented during his first term, while targeting Palestinian immigrants as part of its crackown on activists criticizing Israel. .
The Republican Party is even organizing in opposition to Islam. “Ogle’s language mirrors a lot of the language that’s been coming from members of the so called ‘Sharia Free America Caucus’ since its formation back in December,” Corey Saylor, research and advocacy director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), tells Rolling Stone.
The “Sharia Free America Caucus was founded last year by Reps. Keith Self and Chip Roy, both Republicans from Texas, and now consists of over 40 members — all of them Republicans. Members of the caucus have submitted legislation in Congress that would effectively ban the practice of Islam in the United States, and ban Muslims from immigrating to the country. Shelf once stated that Muslims were “tearing the fabric of American values like faith, family, and freedom.”
The club dedicated exclusively to Islamophobia didn’t emerge from nothing. The United States is an old hand when it comes to fostering anti-Muslim bigotry, and a resurgence of this kind of hate has been brewing across the country for a while now.
CAIR Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell first noticed the resurgence over a year ago. “We started seeing the claim that Muslims are trying to take over the country and impose Sharia law, that all American Muslims are part of the Muslim Brotherhood and a secret plot to take over America, that Muslim private schools have to be shut down, that mosques can’t be trusted, that Muslims are creating Sharia enclaves.”
In Texas, Republican Governor Gregg Abbott and lawmakers in the state legislature embarked on a public anti-Muslim crusade that set its crosshairs on a Muslim-centric community development near Dallas, Texas, labeled CAIR a foreign terrorist organization, led to a slew of anti-Muslim legislative efforts, and marked out a Steve Bannon-approved template for other states looking to review xenophobic sentiments ahead a potentially punishing midterm cycle for the GOP.
“It’s an election year. Every election year we expect to see some rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric, because politicians in certain states and in certain races see the Muslim boogeyman as a helpful way to get votes,” Mitchell explains, noting that the conflict in Gaza has also led to a boom in anti-Muslim bigotry. “People feel much freer to say what’s on their mind then they might have five years ago. Whether it’s [Rep.] Randy Fine, or [Rep.] Keith Self and others, the Republican Party is dominated by Trump, someone who has a history of anti-Muslim rhetoric.”
This week, an investigation by The Washington Post found that since the beginning of 2025, over 100 members of Congress have mentioned Muslims or Islam in social media posts. “Two-thirds of those posts have mentioned radical Islam, Sharia law, extremism or terrorism,” the report found.
The average American’s conception of “Sharia law” is often tied to post-9/11 panic over Islamic extremism, and has deviated quite wildly from its common religious meaning.
“Sharia is an Arabic word that literally means the path,” Mitchell explains. “It refers to the rules that Muslims follow. So when Muslims pray five times a day, or fast and Ramadan, or don’t drink alcohol or don’t eat pork, we are all following Sharia. Just like a Jewish person who follows Halakha, or a Christian who attends mass and follows canon law.”
Because the United States is a secular nation, religious law related to things like criminal justice, trade, and commerce are theoretically not enforced by the government. Republicans love to hyperventilate about the threat of Muslims imposing Sharia law on American Communities, but the same party has sought to impose the teaching of the Bible and Ten Commandments on public, secular education. “I don’t think they really believe that Muslims are trying to impose Islamic law on everyone, nor do they think it’s possible, but it’s politically convenient for them to whip up the Muslim boogeyman,” Mitchell adds.
Despite months of similar rhetoric from other lawmakers being met with virtual silence from the GOP, Ogles’ comments finally brought about a smidge of much-needed backlash from within the party. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told Huffpost that Ogles’ statements were “ridiculous,” and that “once you cite one religion” for expulsion “then you start citing multiple religions, right? That’s just not what America is.” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told Axios that “the Constitution says there can be no religious litmus test for those holding public office or government jobs, and I think that applies to citizenship as well.”
As always though, certain portions of the MAGA base can be counted on to defend the indefensible. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refused to condemn Ogles and instead told reporters that “there’s a lot of energy in the country, and a lot of popular sentiment, that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem.”
It’s not. It never has been in this country. The problem, according to Saylor, is the Republican attack on a religion. “Many people in the higher levels of the Republican Party,” he says, “would be willing to completely abandon the ideals of the founding fathers and go back to this notion that America is for people who think a certain way, look a certain way, worship a certain way, and trace their heritage to certain places.”
It’s a cyclical struggle that American minorities have been forced to endure since the nation’s founding, and the current iteration of the Republican Party seems determined to undo any progress.
