On Tuesday, August 26, 2025, Josh Brecheen stood in front of a room of his own constituents and told them the Ottoman Empire might be coming back.

A man in the audience burst out laughing.

That's not an insult someone made up online. It's what Mediaite reported happened, on video, at a town hall carried by C-SPAN. Here is what the congressman for Oklahoma's 2nd District actually said:

"There is a massacre and a genocide happening by the Muslim Brotherhood and everybody's focused on Gaza... We've got Sharia Law trying to be set up in America today. Absolutely we do. You have Sharia Law trying to be established in America today. The Muslim Brotherhood — the Muslim Brotherhood is the ideology and you've got a Turkey president — Guys, we cannot go turning into chaos. We've been really good to each other today. Turkey has a president who has made statements relative to re-establishing the Ottoman Empire."

When a woman in the crowd shouted at him, he snapped, "Ma'am, you're being rude. You're being rude." When more people joined in, he told the room they were "falling into the Muslim Brotherhood trap."

It would be easy to file this under "congressman says something strange at a town hall" and move on. Don't. Brecheen has spent the year since turning that town-hall riff into cosponsored legislation, a caucus membership, and an official statement about who should be allowed into the country.

Oklahoma already ran this experiment. It lost in federal court.

Here is the part that makes this an Oklahoma story and not just a national one.

On November 2, 2010, Oklahoma voters approved State Question 755 — the "Save Our State Amendment" — which barred state courts from considering Sharia law. It passed with more than 70 percent of the vote.

Brecheen was elected to the Oklahoma state Senate that same night, unseating a Democratic incumbent with 56.77% of the vote.

The amendment never took effect. A Muslim Oklahoman named Muneer Awad sued, arguing that under the ban a court could not carry out his will, which he wanted distributed according to Islamic law. A federal district judge blocked the measure within weeks. On January 10, 2012, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled unanimously that the state had favored every other religion over Islam, in violation of the Constitution's establishment clause. A federal judge struck the amendment down for good in August 2013.

The legal outcome wasn't a close call. Ira Lupu, a religion-law scholar at George Washington University, told NPR that "every responsible First Amendment religion clause lawyer in the United States" he was aware of had looked at the measure — before it even passed — and said it was clearly unconstitutional. "I would have been shocked if there had been contrary outcome," he said.

And here's what Oklahoma was supposedly saving itself from. Writing for the ACLU in 2011, Awad described what the 2010 campaign actually looked like: a Florida-based anti-Muslim group poured $50,000 into robocalls telling Oklahomans the amendment was needed to stop Muslim men from raping their wives. Church groups bought newspaper ads claiming Islam invented slavery. An incumbent who had voted against the measure was attacked by opponents as a terrorist sympathizer.

Awad's point was that there was no conflict to protect anyone from. Sharia, he wrote, "serves as a guide for Muslims" on things like contracts, charity and diet, and it "mandates that Muslims respect the law of the land." As for the idea that it could override American law, he called that "constitutionally impossible" — the Constitution already forbids it. His conclusion about the politicians pushing these bills was blunt: they know the bills are unconstitutional and will fail, and pass them anyway "to ride the current wave of Islamophobia."

Oklahoma defended that amendment all the way to the 10th Circuit, and lost. Fifteen years later, its congressman is running the same play at the federal level.

From a town hall line to a bill number

On October 8, 2025 — six weeks after that town hall — Rep. Chip Roy of Texas introduced H.R. 5722, the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act." Brecheen signed on as a cosponsor, one of 26.

What the bill does is not subtle. As Fox News described it, the secretaries of State and Homeland Security and the attorney general "shall deny any immigration benefit, visa, immigration relief, or admission to the United States to any alien who adheres to Sharia law." Anyone already here who is found to adhere would have their status revoked and "be removed from the United States."

Read that again slowly. To enforce it, the United States government would have to build a process for deciding which people hold which religious beliefs, and then deport the ones who hold the wrong ones.

That's not a liberal talking point. When the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on the bill on February 10, 2026, one of the witnesses testifying against it was Ilya Somin — a law professor who holds the Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, writing at Reason. His assessment: the bill is "manifestly unconstitutional, in violation of the First Amendment," it "amounts to blatant discrimination on the basis of religious belief," and it "would harm national security by playing into the hands of radical Islamists and terrorists."

The caucus, and what Brecheen chose to say

In December 2025, Roy and Rep. Keith Self launched the Sharia Free America Caucus. By January 15, 2026, it had 26 members from 17 states, and Brecheen was one of them.

The release carried statements from members explaining why they'd joined. Here is Brecheen's:

"As Sharia law sympathizers grow increasingly emboldened within America, I urge local, state, and federal lawmakers to resist efforts to establish Sharia law in American jurisdictions. Those who do not assimilate to the American way of life should not be allowed into our country."

Nobody made him write that. It's his own words, on a colleague's official House website, under his own name.

In February 2026, the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the country's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization — designated the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group. It was the first time in the group's 32-year history that it had ever labeled a congressional caucus an extremist organization. By then the caucus had 40 members from 19 states. CAIR's finding was that it is advancing legislation that, if enacted, "would effectively render the practice of Islam illegal in the United States."

"Congressmen Randy Fine, Chip Roy, Keith Self, and other members of this so-called caucus have appointed themselves as religious police with the power to tell Americans how to worship," said Corey Saylor, CAIR's research and advocacy director. "Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years. No one who wrote the Constitution or enforced it since has empowered these legislators to pick which religions get to exist in America."

None of this happened in a vacuum. We've already traced where the 2026 Sharia panic actually came from — a subdivision of five houses in Little Rock, two of them lived in by Christians, written up by a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an anti-Muslim hate group, and turned into a state bill in four days. And we've written about what another caucus member does with the same idea: Georgia's Andrew Clyde posting "Denaturalize, deport, repeat" about American Muslims.

Money followed the rhetoric. Republicans have spent more than $10 million on political TV ads mentioning "Sharia" or "Islam" in a negative way — most of it in Texas, ahead of that state's primaries — according to figures the ad-tracking firm AdImpact gave NPR. That's about ten times what was spent in each of the last four election cycles.

Sabina Mohyuddin of the American Muslim Advisory Council put it plainly to NPR: "Because people don't really know or have any idea what Sharia law is, it's the boogeyman. You just throw the word out there and people get scared."

What Brecheen's district is actually dealing with

Brecheen sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security. That is a real job with real hearings about real threats. This is what he's using the platform for.

Meanwhile, back in OK-02 — the district he actually represents:

• An estimated 41,415 people in his district are projected to lose health coverage because of the health cuts in Trump's budget bill — the largest projected loss of any Oklahoma district.
• 55,436 households in his district get SNAP — 17.6% of every household in OK-02, including 26,140 households with children and 20,733 with a senior over 60. That's the highest rate in the state.

Those are his constituents. They are being hit harder than anyone else in Oklahoma by bills he voted for. And the thing he chose to warn them about, at a town hall, in person, was an empire that stopped existing in 1922.

The man who laughed had the right instinct. The rest of it — the bill, the caucus, the statement — is not funny at all, because Oklahoma has already been down this road once and knows exactly where it ends: in federal court, at taxpayer expense, with a judge explaining that the government does not get to pick which religions are allowed here.

Source

• Town Hall Attendee Bursts Out Laughing After GOP Congressman Warns About 'The Ottoman Empire' — Mediaite, August 26, 2025