Could GOP’s anti-Muslim vitriol really get worse? It did

During Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims around the world fast from dawn to sunset and gather with family and neighbors each evening to break that fast, the American right is manufacturing outrage about Muslims in public life. Worse yet, they are turning it into a vehicle for increasingly explicit calls to push Muslims out of American society altogether. 

What should have been a straightforward story about an anti-Muslim rally escalating into violence instead became a right-wing media opportunity to cast New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and by extension all Muslims, as the villain. Saturday’s protest outside Gracie Mansion, the city’s mayoral residence, was explicitly billed as a demonstration against the supposed “Islamic takeover of New York City.” Organized by Jake Lang, a pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionist who promised to burn a Quran, the event attracted counter-protesters. Amid the chaos, two men allegedly hurled improvised explosive devices (IEDs) filled with bolts and screws into the crowd of anti-Muslim protesters. 

The IEDs failed to detonate, but federal prosecutor Jay Clayton described the suspects as potentially inspired by Islamic State propaganda. Mamdani condemned the violence and denounced the rally’s organizers as bigots. 

Within hours, right-wing media and Republican politicians had reframed the entire episode into a grievance against Mamdani himself. The logic was almost comically circular: an anti-Muslim rally was held outside the home of a Muslim mayor and violence erupted, therefore the mayor’s response was suspect. When Mamdani criticized the Islamophobia driving the rally, that criticism itself became the outrage. Even the New York Times curiously questioned why Mamdani “did not turn to his typical means of communication,” like “short-form videos posted to social media about the attack.”

The most nakedly bigoted response came from Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., who declared on social media that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and suggested that Mamdani should be deported. The mayor, who was born in Uganda, has been a U.S. citizen since 2018. That hasn’t stopped Ogles from previously urging the Justice Department to investigate whether Mamdani could be stripped of his citizenship through denaturalization. The congressman, whose Nashville-area congressional district is home to more than 40,000 Muslims — one of the largest Muslim communities in the South. He recently proposed a bill to ban immigration by Muslims, declaring that they “are unable to assimilate” and “all have to go back.” 

The most alarming part of the episode is not that one far-right congressman is willing to indulge in explicit religious bigotry. American politics has always produced figures eager to test the boundaries of decency. What is remarkable is how many Republicans have decided those borders no longer exist.

South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace joined the pile-on by declaring that New York “deserves better.” Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, who had declared last month that the choice “between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” appeared on Newsmax to demand Mamdani’s deportation. Host Alex Kraemer chimed in that “everybody apparently forgot 9/11 who voted for him.” 

But this is bigger than Mamdani, and the numbers tell the story. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, nearly 100 Republican members of Congress have posted about Islam or Muslims this year alone, and almost all of those posts have been negative. The Islamophobia that’s lurked on the fringes of the party since the 2010 furor over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque — a controversy that transformed an ordinary community center proposal into a national panic about Islamic infiltration — is now openly embraced in the GOP.

There was a time when many in the GOP had standards. Six days after 9/11, George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington and declared “Islam is peace.” Fourteen months later, he returned to celebrate the end of Ramadan — the first president to do so. Famously, in the heat of the 2008 presidential race, Arizona Sen. John McCain corrected a supporter — to boos and protests from the crowd — who said during a town hall meeting that Democratic nominee Barack Obama was “an Arab” and couldn’t be trusted. 

As recently as 2019, the party finally stripped Rep. Steve King of his committee assignments after years of white nationalist remarks. At the time, the move was treated as proof that the Republican Party had limits. Looking back now, it feels almost quaint.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, when asked directly about Ogles’ statement that Muslims don’t belong in American society, did not condemn it. He said the language was “different than I would use” and pivoted immediately to warning about sharia law. PBS reporter Lisa DesJardins deserves enormous credit for pinning Johnson’s Republican colleagues down on the issue. Many attempted to dodge the question, pivoting to terrorism or border security, but her tenacity revealed exactly what most of them actually believe: that there is a “but” lurking around the corner of every statement. That Ogles wasn’t entirely wrong, just a touch impolitic. 

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The right has pointed to the acceptance of most immigrants as “suicidal empathy” and has resorted to attacking fellow conservatives like Trump administration official Richard Grenell for speaking out in defense of religious freedom. 

Right-wing media rhetoric mirrors the language now coming from Republican members of Congress. On Fox News, Greg Gutfeld called for the extrajudicial killing of the Muslim citizens suspected of carrying out the attack. “What drives me nuts is we can decapitate Iran, kiII their leader and we can’t rub out two parasites on the street that just tried to kill a bunch of people,” the co-host of “The Five” said on Monday. “Of course, not all practitioners of Islam are terrorists. But certainly an overwhelming amount of terrorists are Muslim.” 

The right has also pounced on CNN’s bizarre coverage of the attack. “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather,” the network wrote in an oddly-phrased post to X. “But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs during an anti-Muslim protest outside of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home. Here’s what we know so far.” The network later deleted the tweet and issued a statement acknowledging that it had “failed to reflect the gravity of the incident” and breached “the editorial standards we require for all our reporting.” But CNN host Abby Phillip later drew right-wing ire when she falsely claimed that Mamdani was the target of the attack. She later apologized. 

The editors of National Review slammed mainstream media outlets’ headlines about the attack as being “carefully crafted to avoid stating a politically inconvenient truth: Islamic terrorists came horrifyingly close to detonating bombs in a crowd of protesters. Instead, our attention is directed toward the ‘hateful’ nature of the rally.”

Right-wing media outlets have also scrutinized Ramadan celebrations attended by the mayor. Mamdani has attended multiple Iftar dinners — the evening meal Muslims share to break their daily fast during Ramadan — and shared images of those gatherings on social media. When he applauded the opening of a new mosque in the Bronx, far-right activist Laura Loomer accused him of “celebrating the Islamic takeover of New York” and asked, “Why hasn’t he been denaturalized yet? He is a threat to US national security.” 

But the mayor drew the most outrage when he posted a photo to social media on Monday showing that he hosted Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for an Iftar dinner at the mayoral residence. “Mahmoud is a New Yorker, and he belongs in New York City,” Mamdai wrote. 

On CNN, Jonah Goldberg called Khalil “an outright apologist for terrorism,” attacking him for a social media post on the war in Iran by a group he is no longer part of and using air quotes to dismissively refer to the former Columbia University graduate student’s “First Amendment rights.” Khalil has spoken at length about befriending Jewish students at Columbia, attending Shabbat dinners and seeing Jewish students as “integral” during the protest movement on campus. 

Even Mamdani’s family’s social media usage is coming under fire. Jewish Insider published what it called an exposé revealing that the mayor’s wife Rama Duwaji, a private citizen who holds no public office, had liked social media posts sympathetic to Palestinian rights. Bari Weiss’ The Free Press catalogued more than 70 of these likes on Instagram. CBS News — now operating under the editorial leadership of Weiss — amplified the story. Multiple network staffers, speaking anonymously, told journalist Natalie Korach they were alarmed that the network was making editorial decisions that increasingly resembled Weiss’ ideological publication rather than a traditional news organization.

The cumulative effect is that the right-wing media ecosystem is treating Muslims as permanent suspects and giving cover to a political party increasingly comfortable declaring them incompatible with American life.

The parallels to earlier moments in American history are obvious. Every generation seems to rediscover the temptation to declare that a particular minority group cannot truly belong. What is said about Muslims in public is almost certainly said about Jews in private, and about Hindus, and about anyone whose faith looks different from the cramped, exclusionary version of American identity that Christian nationalism allows and fosters. 

The irony, of course, is that the same political coalition suddenly obsessed with religious exclusion had no problem courting Muslim voters when it was politically expedient. In the 2024 election cycle, both parties competed aggressively for Muslim communities in places like Michigan. Their votes were valuable then. Apparently their citizenship is negotiable now.

This strategy may prove as shortsighted as it is ugly. The Republican Party has spent the last decade warning that demographic change threatens its electoral future. Yet it continues to alienate the very communities that shape the country’s political landscape. Hispanic voters have already begun drifting away from the party, and some Republicans seem to understand the danger. Johnson himself warned his colleagues this week that constant talk of mass deportations could backfire politically. Special elections and off-year races have already shown signs of shifting sentiment, including Tuesday’s contest in Georgia to fill the seat left vacant by the resignation of one-time MAGA star Marjorie Taylor Greene. The district is one of the most conservative in the country, voting for Trump in 2024 by 40 points. Yet Democrat Shawn Harris finished first on Tuesday, forcing a runoff with Republican Clayton Fuller. 

But the deeper issue goes beyond electoral strategy. When members of Congress begin openly debating whether Muslims belong in America, the country is confronting a test of its basic constitutional commitments.

Zohran Mamdani was at home inside Gracie Mansion when explosive devices were thrown outside. He condemned both the attack and the rally. He defended the right to protest in front of his house of the very people who want to expel him not just from it, but from the country itself. That is the story worth covering.

The post Could GOP’s anti-Muslim vitriol really get worse? It did appeared first on Salon.com.