A Horrible Throwback to the Early 2000s
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No one could accuse Representative Andy Ogles of using dog whistles. The Tennessee Republican prefers a bullhorn.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles wrote on X on Monday. “Pluralism is a lie.”
The statement’s open bigotry is jarring. Where American Islamophobes in the past two decades have tended to demand that Muslims assimilate or denounce particular people or views, Ogles is taking a categorial approach. (In the past, Ogles has demanded the denaturalization of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he called “little muhammad”— whatever that means—and told an activist that his attitude toward Gazan children was that “we should kill them all.”) His denunciation of pluralism is un-American—not in the sense that it’s reprehensible, though it is, but that it is directly in conflict with the founding principles of the United States. Ironically, it has more in common with hard-line Wahhabis.
But Ogles is not alone. Last month, his House colleague Randy Fine of Florida declared, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” (In January, Fine blamed Representative Ilhan Omar for being attacked during a town hall.) And when Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about the comments yesterday, the Louisiana Republican declined to condemn them. “Look, 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,” Johnson said. (There is no evidence of any serious effort to “impose Sharia law.”) He added, “It’s not about people as Muslims,” but of course that’s exactly what Ogles’s comment was about.
This kind of hateful rhetoric is a throwback to the early 2000s. Then, as now, the U.S. was involved in a dubious, poorly defined war in the Middle East. But there are two important differences. One, jihadist violence in the U.S. was at the time a more active threat, following a devastating terror attack on U.S. soil. A failed attack on Islamophobic protesters this weekend in New York City, inspired by the Islamic State, was a notable exception to a sharp decrease in jihadist attacks in the U.S. today.
Second, leaders in the Republican Party made an effort to tamp down on anti-Muslim sentiment in the 2000s. “Americans understand we fight not a religion; ours is not a campaign against the Muslim faith,” George W. Bush said two weeks after 9/11. “Ours is a campaign against evil.” (Bush’s presidential center today makes pluralism one of its focuses.) And in 2008, when a town-hall attendee said that the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was “an Arab,” the GOP nominee, John McCain, was quick to bat it down. “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with,” he said. It was an imperfect response, suggesting that being a decent man was somehow opposed to being an Arab, but it at least reflected McCain’s reflex to oppose such rhetoric—even when it may have hurt him politically.
Johnson’s smarmy answer on Ogles showed that today’s Republican leadership has neither the courage nor the desire to push back in the same way. After McCain lost the 2008 election, some voices on the right began questioning whether Obama was an American citizen and falsely suggesting that he was a Kenyan-born Muslim. The most prominent among them was Donald Trump, who seemed to represent the prejudices of many Republican voters better than Bush or McCain did. (Less remembered than McCain’s decency at the campaign event is the crowd’s response: They booed him for defending Obama.) Trump’s “birther” antics laid the foundation for his successful presidential run in 2016. During the campaign, he called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States and indicated a willingness to create a registry of Muslims inside the country.
As a result, it’s no surprise that a Trump-led GOP would become a home for anti-Muslim bigotry. What is less expected is that the president himself has not been a notable participant recently. The Trump administration has prominently targeted Muslims such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk for deportation over their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but among his many rotating justifications for the war in Iran, the regime’s theocratic brand of Islam has not been prominent. His approach to Gaza also seems driven more by affinity for Israel’s government and greed for real estate than by any consideration of religion—unlike some members of his administration, such as Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who interprets Israel’s existence in religious rather than transactional terms. And although Mamdani’s rise has produced a spike in Islamophobia on the right, Trump has so far cultivated a surprisingly chummy relationship with the mayor.
Trump’s relative silence does not absolve him of his role in creating the atmosphere that fostered Ogles and Fine, both hard-line MAGA figures. As he has been happy to point out, he is the sole leader of the GOP, and if he disliked such comments he could put a stop to them by simply expressing his disapproval. During the 2024 election, many Arab and Muslim voters who were angry about the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza voted for Trump, especially in the key swing state of Michigan, but the idea that Trump would be more pro-Palestinian than Kamala Harris was ridiculous to anyone paying close attention. The GOP’s tacit approval of Ogles and Fine is a reminder of the real face of the MAGA movement.
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Evening Read
AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job
By Adam Ozimek
By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin …
How could humans possibly compete? Yet today you are more likely to encounter a piano player than a player piano, despite the job being successfully automated a very long time ago. The automatons have been relegated to museums and the rare curiosity. Pianists can be found any night of the week in hotel lobbies, Italian restaurants, and concert halls.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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