MAGA Report Cards — Racist

"A Big Win for Americans": Dale Strong Celebrates a Ruling the Judge Herself Said Would Cause Irreparable Harm

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:43:07 +0000

On Saturday morning, at the monthly meeting of the Madison County Republican Men's Club, Dale Strong was asked about a federal court ruling that cleared the way to deport Somali immigrants who have been living here legally.

He was delighted.

"I think it's a big win, not just for President Trump. I think it's a big win for Americans. You start looking at what these Somalis have done to this country. We're not going fast enough for most. I promise you, I hope that we see more handcuffs on those who have stolen from this country."

That's Alabama's 5th District congressman, on the record, to 1819 News.

Three things are worth knowing about the ruling he was celebrating, because he described none of them.

The judge who ruled for the administration said the people losing protection would be irreparably harmed

On Friday, August 14, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs lifted the stay that had been keeping the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somalia. That is the decision Strong called a big win.

Here is what Burroughs actually wrote, as The Hill reported:

"Plaintiffs have made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is withheld … and the balance of hardships and the public interest also favor Plaintiffs, given that the government has made no showing that maintaining TPS status for the duration of this litigation would impose an undue burden."

Read that again. The judge found that the people about to lose their status had proven they would be irreparably harmed. She found the public interest was on their side. She found the government had not even bothered to argue that letting them keep their status during the lawsuit would burden anyone.

She ruled against them anyway — because in June the Supreme Court decided 6-3, in a case carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's name, that courts have almost no power to review DHS decisions about Temporary Protected Status. Burroughs wrote that she was "bound … to view things through the Mullin prism."

And on the claim that Somalis were being singled out because of their race, she wrote this:

"Though Plaintiffs lay out a strong case for why the at-issue statements were racist … after Mullin, which included a constitutional race-discrimination claim, the Court cannot discern a path to concluding that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of this claim."

A strong case that the statements were racist. She just no longer had the power to act on it.

That is what Strong is calling a win for Americans: not a judge who found the policy was lawful and fair, but a judge who said her hands were tied.

We wrote about the earlier stage of this same case when Tennessee's Andy Ogles announced he would file articles of impeachment against Burroughs for issuing the stay in the first place. She has now ruled the way he wanted. The impeachment threat was never about the law.

Somalia has been too dangerous to send people back to since 1991

Temporary Protected Status is not a loophole. Congress created it so that people from countries torn apart by war or disaster would not be deported into the middle of it.

Somalia was first designated in 1991, at the start of a civil war that scattered a diaspora across the world. It was designated again by the Biden administration, which pointed to widespread and ongoing armed conflict. That is 35 years of every administration — Republican and Democratic — reaching the same conclusion: you cannot safely send people there.

Nothing about Somalia has improved. The State Department still has a "Do Not Travel" advisory for the country because of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care, as States Newsroom reported last week in its coverage of the parallel TPS fight over Haitians.

Roughly 700 people are affected by Friday's order, according to The Hill. 1819 News put the number living in the U.S. under Somali TPS at more than 2,400, with about 1,380 applications still pending.

To qualify for TPS, applicants go through a background check and pay application fees at every renewal cycle. These are the people who did the paperwork.

"What these Somalis have done to this country"

Strong did not say "some people committed fraud." He said "these Somalis." Then he went further:

"They're not stealing from the government. They're stealing from the American taxpayer, and I think that the price has got to be paid for what they've done. You've got more than 80,000 Somalians in one state, and I'll tell you this right here: they have cleaned that state out left and right."

The state is Minnesota. Here is what is actually there.

About 108,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, according to Census Bureau estimates compiled by the Minnesota Reformer. Roughly 5,000 of them are not U.S. citizens — about 9 percent. And that 5,000 includes green card holders and permanent residents. The number actually covered by Temporary Protected Status is, in the Reformer's words, "the couple hundred."

So Strong took a group of about 108,000 people, of whom roughly 103,000 are American citizens and a couple hundred hold TPS, and said they cleaned out the state.

Nearly two in five Somali Minnesotans were born in the United States. In 2001, more than 76 percent of Somalis in Minnesota were non-citizens. By 2023 that was 9 percent. These are American families.

The fraud is real. So is who prosecuted it.

There has been serious fraud in Minnesota's Medicaid programs, and people should go to prison for it. That is not in dispute, and this post is not going to pretend otherwise.

What Strong did was take that fraud and hang it on an ethnic group — and then accuse the officials who prosecuted it of covering it up:

"I believe that some of the Democratic officials in those states have allowed it to happen, and I think that they need to be investigated to find out if they were co-conspirators in this process."

He offered no evidence. He named no one.

Here is the public record. In December 2025, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — a Democrat — announced the federal indictments himself, for fraud in the Housing Stabilization Services and autism-services programs. His office's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit interviewed witnesses, executed a search warrant, took part in investigations at multiple companies, and handed data analysis to federal law enforcement.

"Today's charges and guilty plea are an important step in combatting fraud and protecting our tax dollars," Ellison said.

The Democratic official Strong wants investigated as a possible co-conspirator is the one who stood at the podium and announced the charges.

That is the difference between accountability and a smear. Accountability names the person and shows the evidence. Strong gestured at "some of the Democratic officials" and asked for investigations into whoever that turns out to be.

What followed the last round of this rhetoric in Minnesota

This is not an abstract argument about tone.

The Hill noted that the plaintiffs in the Somali TPS case pointed to Trump's comments about Somali people specifically, made in the wake of the Minnesota fraud investigation — comments followed by widespread immigration raids in the state.

Minneapolis is where an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, an American citizen and a mother of three, as she tried to drive away in January 2026. It is where a Customs and Border Protection agent killed an ICU nurse who was filming and trying to help. Both were Americans. Neither had anything to do with Medicaid fraud.

"I hope that we see more handcuffs" is a sentence with consequences attached, and Strong's own district sends him to Washington to weigh them.

He is not the only one, and that is the point

Strong's remarks fit a pattern we keep documenting. Ohio's Michael Rulli went on Fox News to cheer the mass deportation of Haitians in his own state — after a court had found the policy was rooted in part in racial animus. And the Supreme Court decision that made all of this possible came with a dissent that laid out, quote by quote, the animus behind it.

Each time, the move is the same: a court removes a legal protection on narrow procedural grounds, a member of Congress calls it a victory, and the reasoning the judges actually wrote down goes unmentioned.

Strong sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the panel that writes the checks for the agencies carrying this out.

When he was handed a court ruling that said the people losing their protection would be irreparably harmed, that the public interest favored them, and that the case for calling the statements against them racist was strong, he read all of that and said: not fast enough.

Source

1819 News, "'Big win for Americans': Strong hails legal win allowing Trump administration to end TPS for Somalis" (August 16, 2026)

Greg Abbott Threatened Two Airports' Funding Over a Sink. DFW Folded the Same Day.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:39:05 +0000

Before Muslims pray, they perform wudu — rinsing hands and feet. It takes a couple of minutes and it needs a place to sit and a tap at the right height. Airports around the world install them for the same reason they install chapels, water fountains and nursing rooms: people are in the building for hours.

Houston's airport has had one since 2024. Dallas Fort Worth has had one since 2019. Both say the rooms are available to people of all faiths.

On Friday, Greg Abbott announced he is reviewing every state and federal grant dollar going to both airports because of them.

What Abbott actually did

He sent a letter to DFW's CEO Christopher McLaughlin and to the mayors of Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth, saying his office is reviewing all grant funds for facilities at their airports — and that funding would be revoked if the ablution facilities stayed in use.

He also referred both airports to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for federal investigations.

His stated reason, from the news release:

"These ablution facilities appear designed to single out one subset of the population for special treatment based on religion. That is illegal. Both airports are government-owned facilities. The federal and state constitutions prohibit government from facilitating this sort of discrimination. Just as the government cannot favor the secular over the sacred, it also cannot favor one religious view over all others."

Hold that argument up to the light. Abbott's position is that a public airport providing a washing station violates the Constitution by favoring one religion — while both airports say the rooms are open to anyone who walks in.

By that logic, an airport chapel is unconstitutional. A kosher or halal food vendor is unconstitutional. A quiet room is unconstitutional. Abbott is not, of course, reviewing grant funding over any of those.

The rule he's applying only has one religion in it.

It worked immediately

Shortly after Abbott's announcement, a DFW spokesperson said plans for the facility had been cancelled, because it "would not deliver the originally anticipated operational benefits."

That is what an airport says when a governor threatens its grant funding on a Friday afternoon. Nobody at DFW ran a fresh cost-benefit analysis in the hour after the press release. They read the threat and complied.

Note also what state Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, who chairs the state Senate's transportation committee, sent DFW the day before Abbott's letters: a list of questions asking how the private donation for the facility was accepted and who it came from.

A private donor paid for it. Texas taxpayers weren't funding anything. The state is investigating who gave money to build a sink.

This is a habit, not a principle

Abbott has a documented method: find a city doing something the Republican base dislikes, then threaten its money until it stops.

He threatened $530,000 in grants for Grand Prairie unless the city cancelled an event at a water park that had initially been advertised as a "Muslims only" gathering.
He threatened cities' transportation funding last year unless they removed rainbow crosswalks supporting LGBTQ+ communities.
And now: all grant funds at the two biggest airports in Texas, over foot-washing stations.

None of these are votes. None went through the Legislature. This is one man using the state's checkbook to make local governments do what he wants, on subjects he chooses.

The broader campaign

This didn't come out of nowhere. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has been at the center of Texas Republican messaging all year, with GOP leaders warning for months about ending the so-called "Islamification" of Texas.

We've traced where that panic actually comes from. In Little Rock, the supposed "Sharia takeover" that mobilized a governor, an attorney general, a state bill and a 50-member congressional caucus turned out to be five houses in a subdivision that had been there two decades — two of them occupied by Christians. The story originated in a hate group's blog post.

Abbott himself is a direct participant. Texas Monthly reviewed 1,300 pages of emails and found that twelve of the thirteen reasons in Abbott's proclamation declaring CAIR a terrorist organization matched a report written by a fellow at a think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group — including a claim about the FBI that appears to be false.

So the pattern is: an outside group writes the material, Abbott issues the order, and Texas institutions fall in line.

Who this actually costs

Muslim Texans — most of them American citizens, many of them flying through DFW and Bush Intercontinental every week — just watched their governor put the state's grant funding on the line to stop an airport from installing a place to wash before prayer. A facility a private donor was paying for, in a building their taxes already help maintain.

And the practical outcome is a chill that runs well past one room. Every city manager and airport board in Texas now knows the price of accommodating Muslim travelers is a funding review and a federal referral. That is the point of doing it in public.

Abbott says the Constitution forbids government from favoring one religious view over all others. He should read it again.

Source

Ayden Runnels, "Abbott threatens Texas airports' funding over Islamic facilities," The Texas Tribune, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo: Reuters, via The Texas Tribune.

More Than 50 Black Georgia Lawmakers Asked Mike Collins to Explain Himself. He Said 'No One Speaks for Me.'

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:27:38 +0000

For weeks, the question about Mike Collins was whether he would say anything at all.

Now he has. And what he said is worth reading closely, because it is a careful non-answer to a question nobody actually asked him.

On August 11, 2026, the Georgia Recorder reported that more than 50 Black Georgia state lawmakers had signed a statement condemning Collins — the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — over what the statement calls his "extensive ties to white nationalists." The signers are not activists or opposing campaign staff. They are sitting members of the Georgia General Assembly.

Their central complaint was not the ties themselves. It was that Collins had never explained them.

"We condemn the Georgia congressman and urge our Republican state legislators to join us in demanding answers for his extensive ties to white nationalists."

State Sen. Nikki Merritt, a Grayson Democrat who leads the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus, put it plainly: "I signed this letter because these are some really concerning allegations. We're talking about ties to people who promote white nationalism, just hate and racist propaganda, and these are targeted specifically at Black people and minorities."

Collins' campaign did not respond to the Recorder's requests for comment.

What he actually said

Collins was asked about it at an event in Athens the week before. Here is his full answer:

"No one speaks for me, and I don't speak for anyone else. I condemn all forms of antisemitism. I don't care what the source is. Any type of hate, I condemn, period. That's not who I am."

He then pointed to his voting record supporting Israel's military, and said his son-in-law has never been part of his campaign.

Count what is missing. He does not name David Alan Scheer. He does not say whether he has spoken to him. He does not address the fired chief of staff. He does not address the video he himself reposted. He condemns "all forms of antisemitism" in the abstract — a statement no one would dispute — and moves on.

"No one speaks for me" answers a charge nobody made. Nobody claimed Scheer speaks for Collins. The charge is that Collins has spent years surrounded by this and has never once drawn a line.

The three things he did not address

His son-in-law. In July, CNN's KFile documented that Scheer, married to Collins' daughter, promotes white nationalist ideology to a following of more than a million people. We went through that reporting in detail — the Patriot Front posts, the Nazi propaganda imagery, the "Jewish Bolsheviks" video. The Recorder reviewed his accounts too, and found posts claiming Jews control the media and are responsible for the death of Jesus. In one November video, Scheer said: "All we're told is Germany bad, Hitler evil. Don't ask questions. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust."

His chief of staff. A May 28 Slate report found that Kip Talley, then Collins' chief of staff, took part in a group chat with white supremacists, where he documented efforts to help an associate who had been jailed for contempt. The man Talley was trying to help had minimized the Holocaust and argued that non-white people were genetically predisposed to violence. Talley said he acted on his own: "I was simply trying to help a suffering inmate connect with counsel. I did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat."

Collins replaced Talley last month. That was the second chief of staff he lost — the previous one was under congressional investigation over campaign funds and had used a Collins campaign account to mock a woman who said she was raped.

The video he posted himself. This is the one that cannot be blamed on anybody else. In 2024, Collins reposted footage of a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Ole Miss in which white counterprotesters mocked a Black demonstrator — one of them imitating a monkey. Collins captioned it: "Ole Miss taking care of business."

After the blowback, he wrote that he had meant to elevate the reaction to the protests, not the racist behavior, and that he now recognized "there certainly seems to be some potentially inappropriate behavior that none of us should seek to glorify."

That is not a staffer's post. That is not an in-law's post. That is Mike Collins' own account, his own caption, and a walk-back that still would not use the word racist.

Why Georgia Republicans are being asked to sign too

The most pointed line in the legislators' statement is the one aimed at their own colleagues: they urged "our Republican state legislators to join us."

That is a test, and so far it is going unanswered. Collins is not a fringe candidate — he is the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat, with Donald Trump's endorsement, running against Sen. Jon Ossoff in November.

It is also not only Democrats who have noticed. Former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and the Republican mayors of Valdosta and Tifton have all crossed party lines to endorse Ossoff. Gov. Brian Kemp backed Collins' primary opponent, warning that Collins' history of controversial statements would hurt the party in a general election.

The Center for Politics' Sabato's Crystal Ball recently moved Georgia's Senate rating from "leans Democratic" to "likely Democratic."

The pattern is the point

Any one of these could be a coincidence. A relative with ugly views. A staffer in a bad group chat. A repost that landed wrong.

The reason 50 lawmakers signed a statement is that it keeps happening, and the response is always the same shape: a general condemnation of hate, a pivot to his record on Israel, and no engagement with the specific thing he is being asked about.

Georgians asking Mike Collins what he believes have gotten one sentence: "That's not who I am." They are still waiting to hear who he is.

Source

Four dozen Black Georgia lawmakers press Collins on alleged 'white nationalist' ties by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, August 11, 2026. Photo: Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder.

Tom Emmer Told Somali Minnesotans to "Go the Hell Back." Six Months Earlier He Told Fox Business a Number That Wasn't True.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:22:39 +0000

On June 25, 2026, at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall on Capitol Hill, the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House was asked about immigrants in his home state. Here is what he said, in full:

"I don't really care where you come from. But if you come to this great country, you have to understand you're coming here to be an American. We celebrate everyone's culture. We're happy with that. As long as you are an American. Celebrate your culture, I don't care. Italian, Polish, Somali. But they don't assimilate. And if they don't assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from."

Tom Emmer is the House Majority Whip. He has represented Minnesota's 6th District since 2015. Minnesota is home to roughly 107,000 Somali residents — the largest Somali community in the United States.

He wasn't caught on a hot mic. He wasn't misquoted. And he told the room he had thought about the risk and decided he didn't care:

"I would argue that I never did care, but I'm done being careful, even the least bit careful."

That was about being called racist, or Islamophobic. He said the quiet part out loud: he knows what the words sound like, and he has decided to keep saying them.

"Go back where they came from" — to a community that is 95% American citizens

Start with the plain fact that makes the sentence collapse. 95% of Somalis living in Minnesota are U.S. citizens, according to FactCheck.org's review of the data. For the overwhelming majority of the people Emmer was talking about, "where they came from" is Minnesota.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia and represents Minneapolis, answered him directly: "I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back where I came from."

Rep. Angie Craig called the remarks racist. Gov. Tim Walz condemned them. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Congress to formally rebuke him. Doug Chapin, the Democrat running against Emmer, said Emmer seemed more worried about being called racist than about being racist. Emmer's office did not respond to requests for comment.

The number underneath it is false

The June remark didn't come out of nowhere. It rests on a claim Emmer had been making for months — that Somali Minnesotans are responsible for most of the crime in the state's biggest metro area. And that claim is not true.

On Fox Business in early December 2025, Emmer said this:

"It's not that all Somalis are committing crimes, but 80% of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities Minnesota are being committed by Somalis."

The Minnesota Reformer checked it against the state's own numbers. Two public dashboards cover exactly this question:

Minnesota's state crime dashboard, filtered to the seven-county metro: 37% of people arrested since 2021 were Black.
The Hennepin County Attorney's Office dashboard: 57% of cases since 2018 involved a defendant identified as Black or African-American.

Here is why those numbers demolish the claim rather than support it. Police and prosecutors record race, not nationality. Somali Minnesotans are a portion of Minnesota's Black population — not all of it. So the widest possible ceiling for Emmer's figure is 37% of metro arrests, and the real number for Somalis specifically is some fraction of that.

Emmer said 80%. The outer limit is 37%, and Somalis are only part of it.

This is a habit, not a slip. Eight months after the 80% claim, Emmer went back on Fox Business and told viewers eggs cost 78 cents and milk was under $2 — when the federal government's own price data had eggs at $2.14 a dozen and milk at $4.32 a gallon. The pattern is identical: a confident round number, delivered on cable, that the public record contradicts.

Asked to defend his own constituents, he attacked them instead

Two weeks after the Fox Business appearance, Emmer got a chance to answer for it.

On December 2, 2025, President Trump used a Cabinet meeting to attack Somali immigrants. FactCheck.org recorded the remarks: "I hear they ripped off, Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions. Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. I don't want them in our country." In the same stretch of remarks he described taking Somalis into the country as taking in "garbage."

On December 16, reporter Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider caught Emmer in a hallway and asked the obvious question, reported by The New Republic: did he agree with the President that the roughly 5,000 Somali residents of St. Cloud — people in Emmer's own district, whom Emmer is paid to represent — are garbage?

Emmer didn't defend them. He said Trump "raise[d] an issue that is something that we've been trying to raise for almost three years." Pressed further, he offered a new figure: "90 percent of the crimes that have been charged are from the Somali community."

So in the space of two weeks the number moved from 80% to 90%, and neither version matches any public data. A member of Congress was handed a direct opportunity to say that his constituents are not garbage, and instead he inflated the smear.

Yes, there is real fraud. No, it isn't what he said.

This deserves to be said plainly, because the fraud is real and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Minnesota was defrauded. That same FactCheck.org review found the Feeding Our Future case involved claims of roughly $240 million, with the Star Tribune reporting confirmed fraud closer to $152 million as of December 2025 — and that of 86 people charged across three separate schemes, 78 were of Somali descent. Those are prosecutions, with names and case numbers.

But look at what Emmer did with them. A set of charged fraud cases is not "80% of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities." Fraud is one category of crime; the dashboards above cover all of it. Emmer took a real prosecution involving a real subset of people and stretched it into a statement about every assault, burglary and robbery in a metro of three million. That is not calling out fraud. That is using fraud as a license to talk about a whole nationality.

And the "billions of dollars, every year" figure Trump used, which Emmer went out of his way not to dispute? The fact-checkers asked the White House how it was calculated and got no answer at all.

Minnesota Republicans have been running this play all year

Emmer isn't operating alone, and the harm isn't hypothetical.

The fraud narrative that Trump repeated at that Cabinet meeting traces back in part to a viral YouTube video of Somali-run daycares in Minneapolis — a video that Minnesota's Republican House Speaker took credit for helping steer, and that state inspectors then contradicted: investigators visited nine of the ten centers and found children at nearly every one, with no fraud violations. After the video spread, Somali-run daycares reported strangers showing up demanding to see children, threatening phone calls, and a break-in.

In March 2026, Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber went a step further and named a bill after a nationality — the "Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act" — and wrote a terrorist group into a child care statute.

And by January 2026, Emmer had signed on to the Sharia-Free America Caucus, telling its founders that Sharia "is radical, oppressive, and must never be allowed to gain a foothold in America" — a caucus whose central Little Rock example, when we traced it, turned out to be five houses, two of them lived in by Christians.

What the job actually is

Tom Emmer is not a backbencher shouting into a microphone. He is the House Majority Whip — the man who counts and delivers Republican votes, which makes him one of the most powerful people in Washington. When he puts a number on national television, it travels. When he declines to say his own constituents aren't garbage, that travels too.

He is also supposed to represent the Somali Minnesotans of St. Cloud, whether they voted for him or not. That is the entire job description. Instead he stood in front of a friendly audience on Capitol Hill, said people who don't meet his standard of assimilation should "go the hell back," and volunteered that he is finished being careful about it.

Minnesotans deserve a Whip who checks his numbers before he repeats them, and who defends the people he represents when the President calls them garbage. On both counts, Emmer chose the other thing — and then told us he'd chosen it on purpose.

Source

CBS Minnesota, Rep. Tom Emmer says Somalis who "don't assimilate" should "go the hell back to where they came from" (June 25, 2026). Photo via Getty Images.

Lance Gooden Asked the Dallas Housing Authority Why Poor Families Are Moving to His Suburbs. The Answer Is a Desegregation Case He Cited Himself.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:03:11 +0000

On June 2, 2026, Lance Gooden put his congressional letterhead behind a request from homeowners in a Forney subdivision.

Fourteen of the twenty houses going up on one street in the Gateway Parks subdivision, the homeowners had told him, would be eligible to be rented to families holding federal Housing Choice Vouchers. Gooden wrote to the president of the Dallas Housing Authority and asked him to explain himself.

You can read the whole letter on his own website. It opens like this:

"I write to address my concerns regarding housing concentration and community stability issues affecting portions of Kaufman County, including the Gateway Parks subdivision in Forney, Texas."

Housing Choice Vouchers — most people know them as Section 8 — are how a working family that can't cover market rent pays for a place to live. The voucher goes to the household, not the building. It is the main way this country helps low-income families afford housing that isn't in a high-poverty neighborhood.

A congressman who wants to know how that program works is entitled to ask. But look at what Gooden actually asked for.

He wanted ten years of maps

The letter makes five demands of the Dallas Housing Authority, with a June 26 deadline. Here is the first one, verbatim:

"Aggregate and tract-level data regarding Housing Choice Voucher placements within Kaufman County over the past ten years, including trends in placement concentrations within specific subdivisions or census tracts."

Census-tract-level data on where voucher families have been placed, subdivision by subdivision, going back a decade. He also asked for the housing authority's policies for evaluating "geographic concentration or deconcentration outcomes associated with voucher placements in suburban-receiving communities," and whether the authority weighs impacts on "neighborhood stability, HOA solvency, or long-term homeownership opportunities."

In his press release announcing the letter, Gooden framed it this way:

"Housing programs should support both homeowners and renters while preserving the values that make our rural communities great places to live, raise a family, and build a future."

He copied the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on the letter, so the agency would know a member of Congress was watching.

The case he cited was about keeping Black families out

The third item on Gooden's list is the one that gives the letter away. He asked the Dallas Housing Authority for:

"Current DHA guidance, criteria, or metrics used to evaluate deconcentration objectives associated with Walker v. HUD within Kaufman County and neighboring suburban jurisdictions."

Walker v. HUD is not an obscure regulation. It is a federal civil rights case filed in Dallas in June 1985 — case number 3:85-cv-01210 — brought by Black public housing residents.

The court found that the Dallas Housing Authority, HUD, and the City of Dallas had run public housing on a policy of deliberate racial segregation. In the consent decree, the housing authority was found to have "operated its program to enforce racial segregation and prevent black individuals from moving into predominately white areas."

The remedy was the whole point of the case: get assisted families out of concentrated, segregated poverty and into the rest of the metro area. Courts ordered thousands of new assisted housing units, money for housing in predominantly white areas, and eventually a dedicated pool of "Walker settlement vouchers" that could only be used in non-minority, non-poverty neighborhoods — with rents covered above the normal cap specifically so families could afford to move there.

"Deconcentration," in Walker, means one thing: making it possible for a Black family in West Dallas to rent a house in a suburb.

That is the legal framework Gooden asked the housing authority to justify — in a suburb, on the receiving end, on behalf of homeowners who noticed how many of the new houses on their street would take vouchers.

The case ran for decades. The court's remedial findings identified the specific harms it was fixing, including that Black families using Section 8 ended up in neighborhoods with higher crime, worse city services, industrial hazards, and underperforming schools far more often than white families did. The suburban placements Gateway Parks homeowners are complaining about are the remedy working.

Gooden used the word "concentration" eight times in a letter that runs about four hundred words. In Walker, concentration is the disease. In Gooden's letter, dispersal is.

This isn't his committee

Gooden sits on the House Judiciary and Armed Services Committees. Federal housing policy — HUD, the voucher program, the Dallas Housing Authority — belongs to the Financial Services Committee, which he is not on.

So this letter is not oversight. He has no subpoena power over the Dallas Housing Authority, no jurisdiction over its budget, and no hearing to bring anyone to. What he has is a congressman's letterhead, a deadline, and a copy to HUD. That's a message, and the housing authority is meant to read it.

Who pays for his campaign

Gooden's letter is careful to blame "institutional investor ownership" — corporate landlords buying up single-family homes and renting them out — alongside the vouchers. That's a real problem in North Texas suburbs, and it would be a fine thing for a member of Congress to go after.

He hasn't gone after it. He went after the tenants' program.

Federal Election Commission records show the National Apartment Association's political action committee — the trade group for apartment owners and property managers — has given Gooden's campaign $45,000 across fourteen contributions since 2018, starting with $2,500 in June 2018 and running through $5,000 in April 2025.

That money sits inside a campaign that runs almost entirely on organized interests. Of the $4.96 million Gooden has raised over his career, $2.45 million came from PACs — just under half. Small grassroots donors gave $35,785 total, about seven-tenths of one percent. That ranks him #324 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

Gooden is not a man who gets his housing views from the people who need housing.

The pattern

This is the same congressman who went on Fox News in February 2023 and said of Rep. Judy Chu — the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress — "I question her either loyalty or competence." Chu called the remarks racist. The House Democratic leader called them "dangerous, unconscionable and xenophobic." Gooden did not apologize.

It's the same congressman who grabbed a "This is not normal" sign out of Rep. Melanie Stansbury's hands at Trump's March 2025 address and threw it behind him.

And it's the same congressman currently under House Ethics Committee investigation over a spending matter, whose response to the referral was to call the investigators "dishonest unelected bureaucrats" before anyone had said what he was accused of.

He also does not do town halls. When constituents asked, he declined, while making time for local Republican groups. The homeowners who counted the rental houses on their street got a congressional letter with a deadline on it. The families on the other side of that letter have no room to go answer him in.

What he's actually asking for

Strip out the procedural language and Gooden's letter asks the Dallas Housing Authority a single question: why are these families being allowed to move here, and how many more are coming?

He asked it on his constituents' behalf, and he cited — as the standard the housing authority should be measured against — a federal desegregation order built to make exactly those moves possible.

Nobody has to guess what the answer is. It's in the case he cited.

Source

Gooden's June 2, 2026 letter to the Dallas Housing Authority and his own press release, first reported locally by inForney. Image via inForney.

Brandon Gill's Answer to Being Called Racist Isn't That He Isn't One. It's That the Word Doesn't Work Anymore.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:32:02 +0000

There's a specific move people make when they've said something indefensible and don't want to defend it. They don't argue that the thing was fine. They argue that you're not allowed to name it.

On July 3, 2026, Brandon Gill made that move in public, twice.

He posted on X: "The left has one debate tactic: call you a racist and pray you shut up. I never will." And: "Calling us racist doesn't work anymore."

Notice what's not in either sentence. Not "I'm not a racist." Not "here's what I actually meant." Just that the word has lost its power.

Someone took him up on it.

"We call you racist because you refer to Indian Americans as '7-Eleven workers'"

Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan is an Indian American Democrat. He immigrated to the United States from India and became a citizen. He replied to Gill's post by quoting something Gill himself had written during a debate over immigration policy:

"We don't need to import 7-Eleven workers from India or anywhere across the globe. Hire Americans."

Then Thanedar answered Gill's premise directly:

"No one is calling you racist as an attempt to scare you into shutting up. We call you racist because you refer to Indian Americans as '7-Eleven workers.'"

He went further, and this is the part that got picked up everywhere:

"But the fact that you married an Indian American shows that you're just a grifter pandering to a racist base. How pathetic it must be to be that cheap."

Gill is married to Danielle D'Souza Gill, an American-born conservative media personality and the daughter of right-wing commentator Dinesh D'Souza, whose family is Indian.

Gill did not publicly respond to Thanedar.

What he did instead

Three days later, on the evening of July 6, 2026, Gill posted a fundraising ad for his reelection campaign. The theme was family values. The photo showed him with his two children. The caption read:

"You can call me by any name you want. I just want my children to grow up in a country that they recognize."

His wife wasn't in the picture.

People noticed immediately, and the backlash was substantial — commenters accused him of leaving her out of a family-values ad to avoid complicating his appeal to a particular set of voters. She has appeared in plenty of his other campaign material and at his events.

We can't tell you what was in his head when he picked that photo, and we're not going to pretend to. One photo is one photo. What we can tell you is why so many people read it the way they did — because of the two years of material behind it, which is a matter of public record and not of interpretation.

The record behind the question

This is not a man who said one careless thing.

In June 2025, a video circulated of Zohran Mamdani, then running for mayor of New York, eating rice with his hands. Gill posted: "Civilized people in America don't eat like this. If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World." His wife replied publicly at the time that she was born in the United States, identifies as a Christian MAGA patriot, and has always eaten with a fork.
In October 2025, he told the British journalist Mehdi Hasan to "go back to the UK" and said Muslims come to America "en masse" to "fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life."
In November 2025, he told Newsmax that "Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the United States" — incompatible with "our constitutional system and with Western civilization more broadly."
In February 2026, he circulated a petition to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar — a U.S. citizen and a sitting member of Congress — to Somalia, and his campaign raised money off it.
He introduced the Somalia Immigration Moratorium Act, which would bar nearly all immigration from one country — Somalia — for 25 years.
In March 2026, he posted, "How many Americans have to get 'Allahu Akbar'ed before we realize Islam is a problem?" — a line that drew widespread condemnation.
In January 2026, he joined the "Sharia Free America Caucus", telling colleagues his constituents worry about "the rise of mass Islamic immigration in north Texas."

Put the list next to the defense. Gill's position is that calling this racist is a debate tactic. But the tactic in that list is his: pick a group, tell them the country isn't theirs, and raise money on the reaction.

He does it from a committee gavel, too

The reason this matters more than a bad X account is that Gill doesn't just post. He chairs a House Oversight panel — the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses — and he runs it on the same theme.

At its first hearing, in June 2026, he pointed at Somali and Bhutanese immigrants as the cause of Medicaid fraud in Ohio, told the room "it may not be politically correct to say, but it's true," and said in his prepared remarks that America "wouldn't have a problem with Somalis and Bhutanese populations defrauding us if we didn't import large numbers of Somalis and Bhutanese to begin with." He also blocked all three Ohio Democrats who asked to question the witnesses.

He has used the same gavel to run a standing hearing series against "DEI" and to subpoena businesses and float "criminal conspiracy" charges against doctors over birthright citizenship.

The phrase in the campaign ad — "a country that they recognize" — is the whole project stated as a family sentiment. Somebody has to be the thing that made the country unrecognizable. In Gill's telling it's always the same somebody.

What this costs Texas's 26th District

Denton County sent a first-term congressman to Washington and got a full-time culture warrior. Gill's constituents are dealing with grocery prices, rent, insurance premiums and child care costs. The hearings he calls are about law school accreditation, birth certificates, and which immigrant groups he thinks are draining the country.

And when a colleague quoted his own words back to him and asked him to account for them, his answer was that the accusation doesn't work anymore.

He's right that it doesn't scare him. That isn't the same as it not being true.

We deserve better.

Source

Keerthi Ramesh, "Texas Rep. Brandon Gill faces backlash over campaign ad excluding Indian American wife," The American Bazaar (July 7, 2026), and NRI Pulse's account of the Thanedar exchange (July 3, 2026). Photo: The American Bazaar.

Brandon Gill Represents Texas. He Held a Hearing About Ohio's Medicaid, Then Blocked Every Ohio Democrat Who Asked to Speak.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:20:57 +0000

On June 3, 2026, a congressman from Texas gaveled in a hearing about Ohio.

Brandon Gill represents Texas's 26th District — Denton County, north of Dallas, about a thousand miles from Columbus. He has been in Congress since 2025. But he chairs a House Oversight panel with a very long name, the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses, and he decided its very first hearing would be about Ohio's Medicaid program.

Three Ohio members of Congress asked to take part. Gill told them no.

What actually happened in that room

Reps. Shontel Brown, Emilia Sykes and Greg Landsman all asked to question the witnesses. All three represent Ohio. All three were denied.

Brown is the one whose exclusion is hardest to explain. She sits on the full House Oversight Committee — she's the only Ohio Democrat on it — and she says she represents over 300,000 constituents who rely on Medicaid. A hearing was being held about the health program her constituents depend on, by a committee she serves on, and the chairman would not let her ask a question.

She had written out remarks she never got to give:

"This is a political hearing built on allegations that remain unproven, amplified by partisan actors, and aimed at justifying a broader political goal: cutting Medicaid and shifting blame away from those who have actually been in charge."

Her point about who's been in charge is the one Gill's hearing never got around to. Republicans have run Ohio's state government — the agencies that enroll Medicaid providers, process claims, and catch fraud — for more than fifteen years.

Tempers flared right at the start. Brown interrupted the opening statement of the hearing's lead witness. That witness was Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter at the Daily Wire, a conservative news and opinion site — the man who wrote the story the hearing was built on.

The $1.2 billion number came from a blog post

The hearing's headline figure was $1.2 billion in Ohio Medicaid home healthcare fraud. Where does that number come from? The Daily Wire story. Spectrum News, reporting from the hearing room, put it plainly: the $1.2 billion amount in alleged home healthcare fraud is not verified.

For comparison, Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber — a Republican, who testified at the hearing — released a report in 2024 that found $209 million in Medicaid spending for patients enrolled in both Ohio and another state.

Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, did announce a six-month moratorium in May on new home healthcare providers receiving Medicaid funds. He talked about it the way you'd expect a person actually responsible for a state to talk about it:

"We do have a long history in Ohio of being very successful in prosecutions. But we always can do better, and we're going to continue to work and try to stop any kind of fraud that we're seeing."

Notice what's missing from DeWine's answer. He didn't name an ethnic group.

Gill did

Here is what Gill said in his opening statement, published by his own committee:

"So who are these fraudsters? Well, just like in Minnesota, many of them are Somali."

He went on to say Ohio is also home to the largest Bhutanese population in America, and that "the Somali and Bhutanese communities commit a large portion — if not the vast majority — of home health Medicaid fraud in Ohio."

Then he said the quiet part out loud:

"The reality is that America wouldn't have a problem with Somalis and Bhutanese populations defrauding us if we didn't import large numbers of Somalis and Bhutanese to begin with."

He described those communities as "foreigners from low trust societies." He pre-emptively dismissed anyone who objected: "we cannot back down to fraud simply because of spurious slanders of racism." And before any of it, he added the line people use when they know exactly how something sounds — "It may not be politically correct to say, but it's true."

Ohio State Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio was in that hearing. Gill asked her whether Somali immigration had been good for the state. She said she was almost brought to tears.

"Because the rate of the level of hateful rhetoric based on false information is shocking to me, the lack of humanity."

Who he was actually talking about

The Bhutanese community Gill described as having been "imported" is largely made up of Lhotshampa — Nepali-speaking people expelled from Bhutan, who then spent years, in many cases decades, in United Nations refugee camps in eastern Nepal. They came to the United States through the federal refugee resettlement program. Around 20,000 of them live in the Columbus area, making it home to the largest Bhutanese-Nepali population in the country. Many are now U.S. citizens.

These are people the United States government invited, vetted, and resettled. Gill described their presence here as the reason for a fraud problem.

He inflated his own committee's number

Gill's opening statement leaned on Minnesota as the template — "just a couple months ago, the House Oversight Committee examined a similar problem in Minnesota, where Somali fraudsters stole over $16 billion from American taxpayers."

That's his own committee's investigation he's describing. And his own committee doesn't use that number. The House Oversight Committee's official wrap-up of the Minnesota hearing says fraudsters stole "an estimated $9 billion," and quotes federal prosecutors putting the figure at "at least $9 billion."

Gill nearly doubled it. Not a rival party's number he was disputing — the number his own committee published.

This is what he does with the job

Gill got the gavel to this task force in 2026, and the pattern of what he uses it for is by now easy to trace. He has run it as a standing hearing series against "DEI", summoning the president of the American Bar Association to answer for what law schools teach. He has used it to subpoena maternity clinics and float "criminal conspiracy" charges against doctors over birthright citizenship — a right written into the 14th Amendment.

And when the subject was finally something that touches people's health care, he pointed at two immigrant communities and told the room it wasn't politically correct to say so.

He didn't invent this playbook. He's one of the members who joined the "Sharia Free America Caucus," and he's quoted in our reporting on the ten-million-dollar Republican effort to make "Sharia" a campaign word saying "No more Muslims immigrating to America." He told Newsmax in November 2025 that "Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the United States", and he has introduced a bill, the Somalia Immigration Moratorium Act, to ban nearly all immigration from Somalia — and only Somalia — for 25 years.

What Ohio actually needed from that hearing

Medicaid fraud is real, and prosecuting it is legitimate work. Nobody — not Shontel Brown, not Nickie Antonio, not Mike DeWine — argued otherwise. Brown's prepared remarks said flatly: "if providers committed fraud, they should be prosecuted. If taxpayer dollars were stolen, they should be recovered."

But a serious hearing about Ohio's Medicaid program would have started with the people who run Ohio's Medicaid program, and it would have let Ohio's own representatives ask questions. Gill's hearing did neither. It built its central number on a partisan website's estimate, seated that website's reporter as its star witness, named two ethnic groups as the cause, and locked out the three members of Congress who could have pushed back.

That's not oversight. That's a press release with a witness table.

Gill's constituents in Denton County are dealing with grocery bills, rent, health insurance premiums, and child care costs. He spent the first hearing of his own task force a thousand miles away from them, explaining who he thinks doesn't belong in this country.

We deserve better.

Source

Reporting from the hearing by Harri Leigh, "Ohio Medicaid fraud discussed in House hearing," Spectrum News 1 (June 3, 2026). Photo: House Oversight Committee, via Spectrum News.

Pete Stauber Named a Bill After a Nationality. Then He Put Al-Shabaab in It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:50:42 +0000

On March 12, 2026, Pete Stauber introduced a bill in the U.S. House and gave it a name: the Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act.

The acronym is a stretch, and everybody could see it. In the official text, SOMALIA stands for "Strengthening Oversight and More Accountability for Lying and Illegal Activity." Nobody was fooled. Stauber's own press statement said the quiet part plainly:

"Taxpayers in Minnesota and across the country deserve to know their hard-earned dollars are supporting legitimate services and not lining the pockets of Somali fraudsters."

That's the congressman for Minnesota's 8th District, quoted by KAXE, describing a whole nationality as the problem his bill exists to solve.

Minnesota's largest Muslim civil rights group called it what it is. "You cannot name a federal bill after a nationality or ethnic group and claim it is about accountability," said Suleiman Adan, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota. "Fraud is a crime committed by individuals, not by entire communities."

The group's executive director, Jaylani Hussein, put the test in one sentence: "No member of Congress would introduce legislation titled the 'Stop Fraud by Norwegians Act' or the 'Stop Fraud by Germans Act.'"

Read the actual bill

This is where it stops being about a name.

H.R. 7923 is nominally a child care bill. Section 2 amends the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act to permanently bar providers found to have committed fraud. Fine — nobody defends stealing from a program for poor working parents.

Then keep reading.

Section 4 amends the terrorism section of immigration law. It writes into federal statute that a debarred child care provider who is found to have sent money to "any terrorist organization, including Al-Shabaab" is inadmissible. The same section adds a blanket bar for anyone "in any way associated with" the Palestine Liberation Organization or al-Shabaab.
Section 5 makes a debarred provider deportable, ineligible for asylum, ineligible to adjust status, and legally incapable of showing "good moral character."
Section 6 is the one to sit with. If an immigration officer or judge merely "suspects" an arriving person may be inadmissible under the new fraud provision, the officer "shall order the alien removed" — and must "refrain from conducting any further inquiry or hearing" unless a senior official says otherwise.

Suspicion. Not a conviction, not a hearing — suspicion, and you're on a plane.

A day care billing dispute is now a terrorism screening and an expedited removal. That is not an oversight bill. That is a bill built to tell one community that its members are presumed criminals, presumed foreigners, and presumed one step from a terrorist group.

Stauber introduced it alone. Five months later it still has zero cosponsors and has never moved past a committee referral. It was never going to become law. It was written to be said.

The scandal it's built on never checked out

Here's the part Stauber has never gone back and corrected.

The whole thing started the day after Christmas 2025, when a conservative YouTuber named Nick Shirley posted a 43-minute video in which he knocked on the doors of ten Somali-run day cares in Minneapolis, and declared — when nobody answered, or when staff wouldn't let a group of strangers in — that there were no children inside. He claimed $111 million in fraud.

Then people actually went and looked.

On January 2, 2026, Minnesota's Department of Children, Youth and Families said inspectors had visited nine of the ten sites and found them "operating as expected". Children were present at eight of the nine. The ninth simply hadn't opened for the day yet.
The Minnesota Star Tribune visited all ten and found children inside four of them — the four that invited reporters in. Its review of state enforcement records and court filings found that none of the people publicly identified as owners or operators of the ten businesses "have ever been charged with fraud or any other felonies."
Three months later, on March 16 — four days after Stauber introduced his bill — MPR News summed up the state of play in one line: "No evidence of fraud has yet been confirmed at any of those sites."

We've written before about how this video was assembled and who fed it — the Minnesota House Republican caucus claimed a hand in it, then backed away when the YouTuber publicly called that a lie.

Real fraud in Minnesota's social service programs is real. More than 50 people have been convicted in the Feeding Our Future scheme. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But Stauber didn't build a bill around the convictions. He built it around a video that fell apart.

He gave a State of the Union seat to the man who said "EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud"

Three weeks before he introduced the bill, Stauber announced his two guests for Trump's State of the Union: Nick Shirley, and the man who appears in the video as "David."

"David" is David Hoch, a Minnesota lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for state attorney general. The Intercept identified him on January 3 and pulled his now-deleted Instagram posts. Two of them:

"EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them."

"Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims."

That was public, in a national outlet, seven weeks before Stauber handed him a ticket to the House chamber. Stauber's statement announcing the guests:

"By revealing stunning levels of obvious fraud to the American people, Nick and David did more work and showed more transparency than the Minnesota Department of Human Services."

He called them "citizen-driven oversight."

What it cost people who live here

None of this stayed on the internet.

A lawyer for one of the day cares told the Star Tribune his Somali clients had received hundreds of death threats. "Everybody is very scared right now of being targeted," attorney Jason Steck said. "Nobody wants to stick their head up. Nobody wants to get shot."

One director played reporters the voicemails his center was getting at 5 a.m. and at midnight — "We're coming," "ICE, ICE baby." A part-owner, Umi Hassan, said she'd lived in Minnesota since right after 9/11 and had never felt this marginalized. Crying, she asked the reporters: "What else can I do to be an American?"

Meanwhile the Trump administration froze federal child care money to Minnesota — the money that helps poor parents pay for care while they work — and around 3,000 federal immigration officers surged into the Twin Cities in Operation Metro Surge. Two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal officers in January.

Stauber's answer to all of it was a bill with a nationality in the title.

This is a pattern, not a slip

Stauber's response to the ICE killing in Minneapolis wasn't to ask questions about the shooting. It was to blame local politicians for it: "When Twin Cities politicians spew hateful rhetoric about our law enforcement for months, it gives their constituencies permission to violently attack my brothers and sisters in uniform. The events of today are the result."

In February 2026, union workers stood outside his Hermantown office asking him to address what ICE operations were doing to the region.

He has not held an open, in-person town hall where any of them could ask him about it. When the mayor of Cloquet invited him to hold one, his office offered a virtual meeting with no date attached.

The ten day cares in that video are in Minneapolis. Stauber doesn't represent Minneapolis — his district runs from Duluth to the Iron Range to the Canadian border. He went looking for this fight. He named a bill after the people on the other side of it. And when the underlying story collapsed, he didn't withdraw the bill, revise the title, or say a word.

We deserve better.

Sources

MPR News, Muslim civil rights group: Congressman's fraud bill 'discriminatory and deeply irresponsible' (March 16, 2026)
KAXE, Stauber introduces Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act (March 13, 2026)
The Minnesota Star Tribune, We went to the day cares Nick Shirley did. Here's what we found. (Dec. 31, 2025)

Photo: Rep. Pete Stauber speaks on the House floor, January 2026 / U.S. House Clerk, via KAXE.

"David Duke Without the Baggage": The Line Steve Scalise Has Never Been Able to Explain Away

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:52:34 +0000

In July 2026, The Hill described Steve Scalise as having reached "his peak elder statesman era" — the House Majority Leader who provides "institutional memory" for the Republican conference, and who is talked about as the next Speaker of the House.

Before he gets there, Louisiana and the country should sit with a sentence he said out loud, to a reporter, about twenty years before that.

"David Duke without the baggage"

Stephanie Grace was a new reporter covering Jefferson Parish when she first met Scalise, then a young state legislator. Here is how she opened her column in The Advocate on December 31, 2014:

"This is what I remember about the first time I met Steve Scalise nearly 20 years ago: He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage."

Grace spelled out what the word "baggage" was doing in that sentence:

"The 'baggage,' of course, was Duke's past, his racist and anti-Semitic views and his former role as a KKK grand wizard."

David Duke is not an obscure figure in Louisiana. He is a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who won more than 600,000 votes running for U.S. Senate in 1990 and for governor in 1991.

Scalise's pitch, as the reporter who heard it understood it, was that he could carry Duke's politics into respectable rooms.

The speech to Duke's group

In December 2014, a Louisiana blogger named Lamar White Jr. found an account, on a white supremacist forum, of Scalise speaking in 2002 to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization — EURO, a hate group founded by Duke.

Scalise's story moved. As CNN laid out the sequence: his aides first called it "probable," then "likely." Then he said he didn't specifically remember it, and that in 2002 he "went and spoke to any group that called" while campaigning against a state tax plan. Then came the statement:

"One of the many groups that I spoke to regarding this critical legislation was a group whose views I wholeheartedly condemn. It was a mistake I regret."

The Southern Poverty Law Center went through the excuses one at a time in its 2015 report, and found that they did not hold together:

The "I didn't know who they were" defense. Scalise "was a state representative in his 20s when Duke ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990 and governor in 1991," and Duke's organizations "received enormous amounts of publicity between 1989 and the 2002 meeting." SPLC's conclusion: "Scalise's claim of ignorance was almost impossible to believe."
The "he was really at a neighborhood meeting" defense. A longtime Duke aide, Kenny Knight, first told The Washington Post that Scalise attended the EURO meeting and was the first to speak — then told the Times-Picayune that Scalise had actually been at a neighborhood association meeting in the same hotel room a few hours earlier. SPLC checked: "There is no record at all of the association cited by Knight."
The "I was fighting a tax plan" defense. The tax plan Scalise named "had not even been heard in a legislative committee yet," and the campaign against it "only began months after the EURO meeting."

The votes underneath the speech

A single appearance can be a mistake. A voting record is a pattern. From the same SPLC report:

In 1999 and again in 2004, Scalise was among "lonely groups of three and six Louisiana legislators, respectively, who voted against a state Martin Luther King Jr. holiday."
In 1996, he "was one of two legislative committee members who tried to kill a resolution apologizing for slavery."

And in 1999, Roll Call reported that Scalise "said he embraces many of the same 'conservative' views as Duke, but is more viable."

That's the same idea as the "baggage" line, said to a second outlet, years apart. It is the argument that the only real problem with David Duke was that David Duke couldn't win.

Scalise made that argument explicitly. Asked by Roll Call in 1999 why Duke wouldn't be a good congressional candidate, here is what he said was "the first and most important thing":

"The novelty of David Duke has worn off. The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can't get elected, and that's the first and most important thing."

Not the Klan. Not the anti-Semitism. Electability.

Then he put out a statement about Dr. King

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2015 — weeks after all of this became national news — Scalise issued a statement praising King. The Advocate ran it next to the fact that he had twice voted against recognizing King's birthday in his own state:

"Dr. King challenged our country to fulfill the promises of liberty, equality, and justice prescribed in the founding of our great nation."

He was one of three votes against the holiday in 1999. He was one of six in 2004. Then he wrote that.

Why we're bringing it up in 2026

Because he kept the job, and then he got bigger ones.

SPLC wrote in 2015 that if Scalise "were linked to any other racist groups or events," his career "would be gone with the wind." He wasn't, and it wasn't. He stayed Majority Whip. He became Majority Leader — the man who decides which bills reach the House floor. He is now, by The Hill's account, the institutional memory of the House Republican conference and a leading candidate to be Speaker.

Nobody in Republican leadership has ever required him to answer the actual question, which is not "did you know who EURO was." It's the one Stephanie Grace wrote down: what did he mean when he told a reporter he was David Duke without the baggage, and does he still think the problem with Duke was the packaging?

He has never said. He has never been asked to.

This is a party that has gotten very comfortable with this — a congressman whose son-in-law posts Nazi propaganda, another who spoke at a white nationalist conference two years running, another who wore blackface and then went on TV to argue it wasn't "truly" blackface. Scalise is the one who got promoted to the top of it.

We deserve better.

Sources

Stephanie Grace, Scalise's pitch to Duke supporters seems plausible — The Advocate, December 31, 2014
Steve Scalise: What do I need to know? — CNN, December 31, 2014
House Whip Survives Hate Group Scandal, at Least for Now — Southern Poverty Law Center, Intelligence Report, Spring 2015
Emily Brooks, Scalise embraces House GOP's elder statesman role amid leadership shake-up speculation — The Hill, July 23, 2026

Keith Self Showed Up at a City Council Meeting to Stop a Mosque in His Own District. The Council Voted 7–0 Against Him.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:48:15 +0000

Members of Congress do not usually turn up at municipal zoning hearings. Zoning is not their job. A site plan for a house of worship is about setbacks, drainage, parking counts and traffic studies — the most local government gets.

On the evening of Tuesday, August 4, 2026, Keith Self went to the McKinney City Council anyway.

He was there to stop a mosque.

What he said

The Islamic Association of McKinney had been trying to build for years. The project — a roughly 32,000-square-foot complex with a prayer hall, classrooms, a gym and community space on about 5.5 acres near Virginia Parkway and Crutcher Crossing — was first denied by the Planning and Zoning Commission in 2024. The association spent the next two years redesigning the buildings and studying traffic and drainage.

By August 2026 it was back before the council with a plan that city staff said met the rules.

Self stood up and told the room what he thought would follow:

"Child marriage, honor killings, don't tell me that can't happen here. There is no state cavalry coming to save you."

He warned against letting "political Islam" into North Texas, and, as the Dallas Observer reported, pointed to the British "grooming gangs" controversy, citing a figure of some 250,000 victims. That number does not come from any official report. It circulates on social media, promoted by figures like Elon Musk.

To CBS News Texas, he put it this way: "The freedom to choose our faith or not does not exist in political Islam. Ask any Muslim what the penalty is for leaving political Islam. It's death."

The next day he posted on X that he had "rose in firm opposition to the proposed McKinney mosque and Islamic center."

None of this was about parking.

What happened next

More than 150 people signed up to speak. Public comment ran more than five and a half hours. Many speakers echoed Self — fears of Sharia law, warnings about "the spread of Islam across Texas," demands that immigrant communities "adapt to our norms." Former McKinney mayor George Fuller was called a traitor for supporting the project. Police had to step in during a confrontation in the room.

Then the council voted.

Seven to zero. Unanimous. Approved.

The council's reasoning was the least dramatic thing said all night: the plan is fully compliant with the city's rules, and a site plan vote is about whether a plan meets the ordinances. That's it. That is what the law requires them to decide, and they decided it.

One council member, Justin Beller, said the quiet part out loud:

"Watching partisan politicians with power to gain use fear and outrage is disappointing. Otherizing people and groups is a cheap way to gain power, and evidence that there are no concrete ideas to serve their constituents. There are enough legitimate concerns in the world without manufacturing new ones."

A seven-member city council in a Republican Texas suburb — Self's own voters, the people who actually have to live next to this thing — heard the congressman out and unanimously told him no.

This is not a one-off

Self did not wander into this. He built it.

In December 2025 he and Chip Roy launched the "Sharia Free America Caucus." By January his own office was advertising 26 members from 17 states. The Council on American-Islamic Relations designated it a hate group, saying its agenda "would effectively ban the practice of the world's second largest religion in the United States."

We've traced where this panic actually comes from. In Little Rock, the "Sharia takeover" turned out to be five houses, two of them lived in by Christians. In Oklahoma, Josh Brecheen warned a town hall about the Ottoman Empire and a man in the audience laughed out loud — then Brecheen put it into legislation. In Texas, Beth Van Duyne's House resolution condemning one imam's tweet ended with a clause about Sharia law.

The North Texas version had a specific trigger: EPIC City, a planned Muslim residential community that drew state investigations and public denunciations from Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Self. The Justice Department closed its investigation into EPIC City without bringing any charges.

In September 2025, a sign announcing that the McKinney mosque was "coming soon" was spray-painted over with large crosses and the words "Jesus Christ." It was investigated as vandalism.

That is the environment a sitting United States congressman chose to walk into and pour fuel on.

Why it matters that it was him

Anyone can show up at public comment. That's the point of public comment. If a constituent wants to stand up and say they're afraid of their new neighbors, the microphone is open.

But Self is not a constituent with three minutes. He is a member of Congress with a subcommittee gavel, a press operation and a following. When he tells a room that approving a building will bring child marriage and honor killings to their town, he is lending the authority of a federal office to a claim he did not support with evidence — about people who live in his district and are, as far as the record shows, doing nothing but building a place to pray.

He is also up for reelection this November, which the Dallas Observer noted in its subhead: dog-whistling about Sharia law "has emerged as a key policy issue" in his campaign.

Councilman Beller called it election year fear-mongering.

The vote was 7–0.

Sources

Dallas Observer, "Sitting congressman encourages anti-Islam hysteria during McKinney mosque vote", August 6, 2026, by Emma Ruby. CBS News Texas, "McKinney City Council greenlights mosque site plan amid both support, derision from community members", August 2026. Photo: Mike Brooks / Dallas Observer (the East Plano Islamic Center).

Tennessee Split Its Only Majority-Black District Into Three. Chuck Fleischmann Said He Was "Thankful That the State Did What President Trump Asked Them to Do."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:38:02 +0000

On May 7, 2026, Tennessee's Republican legislature passed a new congressional map. It carves up the Memphis-based 9th District — the only majority-Black congressional district in the state — and spreads its voters across three districts that stretch hundreds of miles east into rural Republican territory. It splits Nashville, the state's other Democratic city, into five.

Governor Bill Lee signed it. The effect, as NBC News reported it, is to put Republicans in position to pick up a House seat in November and take every single one of Tennessee's congressional districts.

The Tennessee House passed it without a single Republican speaking in defense of it. When one member finally rose to speak, the public gallery got so loud that the speaker simply called the vote while Democratic members stood up and walked off the floor. State troopers were ordered to clear the gallery. In the Senate, a member stood on a desk holding what looked like a bedsheet reading "No Jim Crow 2.0" and "Stop the TN Steal."

Chuck Fleischmann had a reaction to all of this. Here it is, in full, as he gave it to WATE:

"I am thankful that the state did what President Trump asked them to do, which was to specifically redistrict the state map. They have done it, and I will certainly approve that. The best news about this is that the great people of Oak Ridge, and Anderson, and Roane counties kept me as their member of Congress."

Read that again, because there are two separate things in it.

Thing one: he said out loud why the map exists

Republicans defending mid-decade redistricting usually reach for something about population or communities of interest. The bill's sponsor in the state Senate, John Stevens, went with: "Tennessee is a conservative state. Its congressional delegation should reflect that."

Fleischmann skipped the reasoning entirely and named the actual cause. The state redrew the map because President Trump asked them to.

He's right about that. Tennessee became the ninth state to enact a new congressional map ahead of the midterms, in a mid-decade redistricting wave that began when Trump urged Republican-run states to redraw their lines to protect the party's thin House majority. A Supreme Court ruling days earlier had gutted the Voting Rights Act's protections against racial gerrymandering, and Tennessee moved within the week.

So the record now shows a sitting congressman saying, on camera, that his state redrew its congressional districts on the president's instruction — and that he is thankful for it.

We have written about this pattern in other states. In South Carolina, Sheri Biggs argued that a 7-0 Republican map reflects the state's "values" in a state where four in ten voters pick Democrats. In Utah, Blake Moore helped launch the anti-gerrymandering movement and then turned on it once a judge enforced what voters passed. Fleischmann's contribution is the plainest of the three: he didn't argue the map was fair. He thanked the president for ordering it.

Thing two: what he was actually worried about

The second half of his statement is the part worth sitting with.

Out of everything in that map — a majority-Black district dissolved, protesters cleared out of the Capitol by state troopers, a whole city's voters distributed into districts hundreds of miles away — the "best news," in Fleischmann's telling, was that Oak Ridge, Anderson County and Roane County "kept me as their member of Congress."

That was the piece he had a stake in. Fleischmann chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and he told WATE that he appropriates about $10 billion each year into the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation. Oak Ridge is his district's crown jewel: the national laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, a growing nuclear industry.

When the redraw threatened to move that territory, the Oak Ridge City Council held a special meeting and passed a resolution opposing any map that didn't keep Anderson and Roane counties in the 3rd District — citing his importance to the local economy.

They got what they asked for. Oak Ridge stayed. Fleischmann's district instead gave up Morgan, Scott and Campbell counties and picked up Rhea and Meigs.

Asked about the threat, he said: "The funding was never imperiled, my representation of that area was."

His representation. That was the thing at risk.

What he had no problem with

Fleischmann was careful to say he had nothing to do with drawing the map. Just a handful of state lawmakers redrew Tennessee's districts, without any input from him, he told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Fine. He didn't draw it. But he was asked about it, on the day it passed, and he had a choice about what to say.

He could have said that splitting the only district in Tennessee where Black voters make up a majority is a bad way to run a state. He could have said mid-decade redistricting at a president's request is a bad precedent no matter which party does it. He could have said nothing at all.

What he said was thank you.

Memphis Democrat Raumesh Akbari, the state Senate minority leader, put the question to her colleagues on the floor this way: whether Black Tennesseans "who pay their taxes, who work just like everyone else, have a right to be politically represented as well by folks who share their interest and who advocate for them on a federal level."

Tennessee's answer was no. Fleischmann's answer was that he was thankful, and that the best news was he kept his seat.

He has not held an open town hall since 2011, and last year told a reporter he would "never" hold one. So there is no room in the 3rd District where a voter gets to ask him to explain that answer.

Sources

NBC News, "Tennessee Republicans pass map dividing up state's lone majority-Black district", May 7, 2026, by Jane C. Timm. WATE 6 On Your Side, "Oak Ridge stays in Fleischmann's district under redrawn Congressional map", May 7, 2026, by Gregory Raucoules. Photo: Nicole Hester / The Tennessean / USA Today Network.

A Radio Host Told the Highest-Ranking Black Man in Congress to Get His 'Cotton-Picking Hands' Off Virginia. Jen Kiggans Said 'Ditto.'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:49:38 +0000

On Monday, May 11, 2026, Jen Kiggans went on "Richmond's Morning News" to talk about the midterms and Democrats' redistricting push in Virginia.

Host Rich Herrera said that if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wanted to be involved in Virginia politics, he should move from New York and run for office in the commonwealth.

"If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia," Herrera said.

"That's right," Kiggans replied. "Ditto. Yes, yes to that."

Jeffries is the highest-ranking Black lawmaker in the history of Congress. The phrase Herrera used carries ties to slavery and sharecropping. Kiggans didn't pause, didn't push back, didn't ask him to rephrase. She agreed three times in a row.

What she said afterward — and what she never said

The clip spread Monday night. By Tuesday morning it was a national story, and Kiggans posted this on X:

"The radio host should not have used that language and I do not — and did not — condone it. It was obvious to anyone listening that I was agreeing Hakeem Jefferies should stay out of Virginia."

She told a Richmond station much the same: "Of course, he never should have used that language, and of course that's not the sentiment I was agreeing to."

Read those statements for the thing that isn't in them. There is no apology. There is a criticism of the host, and there is an explanation of her own state of mind — that she was agreeing with a sentiment and not with a phrase. Both statements are about what Jen Kiggans meant. Neither is addressed to anyone she offended.

"It was obvious to anyone listening" is doing the heaviest lifting. It wasn't obvious to the people listening. That is the entire reason there was a story.

The people who actually heard it

The Virginia State Conference of the NAACP asked for a real apology. Its president, Rev. Cozy Bailey, put the problem in one sentence:

"We have a congresswoman from Virginia who says ditto to that."

He said the group was "not only disappointed, but we are also enraged."

Elaine Luria — the former congresswoman Kiggans unseated in 2022, and now, after winning the Democratic primary on August 4, her opponent again this November — was blunt about what she'd heard:

"I grew up in the South. I know what these racist dog whistles mean."

Luria said Kiggans "should publicly apologize and denounce these racist remarks." Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, called on her to resign. Christie Stephenson, Jeffries's top spokesperson, called it a "stunning failure of judgment and leadership" from a "so-called moderate."

The House Republicans' campaign arm called the whole thing "a total nothing-burger."

Three months later, the apology the NAACP asked for still hasn't come.

Why "moderate" is the point, not the defense

Kiggans's brand is the reasonable one. She's a former Navy helicopter pilot in a Navy town who belongs to the Republican Governance Group and the Republican Main Street Partnership — the caucuses whose entire selling point is not being the loud wing of the party. She runs, every two years, on being less extreme than the rest. Jeffries's own spokesperson used the word in scare quotes for a reason: "so-called moderate."

That reputation is exactly what made this worth reporting. Nobody was surprised when a bomb-thrower said something ugly. The story here is that the "so-called moderate" heard a slur aimed at the most senior Black member of Congress and said "yes, yes to that" — reflexively, on air, without a beat of hesitation.

Reflexes are more revealing than press releases. A prepared statement tells you what someone wants to be. What comes out unprompted, at 8 in the morning on a friendly radio show, tells you what they actually think is normal.

It keeps happening, and it keeps ending the same way

Tennessee's Diana Harshbarger called 77-year-old Rep. Al Green "boy," and when Green explained why that word is a slur, she tweeted "BOY Oh Boy." Kentucky's Andy Barr spent a million dollars on an ad telling voters "it's not a sin to be white" while running against a Black opponent.

The pattern isn't the remark. It's the response to the remark: never an apology, always a clarification. The offense gets reframed as a misunderstanding on the listener's part, and everyone moves on.

Green said it better than we can: the danger is "the normalization of these kinds of slurs."

Normalizing doesn't take a slur. It takes someone respectable hearing one and saying "ditto."

Source

GOP Rep. Jen Kiggans faces backlash for agreeing with 'cotton-picking' comment about Hakeem Jeffries — Kyle Stewart and Scott Wong, NBC News, May 12, 2026. Photo via NBC News.

Gus Bilirakis Wrote a Bill to Cut Off Student Loans at Any College With a Diversity Office

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:45:27 +0000

Gus Bilirakis has been in Congress for 19 years. In that time he has put his name on hundreds of bills — Greek independence resolutions, veterans' benefits, rare disease research, daylight saving time.

He has also introduced, twice, a bill that would cut off federal student loans to students at any college in America that has a diversity office.

It is called the Eliminate DEI in Colleges Act. He filed it in June 2024 and again on February 13, 2025. It has two cosponsors.

What it actually says

Here is the operative sentence, from the bill text:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no institution of higher education shall be eligible to receive funds or any other form of financial assistance under any Federal program, including participation in any federally funded or guaranteed student loan program, unless the institution certifies to the Secretary that the institution — (1) does not and will not carry out any program, project, initiative, or other activity the primary purpose of which is to advocate, promote, or otherwise support diversity, equity, and inclusion; and (2) does not and will not maintain any office or other entity within the institution to advocate, promote, or otherwise support diversity, equity, and inclusion."

Read what that covers. Not "no federal DEI grants." Not "no taxpayer money for DEI programs." Any federal program. Explicitly including the federal student loan programs.

A college that keeps a diversity office does not lose a diversity grant. It loses its students' access to federal loans. It becomes, for federal purposes, not a college.

The bill also requires each school to hand the Education Secretary "any information needed" to verify its certification is truthful, and gives the Secretary regulatory authority to enforce it. A school that gets cut off may appeal to an administrative law judge, and that judge's ruling is final agency action.

The definition is broader than the title

The bill defines "diversity, equity, and inclusion" as the concept by which individuals are "classified on basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation" and then "afforded differential or preferential treatment" on that basis.

That definition is doing a lot of work, because it is written loosely enough to sweep in far more than admissions preferences. A women's center. A veterans' resource office. A first-generation-student mentoring program. A campus group for LGBTQ students with a staff adviser. An office of accessibility. Whether any of those counts is left to the Secretary of Education and to a school's own lawyers guessing at what a future administration will accept.

And the incentive runs one way. A university weighing whether some office might trip the certification is not weighing the loss of a grant. It is weighing whether its students can still get a Stafford loan. The rational response is to close anything arguable.

Who pays

Nothing in the bill distinguishes between a flagship research university and a community college, or between a public school and a private one. The penalty is the same everywhere, and it falls on students, not administrators: the school keeps its diversity office and its students lose their loans, or the school closes the office.

Florida has already banned state spending on DEI programs at its public universities. What Bilirakis's bill adds is federal reach — over every private college in the country too — and a penalty aimed not at the institution's budget line but at its students' ability to pay tuition.

He has a record on this

The DEI bill is not a one-off.

On March 30, 2022, the House took up a bill to name the federal courthouse in Tallahassee after Joseph Woodrow Hatchett. Hatchett was the first Black justice on the Florida Supreme Court. He later sat on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The New York Times called him a legal legend; the Tallahassee Democrat called him trailblazing. He died in April 2021.

The bill was sponsored by Florida's two Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. The Senate passed it unanimously.

Then Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia circulated a 1999 Associated Press story about an opinion Hatchett had written striking down a Florida school district's policy of student-led prayer at graduation, and House Republicans turned on it. The bill got 238 votes — short of the two-thirds needed under suspension — and failed. One hundred eighty-seven Republicans voted no.

Bilirakis voted no. Ten of Florida's 16 House Republicans did.

Clyde's explanation to the ABA Journal was that he disagreed with the 1999 ruling: "I don't agree with that. That's it. I just let the Republicans know that information on the House floor."

Two Republican senators from his own state sponsored the honor and the Senate gave it unanimously. Bilirakis voted it down.

The grandson of immigrants

Bilirakis is the grandson of Greek immigrants. His grandfather ran a bakery in Tarpon Springs, where the sponge docks were built by Greek divers recruited to Florida in the early 1900s. He co-chairs the Congressional Caucus on Hellenic Issues and files a resolution recognizing the anniversary of the Greek War of Independence year after year — 2024, 2025, and 2026. He holds the Greek Order of the Phoenix.

He clearly understands why a community wants its history recognized and its people counted.

He has introduced a bill to cut federal student loans off from any campus that keeps an office to do that for somebody else's community — and voted against putting a Black judge's name on a courthouse in his own state.

Sources

Bill text and status: H.R. 1282, the Eliminate DEI in Colleges Act, 119th Congress. House vote on the Hatchett courthouse designation: Roll Call 95, March 30, 2022. GOP opposition blocks bill to name federal courthouse after Black judge, a 'legal legend' — ABA Journal. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Brian Babin Wrote the Bill to End Birthright Citizenship. In 2021 He Said Democrats Wanted a "Third World Electorate."

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:16:01 +0000

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that babies born in the United States to parents here illegally or temporarily are not citizens.

The next day, Brian Babin filed a bill to put it in federal law.

Babin is the Republican congressman for Texas's 36th District, which covers part of southeast Houston and stretches east toward Louisiana. He has held the seat since 2015. He is the lead sponsor of the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025, H.R. 569, filed January 21, 2025 with 35 original cosponsors. It now has 93.

Seventeen months later the Supreme Court threw Trump's order out. Babin's bill is still alive, and it is still the Republican Study Committee's official position.

What his bill actually does

The 14th Amendment says citizenship belongs to anyone "born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Babin's bill doesn't repeal that clause — it redefines the six words in the middle.

Under the text of H.R. 569, a baby born on American soil is only "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States if at least one parent is:

a U.S. citizen or national;
a lawful permanent resident living in the United States; or
someone with lawful immigration status on active duty in the armed forces.

Read that list again for what isn't on it.

A baby born in Houston to two parents on H-1B work visas — engineers at a refinery, doctors at the Texas Medical Center — is not a citizen under this bill. Neither is a baby born to parents on student visas. Neither is a baby born to a family that entered legally and is waiting years for an asylum hearing. Neither is a baby born to a green-card applicant whose paperwork hasn't cleared.

Lawful presence isn't enough. You need permanent residence, citizenship, or a uniform.

Babin's own press office describes it as closing "a dangerous loophole that encourages illegal immigration." But the bill doesn't stop at illegal immigration. It writes a new, narrower class of Americans, and it does it by statute rather than by amendment.

The Supreme Court already answered the question

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court struck Trump's executive order down in Trump v. Barbara. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, SCOTUSblog reported, and he was direct about it. Children "born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States," Roberts wrote, "satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause." His conclusion:

"Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth."

Roberts walked through the history. The rule came over from English common law, was adopted after the Revolution, and in 1868 the framers of the 14th Amendment wrote it into the Constitution specifically to repudiate Dred Scott — the 1857 decision holding that a Black man descended from enslaved people was not and could not be a citizen. The amendment's purpose, Roberts wrote, was to "permanently enshrine" birthright citizenship.

The Court also rejected the argument that a parent's permanent residence — "domicile" — is required, finding "scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view."

Domicile is the exact thing Babin's bill requires.

If the Citizenship Clause means what the Court's majority said it means, a statute cannot change it. That takes a constitutional amendment: two-thirds of both chambers and three-quarters of the states. Speaker Mike Johnson conceded as much the day of the ruling: "I'm sure the conclusion from this opinion is going to be that you've got to amend the Constitution to fix that."

Babin's bill is not a constitutional amendment. It's a statute. It was written to do by majority vote a thing the Supreme Court has now said requires changing the Constitution.

Where this comes from

To understand why Babin wrote this bill, it helps to hear how he talks about immigration when he isn't drafting legislation.

On September 23, 2021, Babin went on Newsmax to discuss migrants — many of them Haitian — gathered at the border in Del Rio, Texas. Mediaite transcribed what he said:

"We know what the Democrats are up to here. They want open borders. This is exactly their strategy. They want to replace the American electorate with Third World electorate that will be on welfare and public assistance."

He went on to say Democrats want to put migrants "on a path to citizenship and amnesty, and franchise them with the vote, and they will have a permanent majority."

That is the Great Replacement. It's a conspiracy theory, originally French and explicitly ethno-nationalist, holding that elites are deliberately importing non-white people to dilute the political power of white citizens. The Anti-Defamation League's explainer traces its path from the European far right into American politics. Its language has turned up in the manifestos of mass shooters.

The timing is not incidental. Babin made his remarks the day after Tucker Carlson aired a Fox News segment about the same Biden clip Babin referenced — a segment in which Carlson used the phrase "the great replacement" himself.

The two things fit together

A congressman who believes immigrants are being brought in to replace the electorate will naturally write a bill that stops their children from becoming voters.

That's what H.R. 569 does. Not deportation, not border security, not visa limits — it reaches the baby, and it reaches forward across that child's entire life. Someone born in Houston who grows up there, goes to school there, works there and pays taxes there would never be able to vote there.

The bill exempts children born before enactment, so it doesn't take citizenship from anyone who already has it. It just closes the door behind them.

It's not going away

Babin's bill isn't a message bill sitting in a drawer. In January 2026, he announced that the Birthright Citizenship Act had been included in the Republican Study Committee's Fiscal Year 2026 budget — the budget blueprint of the largest conservative caucus in the House. His statement called it "a major step forward."

And after the Supreme Court ruling, House Republicans didn't drop it. They started shopping for other routes: a constitutional amendment from the Speaker, a surrogacy bill from Sen. Rick Scott, and Babin's statute still on the table.

We've written about the reaction across the party. In Iowa, Ashley Hinson said the Supreme Court "got it wrong" and backs doing it by executive order anyway. In Tennessee, Andy Ogles introduced his own bill to gut birthright citizenship and called the babies "anchors". In Louisiana, Speaker Mike Johnson said he was "disappointed" and that Congress will "deal with it".

Babin is the one who wrote the bill they're all pointing at.

What it means in the 36th District

Texas's 36th runs from southeast Houston out through the refinery towns along the Gulf and into the piney woods toward Louisiana. Houston is a port city with a large immigrant workforce, and some of Babin's constituents are families where the parents arrived on a visa and the children were born in a Houston hospital.

Under the bill their congressman wrote, those children would be foreign nationals in the only country they have ever lived in — able to be here, work here, and pay taxes here, but never able to vote here.

Babin has been in Congress for 11 years. He chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. He is a dentist by training and a deacon in his church. And the bill with his name on it, the one that made it into the Republican Study Committee's budget, is one the Supreme Court has effectively already told him he cannot pass.

Source

"Republicans float new ideas to restrict birthright citizenship after ruling" by Susan Carpenter, Spectrum News, June 30, 2026. Bill text and cosponsor counts from congress.gov. Babin's 2021 remarks as transcribed by Mediaite. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Andy Barr Spent $1 Million Telling Kentucky "It's Not a Sin to Be White" — Against a Black Opponent

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:03:39 +0000

In February 2026, Andy Barr launched his campaign for Mitch McConnell's Senate seat with a $1 million ad buy. Here is the ad, in full, as his own campaign published it:

Barr: You know what DEI really stands for? Dumb, Evil, Indoctrination. Woke liberals spew it, corporate losers fall for it. But thanks to Trump, America is rejecting that trash.

Barr: And I'm leading the fight to end it for good. I'm Andy Barr, it's not a sin to be white, it's not against the law to be male, and it shouldn't be disqualifying to be a Christian.

Barr: I'm Andy Barr and I approve this message to give woke liberals something else to cry about.

His campaign's own headline for the press release was "Barr Stop DEI Ad Inflames Woke Leftists, Kicks off $1M Buy Throughout the Commonwealth."

He was running, at the time, against Daniel Cameron — Kentucky's former attorney general, and a Black man.

Where that line comes from

"It's not a sin to be white" is one word away from "It's OK to be white."

The Anti-Defamation League catalogs "It's Okay To Be White" in its Hate on Display database, under hate slogans. The ADL's account of it: the phrase was "popularized in late 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the controversial discussion forum 4chan," and "white supremacists quickly began to promote the campaign—often adding Internet links to white supremacist websites to the fliers or combining the phrase with white supremacist language or imagery." The ADL notes white supremacists had used the phrase before that, too.

That's not a coincidence you fall into by accident. It's a phrase with a documented history, and a campaign that spends $1 million on thirty seconds of television has lawyers, consultants, and pollsters who read every word first.

Kentucky's own political press called it what it was

Al Cross has covered Kentucky politics for decades. His February 20, 2026 column, published in the Kentucky Lantern and the Northern Kentucky Tribune, did not hedge:

"Now U.S. Rep. Andy Barr is running the most overtly racist statewide campaign we can remember in Kentucky."

On the ad's central claim, Cross was equally direct: Barr says DEI stands for "dumb, evil indoctrination" — "That's almost entirely false, but the line is just a tee-up for the rest of the spot." As for the kicker about being white, male, and Christian, Cross wrote that "the lines about being male and Christian have no factual basis."

And on what the ad is actually doing:

"Barr's ad not only appeals to racial and ethnic resentment, it stokes it. Most American politicians in the last 50 years have avoided that, following what seemed to be a broad consensus that racism should be suppressed."

Cross also named the part Barr's campaign would rather nobody said out loud. The ad was aimed at businessman Nate Morris, Barr's chief rival. But, Cross wrote, "because Cameron is Black... stoking racial resentment likely also hurts Cameron."

The people who've known him longest were the ones most upset

The most damning detail in Cross's column isn't about strategy. It's about the people in Lexington who have known Barr for most of his life, and who wrote letters to the Lexington Herald-Leader after the ad ran. Cross quoted one:

"Pre-Donald J. Trump, I used to think of Andy as a good man, a good Republican. I'm so disappointed in him."

Cross's read on why Barr did it anyway: Trump's endorsement was the prize, Morris had backing from Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance, and the ad was a way "showing Trump that he can be a tough, Trumpy campaigner on Trump's favorite issue."

It worked, which is the worst part

On May 1, 2026, Trump got Morris out of the race with an ambassadorship and endorsed Barr. On May 19, Barr won the primary, beating Cameron by more than two to one. Louisville Public Media reported he "rode an endorsement from President Donald Trump" to the win.

Barr got exactly what he paid $1 million for. Which means the ad is not a gaffe he'll walk back. It's the thing that worked, and it's now the closest thing he has to a governing philosophy heading into November.

His campaign has leaned in since, touting endorsements from Nick Sandmann and Riley Gaines for what it calls his "leadership fighting woke ideology."

This isn't new territory for him

Barr's record on who gets equal treatment under the law didn't start in February.

He scored a zero on the Human Rights Campaign's congressional scorecard for the 114th Congress. When the Supreme Court guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry in 2015, he called the ruling "inappropriate and inconsistent with the constitutionally limited role of the judiciary" and said "marriage is defined as a union between one man and one woman."

And he has been running from the people who'd like to ask him about any of it. Barr holds only telephone town halls, having decided during Trump's first term that "live in-person massively attended town halls were shouting contests where people were really not respectful." When a Lexington group invited him to a real one in March 2025, his staff said no. More than 900 Kentuckians came anyway and addressed an empty chair marked "Reserved for Congressman Andy Barr." Barr's response was to call it "manufactured outrage by paid activists."

That's the pattern. He will spend a million dollars to talk at Kentuckians about race. He will not sit in a room and take a question from one.

Source

Why did Andy Barr run a racist ad? It's all about Donald Trump — commentary by Al Cross, Kentucky Lantern / Northern Kentucky Tribune, February 20, 2026. Image: still from Barr's campaign ad, via the Barr campaign.

ICE Is Putting Ankle Monitors on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Their Crime Was Showing Up When Told To.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:43:30 +0000

On July 22, letters started arriving at Haitian households in Springfield, Ohio. They came from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and they told people to bring all of their immigration documents to an appointment at an ICE office.

On July 31, about 50 Haitians showed up at the Cincinnati ICE field office as instructed. There they were given a choice: take $2,600 to deport themselves, or put on an ankle monitor.

Every one of them turned down the money.

"Being deported to Haiti right now is a death sentence," said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Two days later, on August 2, a dozen Haitians who still held Temporary Protected Status were called in and walked out wearing electronic monitors.

These are people with no criminal record

This is the part that should stop you.

An ankle monitor is normally used for an immigrant with a criminal record, an outstanding deportation order, or a missed immigration court date. The people being fitted with them in Springfield have none of those things. They had legal status. They passed background checks to get it. They paid fees to renew it.

Katie Kersh, managing attorney at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, put it plainly:

"The people getting the ankle monitors are the people who are complying … and they're getting this thing that we connote with criminality, which is an ankle monitor, when they've literally gotten that because they followed the orders of the call-in letter."

Lynn Tramonte of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance called it what it looks like:

"It's really just theater. They're putting ankle monitors on people to make it look like they're doing something, but it's devastating for the people who are getting these placed on their ankle. They're a constant reminder that you're not free."

ICE did not respond to a detailed list of questions from States Newsroom about the practice.

It appears to be happening in Springfield and nowhere else

Reporters checked. Advocates and immigration lawyers in Boston, Chicago and Miami — all cities with large Haitian populations — have not seen this tactic. One advocate reported more federal agents around Brooklyn's Little Haiti, but no check-ins.

Six advocates and attorneys said the electronic monitoring appears to be happening only in Springfield.

Springfield is home to about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. It is also the town Donald Trump made famous in September 2024 when he falsely accused Haitians there of eating people's pets, and promised to strip their legal protections so he could deport them.

Two years later, ICE is bolting monitors to their ankles in that specific town. Kersh said an ICE officer told her the order came from above: "we are being told from headquarters that we have to ankle monitor them specifically."

The rollout was a mess

The attorneys describe check-in appointments that were disorganized in ways that would be funny if the stakes were lower.

Officers pulled out brand-new ankle monitors that hadn't been charged.
Instructions were provided only in English and Spanish. Most Haitians' first language is Creole. No translator was present, so Kersh brought one herself.
A woman who works night shifts explained she wouldn't be able to charge the device. An officer told her "to just charge it while you're sleeping." She told him again that she works nights.
Kersh asked about alternatives — a daily facial-recognition check-in, a wrist monitor. Officials refused to deviate.

Then there's the geography problem. The monitors have a 75-mile radius. Ohio's only immigration court is in Cleveland, 188 miles from Springfield. So a Haitian ordered to appear in court now has to ask an ICE officer for permission to attend their own hearing.

"It just sort of feels like the wheels are off the bus," Kersh said.

Even getting to the ICE appointments was hard, because Ohio legislators passed a law tying a valid driver's license to immigration status — so as their status lapsed, so did their ability to legally drive to the appointment ICE ordered them to attend.

The people fitted with monitors were told to come back in several weeks. They were given no information about what happens then.

What changed, and how fast

The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in June that the administration could end TPS for as many as 350,000 Haitians. We wrote about that decision and the dissent that laid out, quote by quote, the racial animus behind the policy. The case went back to a lower court in Washington, which is still litigating exactly that question — whether ending protections for Haitians was motivated by racial animus.

Last Wednesday, a federal judge lifted a stay that had been blocking the termination since February.

The same day, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin went on NewsNation and said the department was "going after (Haitians) right now."

"We are giving them an opportunity to either leave on their own and we'll help you, or we'll arrest you and send you back. Either way, you don't have status inside this country anymore."

The speed is the point. Geoffrey Pipoly, the attorney who argued the Haitian TPS case at the Supreme Court, drew the contrast with Trump's first term, when the administration at least tried to give people a wind-down period:

"We went from the first Trump administration giving these folks 18 months to get their affairs in order to now, their position is: We're not even going to give you 32 days from the final judgment of the Supreme Court … as soon as the earliest possible time that we are legally allowed to start deporting people, that's what we're going to start doing."

Lower courts normally get 32 days to implement a Supreme Court ruling. For the June decision, that would have meant July 27. ICE's letters to Springfield Haitians were dated July 22 — five days before the government was even supposed to be able to act.

"They really, really, really, really want to target these people," Pipoly said.

What these people actually are

Temporary Protected Status was created by Congress in the 1990s for people from countries too dangerous to return to. Haiti first got it in 2010, after the earthquake. President Biden extended it in 2021 after Haiti's president was assassinated.

To hold it, you have to pass a background check and pay application fees every renewal cycle. It gives you no path to citizenship. It just lets you live and work here legally.

Of the roughly 350,000 Haitians with TPS, about 200,000 are in the workforce, according to FWD.us — in healthcare, retail, agriculture and manufacturing. Those are hospital aides, meatpacking workers, farm hands and warehouse staff, many of them in Ohio.

And the country they're being sent back to? The State Department's own advisory for Haiti is "Do Not Travel" — "due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care."

The federal government is telling Americans it is too dangerous to set foot in Haiti while deporting Haitians there.

Ohio Republicans knew, and cheered

None of this happened quietly. Ohio's own congressional Republicans have been vocal supporters. Rep. Michael Rulli went on Fox News after the Supreme Court ruling to celebrate the mass deportation of Ohio's Haitians — "Let's get 'em all out of here".

The people wearing monitors in Springfield right now are the ones who did everything they were asked. They registered. They paid. They passed the checks. When a letter arrived telling them to report to a government office, they went.

That is what got them the ankle monitor.

Source

Some Haitians targeted for ankle monitors by ICE as they face threat of mass deportation — Ariana Figueroa, States Newsroom / Ohio Capital Journal, August 10, 2026. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Diana Harshbarger Called a 77-Year-Old Black Congressman 'Boy.' When He Explained Why That's a Slur, She Tweeted 'BOY Oh Boy.'

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:05 +0000

In April 2025, Rep. Diana Harshbarger sat for a half-hour interview with FAME Ministries, a local Christian group in her East Tennessee district. Near the end, the interviewer brought up Democrats holding signs during President Trump's address to Congress the month before — the night Rep. Al Green of Texas was escorted out of the chamber for heckling.

Harshbarger said she'd wanted to go grab a few of the signs, "but Al Green was over here with his cane."

"And I'm like gosh dangit boy, put that — he does not need that cane. That cane is a prop. I swear it's not real. And I'm wondering, one my colleagues said take the, screw the gold part off of it and see if there's a gun in there, and I'm like, I don't know about that, man. He's just weird Al."

Three things in one breath: a 77-year-old Black man called "boy," his mobility aid dismissed as a prop, and a colleague's suggestion that he might be smuggling a gun inside it — repeated approvingly enough to be worth repeating.

What Green said

Green held a press conference the following Tuesday. He did not spend it defending his cane.

"It wasn't said to indicate that you are youthful," he said of the word "boy." "It was said to demean, to degrade, to denigrate."

He said he had heard people call his father that when he was a child.

"Friends, it's not about Al Green. It's about whether Black people in this society are going to allow slurs such as this to be normalized. We cannot allow the normalization of these kinds of slurs."

On the cane, he said simply that it gives him stability when he walks — and that no, there is no weapon in it, though he'd use it to defend himself if he had to.

He also made a point of not asking for an apology. "I never ask people to apologize," Green said. "I ask people to tell the truth. If you just tell the truth, no apology is necessary."

What Harshbarger said next

Her office didn't respond to WJHL's request for comment. She answered on X instead:

"The weather is warming up, so naturally, the snowflakes are starting to melt!

I was discussing one of my colleague's erratic behavior during President Trump's Joint Address, and now he—along with the rest of the Radical Left—is blowing it out of proportion in a desperate attempt to get attention.

BOY oh boy, you just can't catch a break between the FAKE NEWS and young men wielding canes!"

A colleague had just explained, on the record, that the word was used to demean his father. Her response used it twice more and called the 77-year-old a "young man."

That is not a slip of the tongue anymore. A slip is what happens before someone tells you. This came after.

"So many fairies in the White House"

The same interview included another passage. Asked about the Biden administration and transgender people, Harshbarger said:

"Listen, I never saw so many fairies in the White House, dancing around. I'm like, I don't know where they got them. But look, my job is to love them into the love of Christ, and I've got to watch what I say."

A few minutes earlier, on the same subject:

"But if you look at what some of these other countries are going back, they're pushing off on these stupid things like transgender — you can pretend to be a man if you're a woman or a woman if you're a man — and all this junk. They're getting back to what made them great. And we do want to make America great again. And it starts with God and with the family."

"I've got to watch what I say" is the part worth sitting with. She knew. She said it anyway, and then didn't take it back.

Why it still matters a year later

This could be filed away as a bad interview if she had no power over the people in it. She does.

In April 2026, Harshbarger introduced the STOP Act, federal legislation banning gender transition procedures for anyone under 18 — puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries — with civil penalties of at least $100,000 per violation, a private right to sue in federal court, and a compensation fund in the U.S. Treasury funded by the penalties.

People can and do disagree in good faith about minors and medical transition. Many parents, doctors and voters have real concerns, and Tennessee's own law on the subject was upheld by the Supreme Court.

But the person writing the federal version of it is the person who, a year earlier, described the people it governs as "fairies… dancing around" and their identity as "all this junk." She is also a member of the committee that oversees federal health policy. When she says "as a parent and pharmacist, protecting patients has been my priority," the interview is the context in which that sentence has to be read.

And on Al Green: he sits with her in the same chamber. She will vote alongside him for as long as they both hold their seats. The measure of a member of Congress is not whether she can be provoked into saying something ugly on a podcast. It's what she does when the person she said it about explains, calmly and publicly, why it hurt.

What she did was say it twice more.

We deserve better.

Source

Slater Teague, "Harshbarger criticized for comments about Black congressman, trans people" — WJHL News Channel 11, April 23, 2025. Photo: Getty Images, via WJHL — Rep. Al Green during the March 4, 2025 joint address, with Harshbarger seated behind him.

Republicans Spent $10 Million Making 'Sharia' a Campaign Word. Then Michigan Nominated a Muslim.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:30:50 +0000

A Muslim-American pollster named Dalia Mogahed spent years asking Americans what they think about Muslims. She found something most people get backwards.

Hostility toward Muslims doesn't spike after terrorist attacks. It spikes during election cycles — in the run-up to the Iraq war, and in the runs-up to the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Not after 9/11. Not after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Her conclusion: "Islamophobia is not organic. It is manufactured. It is a tool of public manipulation."

This week in Michigan, we got to watch it being manufactured in real time.

They didn't wait a full day

Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. He's the son of Egyptian immigrants, he's openly Muslim, and if he wins in November he'd be the first Muslim U.S. senator.

His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers (MI), responded with a statement saying he never thought he'd be "running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11" — then put out a video with images of Osama bin Laden and the burning Twin Towers.

El-Sayed never said that. Snopes rated it False. PolitiFact went further and rated it Pants on Fire, their worst rating — we wrote that one up separately. The words belong to a Twitch streamer, from 2019, and El-Sayed had gone on Fox News months ago and said the opposite.

Then came the name.

"Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed"

He goes by Abdul. He has always gone by Abdul. The National Republican Senatorial Committee had almost exclusively called him that too — right up until the day he won. Then its debut general-election ad called him "Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed" and "the most radical Senate candidate in America," and tied him to the Muslim Brotherhood's Egyptian branch, which the State Department recently designated a terrorist group.

NRSC chairman Tim Scott put out a press release calling him "the most radical Democrat Senate nominee ever."

Senator Jim Banks, an NRSC vice chair, said Michigan's "union Democrats" wouldn't "want to vote for a guy like Abdulrahman El-Sayed."

The UAW — the largest union in Michigan — endorsed El-Sayed in June, months before Banks said that.

If this feels familiar, it should. It's the same trick Republicans ran on Barack Hussein Obama — dig up the full name, say it slowly, let the voter fill in the rest. The difference is that Obama was falsely accused of being Muslim. El-Sayed actually is one. There's nothing left to expose. So the "revelation" is just his name.

A Senate hearing where one senator showed up

The day after El-Sayed won, Senator Ted Cruz gaveled in a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing called "Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America."

All five Democrats on the subcommittee refused to attend, calling it a targeting of the American Muslim community. "Scapegoating Muslims may be a Texas Republican strategist's idea of 'solid gold' to whip up their voters," they wrote, "but Democrats have no intention of indulging this political creepshow."

No Republican showed up either. Cruz held the hearing alone, in front of three reporters, some staff, and a few tourists.

He used it anyway. Cruz told the room that "behind El-Sayed's political rise sits a much older and more entrenched institutional network," and pointed to his primary win as evidence. Then he asked one of his own hand-picked witnesses a question that gives the whole thing away:

"Does Abdul El-Sayed's candidacy for senator in Michigan concern you?"

That is not a national security question. That is a campaign ad with a gavel.

On Fox News that same week, Cruz said the quiet part: "El Sayed is also an Islamist, as is Mamdani … they want Sharia law." There is no evidence for that. It's just the word you say.

This machine was built months ago

None of this was improvised. Republicans have been building the equipment all year.

By March, they had spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning "Sharia" or "Islam" negatively — most of it in Texas, right before its primaries. That is roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four election cycles, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Sharia is a religious framework. As NPR noted plainly in the same story, it does not have standing over the U.S. Constitution.

By March, the House "Sharia-Free America" caucus had 50 Republican members.

And when reporters asked Speaker Mike Johnson about his members saying Muslims don't belong in America, he explained that "the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem — that's what animates this," and added, "It is not about people as Muslims."

Here is what it looks like when it's not about people as Muslims:

Rep. Brandon Gill: "No more Muslims immigrating to America."
Rep. Randy Fine: "We need more Islamophobia, not less. Fear of Islam is rational." He later went on Newsmax and called New York's mayor a "Muslim terrorist".
Sen. Tommy Tuberville posted a photo of the 9/11 attacks beside a photo of that same mayor, captioned "The enemy is inside the gates" — and separately said the mayor should be shipped to Guantanamo Bay.
Rep. Scott Perry read the First Amendment aloud on the House floor, then spent ten minutes arguing Muslims are quietly taking over neighborhoods.
Rep. Beth Van Duyne wrote a resolution about one imam's ugly tweet and tacked a Sharia clause onto the end.
Gov. Greg Abbott labeled the country's largest Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization, using reasons that tracked a report from an anti-Muslim think tank.

And the panic that all of it feeds on keeps turning out to be nothing. In Arkansas, the "Sharia takeover" that produced a governor's proclamation, an attorney general's statement and a state bill traced back to five houses in Little Rock — two of them lived in by Christians. In Oklahoma, Rep. Josh Brecheen warned a town hall audience about the return of the Ottoman Empire, and a man in the room laughed out loud.

As one Tennessee Muslim advocate put it 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."

One Republican said something

Almost all of them stayed quiet. One didn't.

"Freedom of religion is a pillar of our nation and broad brush statements like this are offensive and completely inappropriate," Rep. Nicole Malliotakis told NPR.

It's worth remembering that this used to be the normal position in her party. Within days of the actual 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and said, "Islam is peace." Nobody in his party stripped him of anything for it.

Twenty-five years later, his party's Senate campaign arm is running his opponent's first name as the attack.

There's one more wrinkle. Rep. Andy Ogles — the member who posted "Muslims don't belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie," and who tried to strip New York's mayor of his citizenship — went into his own primary this week with Trump's endorsement and lost to a Republican challenger.

Michigan gets to answer this

Mogahed's finding was that this stuff is not weather. It's a choice somebody makes, on a schedule, because they think it moves votes.

Rogers and the NRSC have made that choice for November. They are betting that saying a man's full name in a scary voice will work better on Michigan voters than talking about what health care costs, or why groceries are still expensive, or what happens to the auto jobs.

Michigan voters get to decide whether that bet pays.

Source

Mehdi Hasan, "First Draft: Here Come the Super-Islamophobic Midterms", Zeteo, August 7, 2026. Photo of Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit, August 5, 2026, by Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images.

Joe Wilson Said the Confederate Flag Should Come Down in 2015. Eleven Months Later He Voted to Let It Fly Over Veterans' Graves.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:55:00 +0000

In April 2000, the South Carolina Senate voted 36 to 7 to bring the Confederate battle flag down off the Statehouse dome.

Joe Wilson was one of the seven.

Not one of seven who had doubts about the process. Not one of seven who wanted a different compromise. He was one of only seven state senators who voted to keep the flag flying over the building where South Carolina makes its laws. Thirty-six of his colleagues voted to take it down.

That was twenty-six years ago. What makes it worth writing about today is everything Wilson has done since.

He didn't just vote for the flag. He defended the Confederacy.

Plenty of politicians who voted the wrong way in 2000 said it was about tradition and left it there. Wilson went further. On comparisons between the battle flag and Nazi symbols — which he called odious — he told BBC News:

"That's offensive to me that they would take my heritage and make it into a Holocaust era type description. I find that very offensive, and it's not true."

And then, in the same breath, the line that follows him around:

"The Southern heritage, the Confederate heritage is very honourable."

CBS News, reporting on Wilson years later, noted he was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This wasn't a stray vote on a crowded calendar. It was a cause.

And he told his colleagues exactly why. In a speech to the South Carolina General Assembly in 2000 — a year before he was elected to Congress — Wilson said keeping the flag at the Statehouse was "very, very personal. And it's personal because it's my family," explaining: "For me, it began very early in that I was named for a Confederate general, General David Addison Weisiger."

He added, in that same speech, that Weisiger "was not a plantation owner; he was a bank cashier." Reuters later found what Wilson left out: Weisiger enslaved seven people in southeast Virginia in 1860, ranging in age from 5 to 45. Reuters contacted Wilson five times about its findings. He never responded.

What the flag was actually doing up there

South Carolina leaders raised the battle flag over the Statehouse dome in the early 1960s — to mark the Civil War's 100th anniversary and to register official opposition to the civil rights movement, as the Equal Justice Initiative put it. It was not a Civil War relic that had been quietly flying since 1865. It was a message, sent in the decade of sit-ins and school desegregation, by a legislature that had no Black members.

And the 2000 compromise Wilson voted against didn't even remove it. The bill took the flag off the dome and put a different version on a Confederate soldiers' monument on the Statehouse lawn, where it stayed for fifteen more years. The controversy went right on: in July 2009, after talks with the NAACP, the Atlantic Coast Conference pulled three future college baseball tournaments out of South Carolina.

So the seven lost — and even the winning side only moved the flag from the dome to the lawn.

It took nine people murdered in a church

On June 17, 2015, a white gunman who had posed with Confederate flags walked into Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and killed nine Black parishioners at Bible study, including state Sen. Clementa Pinckney.

Six days later, Wilson put out a statement:

"I stand with Senator Tim Scott in calling for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds."

He named all nine of the dead and asked people to pray for their families. He called Sen. Tim Scott "the true face of South Carolina at this time." The flag came down from the Statehouse grounds on July 10, 2015 — fifteen years after Wilson voted to keep it up.

It's worth saying plainly what that sequence means. Wilson spent the 1999–2000 fight insisting the flag was honorable heritage and nothing to do with hate. He changed his public position only after nine of his own state's people were shot to death in a church by a man who wrapped himself in that flag. That is very late, and it took a great deal.

Still — he said it. The question is whether he meant it.

Eleven months later, he voted the other way

On May 19, 2016, the House took up a spending bill for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Rep. Jared Huffman offered an amendment to stop Confederate battle flags from being flown over the mass graves at VA-run national cemeteries on the two days a year such displays were permitted. Huffman's argument: "Symbols like the Confederate battle flag have meaning. They are not just neutral, historical symbols of pride. They represent slavery, oppression, lynching and hate."

The amendment passed, 265 to 159. Eighty-four Republicans voted for it.

Wilson voted no.

Eleven months after saying the flag should come off the Statehouse grounds in Columbia, he voted to keep flying it over graves in federal cemeteries.

And he kept voting that way

This is where the pattern stops being about one flag.

July 22, 2020 — the House passed a bill to remove statues of Confederate figures from the U.S. Capitol and replace the bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, with a bust of Thurgood Marshall. It passed 305 to 113. Every single no vote was a Republican. Wilson was one of them.
June 29, 2021 — the House passed a similar bill to pull Confederate statues out of the Capitol, 285 to 120. Again, every no vote came from a Republican. Again, Wilson was one of them.

None of these votes cost a constituent a dollar. None of them cut a program in South Carolina's 2nd District. They were about what the country honors and where. Three times, given a free vote, Wilson chose the Confederacy.

He is not alone in that. Andy Harris was one of only nine members who voted against naming a post office after Maya Angelou — a bill that passed 371 to 9. And this past July, Dan Sullivan recited the Declaration of Independence on a stage feet from a Confederate battle flag, then let his campaign post photos with the flag cropped out. These are the votes and moments nobody makes you take.

The same instinct, over and over

Three years after the flag vote, Essie Mae Washington-Williams came forward as the daughter of Strom Thurmond. Wilson — a former page of Thurmond's — said he didn't believe her, called it "unseemly," and said she should have kept it to herself. The Thurmond family confirmed her account days later. Wilson apologized six days in, and still maintained she should never have gone public.

Six years after that, he shouted "You lie!" at President Obama during an address to Congress. The House formally disapproved of the outburst, 240 to 179.

The shape is always the same. The flag was "heritage" — his family's honor. A Black woman's account of her own father was a "smear" — another white man's honor. And the apology, when it comes, arrives only after the pressure does, with the original position left standing underneath it.

The bottom line

Joe Wilson spent years defending a flag that was raised over the Statehouse to oppose the civil rights movement. He said it should come down only after nine people were murdered in a Charleston church. Then he went back to Washington and voted three separate times to keep Confederate symbols on federal ground — over veterans' graves, and in the Capitol itself.

You can call the first one a product of his time. You cannot say that about 2016, 2020, and 2021.

He is also the man who, in February 2025, introduced a bill to print Trump's face on a new $250 bill while ground beef in his district was up 19%. Twenty-five years in Congress, and this is the record.

We deserve better.

Sources

CBS News and the Institute for Southern Studies' Facing South (quoting BBC News) on the 2000 flag vote and Wilson's remarks; Wilson's own June 23, 2015 statement; the Equal Justice Initiative on the flag's history and removal; PBS NewsHour on the 2016 VA cemeteries amendment; House roll calls from the Office of the Clerk; Reuters' 2023 "Slavery's Descendants" investigation on Wilson's 2000 speech and his ancestors; and Talking Points Memo on the 2003 Washington-Williams episode. Photo: official congressional portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Black Woman Said Strom Thurmond Was Her Father. Joe Wilson Called It a "Smear." She Was Telling the Truth.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:54:11 +0000

In December 2003, a 78-year-old retired schoolteacher in Los Angeles told the country something South Carolina had whispered about for decades: Senator Strom Thurmond — the state's most powerful politician for half a century, and the man who ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist ticket — was her father. Her mother had been a 16-year-old Black maid working in the Thurmond family home.

Joe Wilson, who got his start in politics working for Thurmond, went to his hometown newspaper and said he didn't believe her.

He was wrong. And the way he was wrong is worth sitting with.

What she actually said

Essie Mae Washington-Williams was born in 1925. Thurmond was 22 at the time; her mother, Carrie Butler, was 16 and worked as a maid in his family's house. Thurmond never publicly acknowledged her, but he supported her financially for decades.

She stayed silent until she was 78. She came forward only after Thurmond died in June 2003 at age 100.

Wilson's answer: "It's a smear"

Wilson didn't wait. He told The State newspaper he didn't believe her, called the revelation "unseemly," and argued that even if she were telling the truth, she should have kept it to herself:

"It's a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina."

He went further, putting it in the same category as the stories about Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved woman, and said it was unfair to debate rumors about Thurmond when he could no longer defend himself.

"Sometimes these things just go on. These are heroes of mine. I really hope these would be heroes to future generations of Americans. (The stories) are … a way to diminish their contributions to our country's existence."

Read that again. A woman said, at 78, that she was somebody's daughter. Wilson's objection was that saying it out loud might diminish the man who never claimed her.

Days later, the Thurmond family confirmed it

On December 15, 2003, the family's lawyer put out a statement: "As J. Strom Thurmond has passed away and cannot speak for himself, the Thurmond family acknowledges Ms. Essie Mae Washington-Williams' claim to her heritage."

So Wilson's certainty lasted a matter of days before the people who would know best contradicted him in public.

"Six days and several furious letters to the editor later," Talking Points Memo reported, Wilson apologized. Sort of. His apology was this:

"I have the utmost respect for Essie Mae Washington-Williams and wish her and the Thurmond family all the best."

And he still maintained she should not have gone public.

That's not an apology for being wrong. It's an apology for being caught being wrong, attached to a restatement of the original insult. The South Carolina legislature added her name to the Thurmond monument at the Statehouse the next year, changing the inscription from four children to five. Wilson's position was that the whole thing never should have been said.

Why "heritage" was the word he reached for

In April 2000, three and a half years before Washington-Williams came forward, Wilson was a state senator voting to keep the Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina Statehouse — one of only seven who did, against 36 who voted to take it down.

What matters here isn't just the vote. It's the reason he gave for it. In a speech to the General Assembly in 2000, Reuters found, Wilson explained why the flag mattered to him:

"Very, very personal. And it's personal because it's my family. For me, it began very early in that I was named for a Confederate general, General David Addison Weisiger."

That is the same instinct, a few years early. A symbol of the Confederacy was personal family honor. A Black woman's account of her own parentage was a smear on somebody else's honor. Both times, the thing being protected was a white man's reputation.

What he left out of that speech

In the same speech, Wilson volunteered that Weisiger "was not a plantation owner; he was a bank cashier."

What he did not mention is that Weisiger enslaved seven people in southeast Virginia in 1860, ranging in age from 5 to 45.

Reuters' 2023 investigation into lawmakers descended from slaveholders found more. Wilson has at least five slaveholders among his forebears, going back to the 1700s. His great-great-grandfather, Stephen H. Boineau, enslaved 16 people in 1860 — the youngest an 8-month-old girl, the oldest a 50-year-old man. Boineau also worked as an overseer on South Carolina plantations, the man paid to enforce discipline on people held in bondage.

Wilson has spoken for most of his adult life about how much family history means to him. Reuters contacted him five times with the documents. He never responded.

The apology that isn't an apology

Six years later, on September 9, 2009, Wilson shouted "You lie!" at President Obama during a joint session of Congress — the moment most of the country still knows him for. What happened next should look familiar by now.

He apologized once, by phone, to the White House. Then he refused to do it on the House floor: "I've apologized one time. The apology was accepted by the president, the vice president. … I am not apologizing again."

On September 15, the House passed a resolution disapproving of his conduct, 240–179. Wilson voted no — against a resolution about his own behavior.

That's the shape of it, in 2003 and again in 2009: say the thing, get contradicted, offer the narrowest walk-back that pressure will accept, and never concede the underlying point. Missouri's Jason Smith ran the same play years later when he yelled "Go back to Puerto Rico!" across the House floor and wouldn't own up to it in the room.

Why this still matters

Joe Wilson has represented South Carolina's 2nd District since 2001 — 25 years. He is still in Congress. He is still asking the same voters to send him back, most recently while pushing to put Donald Trump's face on a $250 bill.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams died in 2013 at 87. She carried a powerful man's secret for him nearly her whole life, and when she finally set it down, a South Carolina congressman's first instinct was to tell her she'd damaged his hero.

We should be able to expect better than that from the people who represent us. When a constituent tells the truth, the job is to listen — not to calculate whose reputation it costs.

We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Justin Elliott for Talking Points Memo, which surfaced Wilson's December 2003 comments to The State, plus Reuters' "Slavery's Descendants" investigation, CBS News on the Thurmond family's acknowledgment, Fox News on Wilson's refusal to apologize on the House floor, and House roll call records from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: Talking Points Memo.

Mike Rogers Says His Opponent 'Believes America Deserved 9/11.' PolitiFact Rated It Pants on Fire.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:25:10 +0000

The day after Michigan's primary, Mike Rogers (MI) put out a statement about the man he'll face in November.

"Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11."

That's about Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat. El-Sayed never said it. He said the opposite, on Fox News, on the record, months ago.

On August 7, PolitiFact rated Rogers' claim Pants on Fire — the worst rating they give. It's reserved for statements that are not just false but ridiculous.

Where the quote actually came from

The words "America deserved 9/11" belong to Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer. He said them during a 2019 livestream. That was seven years ago, and Piker is not Abdul El-Sayed.

Piker walked it back two days later on "The Young Turks," saying he opposes violence and was arguing that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East "created the extremism that led to the terrorist attacks."

El-Sayed's connection is that he campaigned with Piker on April 7 of this year, at Michigan State and the University of Michigan.

Here's the part Rogers left out. On the morning of those events, El-Sayed went on "Fox & Friends." The host asked him directly whether he agreed with Piker's 9/11 comments.

"Of course I don't think 9/11 was justified. Because you appear with somebody doesn't mean you agree with him on everything."

So the sequence is: El-Sayed publicly rejected the idea that 9/11 was justified, and Rogers went out and told Michigan voters that El-Sayed believes 9/11 was justified.

Rogers' campaign was asked for proof. It didn't have any.

PolitiFact did what fact-checkers do. It asked the Rogers campaign for the evidence.

The campaign couldn't produce a statement from El-Sayed. What it offered instead were two clips: one of El-Sayed calling the blowback "cancel culture" when asked to disavow Piker, and one of him declining to say whether he'd campaign with Piker again.

Rogers campaign spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet's defense:

"Abdul was asked point blank if he'd disavow Hasan Piker's comments, and he wouldn't do it. That tells you everything you need to know."

That is a real thing you can criticize an opponent for. "He wouldn't disavow someone else's comment" is a fair political attack.

But that is not what Rogers said. Rogers said El-Sayed believes America deserved 9/11. Those are not the same sentence, and Rogers — who framed the whole attack around his own law enforcement work "hunting terrorists" — knows exactly how much distance there is between them.

As PolitiFact put it in their ruling: "Rogers pointed to a seven-year-old statement from another person — not from El-Sayed — to support his claim."

The part PolitiFact said out loud

The fact-check didn't stop at "false." It named what the attack was doing:

"The incendiary attack by Rogers on El-Sayed, who is Muslim, evokes tropes about Muslims and support for terrorism."

El-Sayed is a former public health official. He is also Muslim. Rogers took a comment made by someone else, stapled it to the Muslim candidate, and framed it with his own record "hunting terrorists."

That's the move. It only works if you already assume something about the man it's aimed at.

We've written about this playbook before, because Rogers is not the only Republican running it. Scott Perry spent ten minutes on the House floor arguing against the pocket Constitution he was holding — specifically the part about no religious test for office. In Little Rock, a "Sharia takeover" panic turned out to be five houses, two of them lived in by Christians.

"There's no way for him to know every view of every volunteer"

Here's the hypocrisy, and it's a big one.

Rogers' whole case is that El-Sayed is responsible for what a person he appeared with said seven years ago.

Rogers has been asked about the views of people on his own campaign. Not people he shared a stage with once — people he hired and appointed.

The Metro Times reported that Rogers built a "Faith Coalition Leadership Team" that included Linda Lee Tarver, who petitioned the Michigan Supreme Court to seize Detroit ballots and block certification of Biden's win, and who called federal LGBTQ+ protections a "godless, demonic, satanic and wicked agenda of the devil."

When Metro Times asked Rogers about his own team members' records, his campaign said:

"There's no way for him to know every view of every volunteer — no candidate does."

There it is. When it's Rogers' own hand-picked coalition, he cannot possibly be expected to know what they believe. When it's his opponent sharing a stage with a streamer, the opponent personally holds every view that streamer ever expressed.

It gets worse. Metro Times also reported that Rogers' "Students for Mike Rogers" team included a member who replied "Send them to North Korea?" to a post asking what should be done about "these people," an apparent reference to Jews. His University of Michigan campus coordinator defended participants in the leaked Young Republicans group chat that featured "I love Hitler," gas chamber jokes, and racial slurs, writing: "Loyalty is the only political virtue that matters."

And Texas oil billionaire Tim Dunn — who told a Jewish former Texas House Speaker that "only Christians should hold leadership positions" — gave $5 million to a super PAC backing Rogers. That was more than 98% of everything the PAC raised in the first half of 2025. Rogers has never publicly addressed it.

Guilt by association is Rogers' entire argument this week. He should be careful with it.

This is a habit, not a slip

A Pants on Fire rating in August is not an isolated bad day.

Rogers lost the 2024 Michigan Senate race and then claimed it was stolen — after having called that exact behavior "third world dictatorship" stuff in 2021. He has now built two straight campaigns on saying things that aren't true about how Michigan votes and who Michiganders are.

Michigan has real problems Rogers could be running on — energy bills, health coverage, what tariffs did to farmers and manufacturers. His record on all of them is on his report card below.

Instead, the day after the primary, he told voters his opponent thinks America had 9/11 coming.

It wasn't true. A nonpartisan fact-checker said so in public, with receipts, and gave it their worst possible rating. Rogers has not corrected it.

Source

Caleb McCullough, "In Michigan Senate race, Mike Rogers falsely ties Abdul El-Sayed to Twitch streamer's 9/11 comments," PolitiFact, August 7, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sancya.

Scott Perry Held Up a Pocket Constitution on the House Floor. Then He Spent 10 Minutes Arguing Against It.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:52:00 +0000

On the afternoon of March 26, 2026, Scott Perry stood up on the floor of the U.S. House and pulled out a copy of the Constitution.

He read the part about religion out loud. From the official record of that day:

"Our Constitution — I have it right here — very specifically says: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.'"

That's the First Amendment. It's the sentence that protects every American's right to worship — or not — however they choose.

Perry read it, and then he spent the next ten minutes arguing that one religion is quietly conquering the country, neighborhood by neighborhood.

What he actually said

Perry was speaking as a member of the Sharia-Free America Caucus, a group of House Republicans holding an hour of floor speeches about Islamic law. Here is the heart of what Pennsylvania's congressman told the country:

"They refuse to assimilate to that culture, whether it is America, Europe, or any other culture other than their own. They just live in that culture. Others around them, because they don't want to be a part of that, move away. Then, more sharia-compliant individuals move into the neighborhood. Once they reach a critical mass, they start instituting sharia law. That is how it goes."

Read that again. Muslim families move in. Everyone else moves out. Then they take over.

That is not a claim about crime, or terrorism, or any law that anybody passed. It's a claim about who your neighbors are.

He had no evidence, and he said so

The most revealing moment in Perry's speech was when he admitted he can't point to the thing he's warning about.

"I hear that there are sharia courts overseas in the U.K. and in Europe, but there aren't any where I live or maybe in the United States of America, but how would you know?"

How would you know? That's his argument. He then explained that these secret courts can't be proven because nobody would testify against them — "there are no witnesses because they will not speak out against their own laws."

So: there's no evidence, and the lack of evidence is itself the evidence. There is no fact that could ever prove Perry wrong. That's not how a lawmaker builds a case. That's how a conspiracy theory works.

He made one more specific claim in that speech — that "schools in some States are now forcing sharia-compliant meals in their schools." He didn't name a state. He didn't name a school. He didn't name a district. He just said it on the House floor and moved on.

We've watched this movie before. When a "Sharia takeover" story swept Arkansas and Texas this year, we traced it back to the source — a hate group's blog post about five houses in Little Rock, two of which are lived in by Christians.

He already told us what he believes about "replacement"

Perry's "critical mass" story isn't new. It has a name, and Perry has already endorsed it by name.

In May 2024, in a closed-door briefing for members of Congress about rising antisemitism, Perry said flatly that "replacement theory is real" — the white nationalist conspiracy that native-born Americans are being deliberately swapped out for immigrants. In the same briefing he claimed the Ku Klux Klan is "the military wing of the Democratic Party." We laid out that record, and the antisemitic meme his campaign posted two months later, in a separate piece.

Two years later he stood on the House floor and described the exact same process — they move in, we move out, they take over — without using the phrase. Same theory, new target.

Ten years of the same thing

This didn't start in 2026.

December 2016. Perry posted a photo of himself with Brigitte Gabriel, founder of ACT for America — a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls "the largest grass-roots anti-Muslim group in America." He called Gabriel "someone who demands (and deserves) to be heard about the security of our nation."

When constituents objected, Perry didn't back down. He called the SPLC an "extremist left-wing organization," said "the fact that they would condemn anyone is laughable," and delivered the line that's aged into a kind of confession:

"One person's hate group is another person's patriot."

He said that in a story that also reported the FBI's numbers: 257 hate crimes against Muslims in 2015, a nearly 67% jump in one year, the highest since the aftermath of September 11.

December 2021. The House voted on a bill by Rep. Ilhan Omar to set up a State Department office to track Islamophobia around the world. During the debate, Perry falsely claimed on the floor that Omar — a Somali-born Muslim — was "affiliated with" terrorist organizations. The House's rules-enforcer struck his words from the record and barred him from speaking on the floor for the rest of the night. The bill passed 219–212, with every Republican who voted opposing it.

Asked about it, Omar said: "The parliamentarian responded to him. His words were taken down. That's good enough."

January 2026. Perry joined the Sharia-Free America Caucus and gave the founders a statement for their press release:

"We welcome oppressed people from around the globe to enhance and participate in the self governance model that is America; we did not, however, invite them to leave their theological oppression abroad to come and conquer America under the flag of violent submission and oppression that is Sharia law."

February 2026. The Council on American-Islamic Relations designated that caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the group's 32-year history it has done that to a caucus of Congress. CAIR's write-up says members paint Islam itself as a threat, describing Muslims as people who bring "violent submission and oppression." That exact phrase is Perry's, word for word, from the press release above.

CAIR's research director put it this way: "No one who wrote the Constitution or enforced it since has empowered these legislators to pick which religions get to exist in America."

Perry answered that criticism ten years early. One person's hate group is another person's patriot.

By late March, the caucus had passed 50 members, and it isn't a fringe of the fringe — it now includes members like Florida's Randy Fine, who went on TV and said "a Muslim terrorist runs the city of New York", and Oklahoma's Josh Brecheen, who warned a room of constituents about the Ottoman Empire — in a state that already tried banning Sharia once and had it thrown out as unconstitutional.

Who's actually a threat to the Constitution here

Perry's whole argument is that a foreign code is going to replace the American one.

Look at who's making it.

Perry had his cellphone seized by the FBI as part of the investigation into the effort to overturn the 2020 election. In the early hours of January 7, 2021 — after a mob attacked the Capitol — he voted to throw out Pennsylvania's own electoral votes. His constituents' votes.

And in June 2026, he signed on to a resolution to repeal the 17th Amendment — the one that lets you elect your own U.S. senators. If Perry got his way, Pennsylvanians would no longer pick Pennsylvania's senators at all; politicians in Harrisburg would. We wrote about that resolution when another of its nine cosponsors signed on.

The man warning that someone is coming to shred the Constitution has spent five years trying to edit it himself.

What he isn't doing

Here's what central Pennsylvania is dealing with while its congressman works on this.

An estimated 23,069 people in his district are projected to lose health coverage because of the health care cuts he voted for, according to the Joint Economic Committee. When Congress moved to save the tax credits keeping people covered, Perry called that a "colossal mistake."
45,736 households in PA-10 — about 14% of the district — use SNAP to buy groceries, including more than 20,000 households with kids.
He has not held an in-person town hall since 2019. In March 2025, hundreds of his constituents held one without him.

Perry found an hour on the House floor to warn about secret courts he admits he can't find. He hasn't found an evening in seven years to stand in a school gym in York County and answer a question from someone whose insurance just got cancelled.

He's got time. He's just spending it on this.

We deserve better.

Sources

SHARIA-FREE AMERICA — Congressional Record, House, March 26, 2026 (Perry's full remarks)
What is the Sharia Free America Caucus, and who from Pa. joined? — Keystone Newsroom, March 24, 2026 (photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect)

Scott Perry's Campaign Posted an Antisemitic Meme. Two Months Earlier He Told Colleagues 'Replacement Theory Is Real.'

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:42:15 +0000

Some things a member of Congress does can be explained away as a bad day, a staffer's mistake, or a sentence that came out wrong. And then there are things that keep happening.

Scott Perry has represented the Harrisburg and York area in Congress since 2013. Over the last several years he has posted a notorious antisemitic image on his campaign's Facebook page, told fellow lawmakers in a closed-door briefing on antisemitism that the white nationalist "replacement" conspiracy is real, compared Democrats to Nazis from a conference stage, and — according to sworn testimony from a former Trump White House aide — asked the president for a pardon after January 6.

That is not a bad day. That is a record.

The meme

In late June 2024, Perry's campaign Facebook account shared an image showing a group of stereotypically Jewish bankers with hooked noses and thick beards playing Monopoly on a game board balanced on the bent backs of naked people. Text above it read, "If the people stand … the game is over." The campaign added its own comment: "Says it all ..."

The image wasn't ambiguous, and it wasn't new. As Jewish Insider first reported, it was lifted from "Freedom for Humanity," a 2012 London street mural by the artist Mear One that was condemned as antisemitic and removed. It's famous enough that Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour leader, publicly apologized in 2018 for having defended it, calling the image "deeply disturbing and antisemitic."

Perry's campaign took the post down — but only after Jewish Insider asked about it. The explanation it gave, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, was this:

"After receiving a media inquiry, learning the history of the image, and contacting several members of the Jewish community (some who were familiar with it and some who were not) out of grave concern that it is considered antisemitic — we removed it immediately."

Read that again. It's not an apology. It says the campaign had to go learn the history of a cartoon of hook-nosed bankers ruling over naked bodies before it could tell whether it was antisemitic.

Jewish leaders in his own district were not impressed. The Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg and the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition issued a joint statement on July 5, 2024 saying they "strongly condemn the recent post of a horrific and plainly anti-Semitic image by the campaign of U.S. Congressman Scott Perry (PA-10)." They called what the campaign offered "only a brief and anodyne explanation," and wrote that Perry "should have taken ownership of his indefensible promotion of the image, expressed only antipathy for this infamous slander of Jews, and condemned anti-Semitism in all its pervasive and pernicious forms" — and had failed to do so.

He never did.

"Replacement theory is real"

Two months before the meme, on May 7, 2024, House members attended a closed-door briefing titled "The Origins and Implications of Rising Antisemitism in Higher Education." Someone in the room recorded it, and the audio got out.

According to the Inquirer's account of the recording, Perry used a briefing about antisemitism to say this:

"The KKK in modern times, a lot of young people think somehow it's a right-wing organization when it is the military wing of the Democratic Party."

And this:

"Replacement theory is real."

He also said migrants have "no interest in being Americans." His office's response was not to dispute the quotes but to complain that the "radical Left twists facts."

It's worth being precise about what "replacement theory" is, because Perry's defenders like to pretend it's just a comment about immigration numbers. HIAS, the Jewish refugee organization, defines it as "a white nationalist conspiracy theory that dangerously and falsely asserts that Jews and others are orchestrating the deliberate replacement of white Americans with non-white immigrants and people of color."

That theory has a body count, and part of it is in Pennsylvania. The man who murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 — the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history — believed it. Before the attack he posted online accusing HIAS of bringing in "hostile invaders" who would kill "his people." HIAS also links the conspiracy to the 2019 Poway synagogue attack, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, and the 2022 Buffalo supermarket massacre.

Perry told a room full of colleagues, at a briefing convened because antisemitism was rising, that the theory is real.

It wasn't the first time either

Three years earlier, on April 14, 2021, Perry brought the same idea into a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting. CNN reported his words at the time:

"For many Americans, what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening is what appears to them is we're replacing national-born American — native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation."

CNN's headline called it what it was: how the racist replacement theory "came to Congress." Perry brought it there.

Two months after that, in June 2021, Perry took the stage at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference and compared Democrats to Nazi-era Germans, telling the crowd, "Not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and '40s was in the Nazi Party." The Harrisburg Jewish groups cited that episode too, in the same statement about the meme — this was a pattern they had already watched build.

And when the House voted in October 2020 on a resolution simply condemning QAnon and rejecting its conspiracy theories, it passed 371 to 18. Perry was one of the 17 Republicans who voted no. We wrote about that vote when we looked at the one member who couldn't even bring himself to pick a side. Perry picked one.

The pardon

On June 23, 2022, former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath before the January 6 committee. Asked whether Perry had spoken to her about a pardon, she answered plainly: "Mr. Perry asked for a pardon, too."

Perry denies it. His office called it a "false pardon narrative," and his spokesman put out this line, as WESA and WITF reported: "I stand by my statement that I never sought a Presidential pardon for myself or other Members of Congress."

You can decide who to believe. What isn't in dispute is the conduct around it. Perry pushed to install Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general so Clark could reverse the department's finding that there was no widespread fraud. He circulated a claim that Italian satellites had flipped votes — a theory so far out that it reached the Defense Attaché in Italy. And the FBI seized his cellphone in 2022, making him the only sitting member of Congress whose phone was taken in the 2020 election investigation.

People with nothing to worry about don't usually need a pardon.

He's not an outlier — but he's ours

Perry is not the only Republican on this site whose record runs in this direction. Paul Gosar spoke at Nick Fuentes's white nationalist conference two years running and defended Fuentes to the FBI on congressional letterhead. Wisconsin's Tom Tiffany went on a podcast whose host praised Hitler and then accepted the host's offer to campaign for him.

What separates Perry is that he did his in the places that are supposed to be safe from it: a committee hearing, a briefing on antisemitism, his own campaign's Facebook page.

It also isn't limited to Jews. In March 2026, Perry stood on the House floor, read the First Amendment's religious freedom clause out loud, and then spent ten minutes arguing that Muslim families move into a neighborhood until they reach "critical mass" and take it over — the same replacement story with a different target. We wrote that one up separately: ten years of Perry's anti-Muslim record.

In May 2026, after Janelle Stelson won the Democratic primary to face him again, Perry called her "the same carpetbagging, racist, tax hiker we defeated less than two years ago." He beat her by 5,133 votes in 2024.

Scott Perry is comfortable throwing the word "racist" at an opponent. He has still not offered the plain, unqualified condemnation of antisemitism that the Jewish Federation in his own hometown asked him for after his campaign put that image on the internet.

We deserve better.

Sources

Dan Meuser Wouldn't Say a Word to Reporters About Trump's "Go Back" Tweets. That Night He Took the House Floor to Defend Them.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:26:41 +0000

On the evening of July 16, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 240 to 187 to formally condemn the sitting president's words as racist.

Most Republicans voted no and said nothing. Dan Meuser asked for time to speak.

He got a minute and a half from Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, walked to the microphone, and opened with this:

"Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to H. Res. 489, the latest legislative attack on the President."

That is the whole story in one sentence. A resolution about what the president said to four women of color who serve in Congress was, to Meuser, an attack on the president.

What Trump actually said

Two days earlier, on July 14, Trump posted a series of messages about "'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen" — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx, Pressley in Cincinnati, Tlaib in Detroit. Omar was born in Somalia, came here at age 12, and became a citizen. All four are American citizens. All four were elected by American voters.

Here is what he wrote, as reported at the time:

"Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came."

"These places need your help badly, you can't leave fast enough. I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!"

Go back where you came from. It is the oldest line in the book, and every American who has ever heard it aimed at them knows exactly what it means.

What the resolution actually said

It is worth reading what Meuser voted against, because it was not a censure, not an impeachment, and not a punishment. It cost the president nothing.

The text of H. Res. 489 opens with Benjamin Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and a long passage from Ronald Reagan's last speech as president about the Statue of Liberty. Then it resolves that the House:

"believes that immigrants and their descendants have made America stronger, and that those who take the oath of citizenship are every bit as American as those whose families have lived in the United States for many generations"

"strongly condemns President Donald Trump's racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color by saying that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should 'go back' to other countries"

That's it. Naturalized citizens are every bit as American as anyone else, and telling them to go back is wrong. Meuser voted no.

He wouldn't answer reporters. Then he asked for the microphone.

Before the vote, WHYY went member by member through Pennsylvania's congressional delegation asking each one where they stood. Their entry for the 9th District:

"Freshman Congressman Dan Meuser, a Republican representing Pa.'s 9th district including Hershey and a sizeable chunk of Pa.'s coal region, didn't post to Twitter or Facebook regarding the president's comments. His office did not respond to requests for comment."

So when a reporter asked him to say something about the president telling members of Congress to go back where they came from, he had nothing. No statement. No callback.

Two days later, with a vote on the board and cameras rolling, he had plenty. Here is his floor speech, in the Congressional Record, delivered on the House floor:

"In the last few days, Democratic Members of this House have attacked the President with claims of racism. Some have even said and then walked back similar comments referring to the Democratic House Speaker. None of those accusations are based in fact."

He called the four congresswomen's press conference "at best, political theater." He said the real debate in the country "will continue to be socialism versus American exceptionalism." When his 90 seconds ran out, Collins gave him another 30 to finish:

"This ridiculous slander does a disservice to our Nation and to the American people, and I, like many, am tired of it. I urge a 'no' vote on the resolution aimed purely at harassing the President of the United States."

He posted the same message on Twitter that night: "I strongly oppose Democrat leadership's latest effort to harass @realDonaldTrump."

Read the speech twice and you'll notice what is missing from it. Meuser never says the words were fine. He never defends them, never explains them, never quotes them. He argues about who is being harassed. The tweets themselves — the actual thing on the floor that night — he never touches.

A Republican from Bucks County managed it

Four Republicans in the entire House voted to condemn the remarks. One of them was from Pennsylvania: Brian Fitzpatrick, of the 1st District, who put it plainly the same night.

"The language and tone being used by so many in our country needs to change. The Hatfield versus McCoy brand of politics must end. Democrats and Republicans need to start treating each other respectfully and like human beings."

So it could be done. A Republican from Bucks County, facing the same primary voters and the same president, found it possible to say that telling colleagues to go back where they came from is wrong.

Meuser chose the other thing — and he chose it loudly, on his feet, on the record.

He was not alone in Pennsylvania. Mike Kelly, from the 16th District, voted no too. Asked about the tweets by a reporter in a Capitol hallway, Kelly explained that he couldn't be offended because "I'm a person of color ... I'm white". And Missouri's Jason Smith voted no six months after he yelled "Go back to Puerto Rico!" at a Latino colleague standing in the well of that same House floor.

"Matters of real substance"

The most revealing line in Meuser's speech is the one that sounds most reasonable. He said the House should address this and then:

"move on to engage in the work and the matters of real substance and importance to the people of our country, rather than baseless name-calling and offensive lectures."

Fair enough. Let's look at the matters of real substance he got to.

In July 2025 he voted for Trump's budget bill. By the Joint Economic Committee's district-level estimate, that law will strip health coverage from about 25,542 people in his own 9th District — 16,342 of them on Medicaid.

The same bill cut food assistance. In PA-09, 47,877 households rely on SNAP — about 15% of all households in the district, including 19,844 households with children, according to USDA data.

And when constituents in that district asked to talk to him about any of it, he said no. They have shown up every Monday morning for over a year asking for one open town hall, and he told a reporter he won't do it because he doesn't want to "basically be a piñata" — that it's just "the same 40 people."

Six years ago he had 90 seconds and used them to defend the president from an accusation. Since then he's had seven years of "real substance" and used it to take health care and food help away from the people who sent him, while refusing to stand in a room and answer for it.

The pattern

This is not a one-off from a nervous freshman. It's the same move he has made every time the president needed cover.

In December 2020 he signed the amicus brief in Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to throw out his own state's presidential election results. At 3:08 in the morning on January 7, 2021, hours after the mob was cleared out of the Capitol, he voted to reject Pennsylvania's electoral votes. And this month he spent more than an hour explaining that vote to a closed meeting of about 40 people — while still refusing to debate the woman running against him.

The through line is simple. When Trump does something indefensible, Dan Meuser does not defend it. He changes the subject to how unfairly Trump is being treated, and then he votes.

In July 2019 the subject was whether an American citizen elected to Congress can be told to go back where she came from. Two hundred and forty members of the House said no, she cannot.

Meuser was one of 187 who wouldn't say it.

We deserve better.

Sources

Congressional Record, July 16, 2019 — Rep. Meuser's floor remarks on H. Res. 489 (U.S. Government Publishing Office)
House Roll Call 482, July 16, 2019 — H. Res. 489, passed 240-187 (Meuser: No) (Office of the Clerk)
Pa.'s Fitzpatrick votes with Dems to condemn Trump's tweets — Pennsylvania Capital-Star, July 16, 2019
Pa. Dems, some in GOP criticize Trump's 'go back' tweets — WHYY, July 2019

Photo: Dan Meuser, 118th Congress official portrait (Wikimedia Commons).

A Swastika Flag Hung in Dave Taylor's Office. Nearly Ten Months Later, He Still Hasn't Explained How It Got There.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:26:11 +0000

In October 2025, someone in Washington got on a video call with a congressional office. Behind the staffer on the screen, pinned to a cubicle wall next to a pocket Constitution, was a small American flag. Its stripes had been altered to form a swastika.

The office belonged to David Taylor, the Republican who represents Ohio's 2nd District.

A screenshot went up on X on October 15, 2025, posted by left-leaning Ohio politics blogger D.J. Byrnes, who writes The Rooster. Politico first reported the photo, and it was national news within hours.

Nearly ten months later, we still don't know how a Nazi symbol ended up on the wall of a member of Congress's office. And the congressman who promised to find out has stopped talking about it.

The story changed in about 24 hours

Taylor's first response, on October 15, was strong and simple. He called it a "vile and deeply inappropriate symbol." In a statement, he said: "The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff, or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms." He described what happened as office vandalism, and said Capitol Police were investigating.

That's the right thing to say. Nobody should have to explain why a swastika is unacceptable.

But by the next day, the explanation had grown a lot more complicated.

On October 16, Taylor put out a second statement:

"New details have emerged from a coordinated investigation into the vile symbol that appeared in my office. Numerous Republican offices have confirmed that they were targeted by an unidentified group or individual who distributed American flags bearing a similar symbol, which were initially indistinguishable from an ordinary American flag to the naked eye. My office was among those that were subjected to this ruse."

So in one day it went from vandalism in his office to a coordinated plot against Republicans across the Capitol. And there was a new claim tucked inside it — that you couldn't even see the swastika by looking at the flag.

That claim came from an anonymously sourced Fox News report saying the symbol was worked into the ink or the weaving of the flags, an "optical illusion" that only showed up clearly on camera. NBC News reported that two Republican sources said several offices had gotten similar flags earlier in the year, and that one office found its flag back in January and threw it out.

Some of that holds up. Utah Rep. Mike Kennedy told reporters his office got one too.

But nobody has ever confirmed the part that matters

Here's the piece of Taylor's story that does the actual work for him: if the swastika was invisible, then nobody in his office could be blamed for a flag hanging on the wall.

That is the one part reporters could not verify.

The Hill checked. It confirmed that a similar flag went to at least one other House Republican office, which threw it out — but wrote plainly that it "has not confirmed that the swastika was not visible to the naked eye," and that it had never seen or inspected one of the flags.

And there's a wrinkle that cuts the other way. Politico obtained a photo of a second altered flag — this one with the swastika drawn on by covering parts of the stripes with whiteout and a black marker. An aide who dealt with that flag told Politico, "it was plainly obvious to us that there was a swastika on the flag with the naked eye." That office didn't launch an investigation. They threw it out, the aide said, "like we would hate mail."

That's not proof about Taylor's specific flag — it was a different flag, marked up a different way. But it tells you something. Somebody handed a defaced American flag to a congressional office, and the people there saw exactly what it was and put it in the trash. The flag in Taylor's office went up on a wall and stayed there long enough to end up in the background of a work call.

The "full-scale internal investigation" that answered nothing

In that same October 16 statement, Taylor said this:

"After a full-scale internal investigation, I am confident that no employee of this office would knowingly display such a despicable image, and the flag in question was taken down immediately upon the discovery of the obscured symbol it bore."

Read that carefully, because it's doing less than it sounds like.

It doesn't say who put the flag up. It doesn't say when it went up, or how long it hung there. It doesn't say whether anyone was disciplined. It clears his staff of doing it knowingly — a standard almost nobody could fail — and then stops.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about it the same day, along with a Young Republicans group chat full of racist and antisemitic messages that had surfaced days earlier, where members joked about sending people to gas chambers. Johnson's answer: "Look, obviously, we roundly condemn any of that nonsense." On Taylor specifically, he said "the congressman did exactly what he should have done," and that he couldn't comment further until the investigation finished.

That investigation has never publicly finished.

Two months later: nothing. Ten months later: still nothing.

In December 2025, the Cincinnati Enquirer went back and asked what the investigations had turned up. The answer was nothing anyone would share.

On December 2, a Capitol Police spokesperson told the Enquirer they could not discuss "any potential investigations" for "safety reasons." When the paper pointed out that Taylor himself had said the investigation was ongoing, not potential, and asked if it was still open, Capitol Police didn't respond at all.
Taylor had also asked the House Administration Committee to investigate. The Enquirer emailed the committee. No response.
On December 5, Taylor's spokesperson, Rebecca Thompson, said the office had no new updates.
The Enquirer asked whether Angelo Elia — the legislative correspondent identified in the photo — still worked there. Taylor's spokesperson didn't answer the question.

To be clear about Elia: he has not been accused of doing anything wrong, and Taylor's own statement cleared his staff of knowingly displaying the symbol. A former colleague from his consulting days in Ohio told the Tribune Chronicle in Warren, "This is not consistent with the person who I knew."

But "we won't say if he still works here" isn't a privacy policy. It's a way of ending a conversation.

Nearly ten months on, that's where it sits. Two investigations announced. Zero findings released. A congressman who spoke forcefully for one day and then let the clock run.

We deserve better than a story that stops

We're not asking Taylor to have known in advance. Somebody handed defaced flags to congressional offices, and that's on whoever did it.

What we're asking is much smaller: finish the sentence. Who hung it up? How long was it there? What did Capitol Police conclude? Is the staffer still on the payroll? Taylor asked two different bodies to look into this. He is a sitting member of Congress with the standing to demand answers from both — and if the answers came back, he never told anyone, and if they never came back, he never said that either.

This is the pattern that keeps showing up. When a Republican gets caught standing near this stuff, the response is a strong statement, an announced investigation, and then silence until the news cycle moves on. Paul Gosar spoke at a white nationalist conference two years running and simply never explained it. Wisconsin's Tom Tiffany went on a podcast whose host had praised Hitler, and took the host's offer to help his campaign. The playbook is to wait it out. It usually works.

Taylor is in his first term. He took office in January 2025 representing southern and southeastern Ohio, and he's already given his constituents a voting record that makes their lives harder — on health coverage, on food aid, on jobs. Now he's given them an unfinished story about a Nazi symbol on his office wall.

Southern Ohio deserves a representative who follows through. Ask him to.

Source

This post draws on the Cincinnati Enquirer's December 2025 follow-up by Victoria Moorwood, and on WVXU's reporting on Taylor's "ruse" claim. Photo via WVXU.

Mitch McConnell Said There's No Place in the GOP for White Supremacists. Paul Gosar Spoke at Nick Fuentes's Conference Two Years Running.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:10 +0000

Most politicians who get caught near a white nationalist movement do the same three things: express surprise, claim they didn't know who was involved, and never go back.

Paul Gosar has done none of that. He went back.

The conference

The America First Political Action Conference is organized by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who, as NBC News put it, "gained national prominence after he attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville."

Gosar attended AFPAC in person in 2021. He addressed it again in 2022 by recorded video.

At that 2022 event in Orlando, from the same stage, Fuentes appeared to praise Adolf Hitler — responding to comparisons between Vladimir Putin and Hitler by telling the crowd, "Now they're going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler — they say that's not a good thing." He then urged the room to back Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The crowd chanted "Putin! Putin!"

What his own party said about it

This is not a case where Republicans looked away. They said it out loud, on the record, by name.

Mitch McConnell, then Senate Republican leader: "There's no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism."

Kevin McCarthy, then House Republican leader, called it "appalling and wrong," and added: "There's no place in our party for any of this. … The party should not be associated any time, any place with somebody who is antisemitic. This is unacceptable."

Mitt Romney called Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene "morons" on CNN.

Liz Cheney said her colleagues were promoting antisemitism and white supremacy that is "a toxin in the bloodstream."

Jim Banks, then chairman of the Republican Study Committee: "It's unbecoming for a member of Congress to speak at an event that's promoted by anyone who espouses those views. This is an event that no Republican should attend."

Greene at least offered a defense — she told a CBS reporter she didn't know who Fuentes was, had never heard him speak, had never seen a video.

Gosar offered nothing. NBC News reported flatly: "Gosar has been silent about the controversy. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment."

Nobody in that party lost a committee seat over it. McCarthy said he planned to discuss the matter with them.

He used congressional letterhead to defend Fuentes to the FBI

The AFPAC appearances could, at a stretch, be filed under bad judgment about a speaking invitation.

This cannot. In July 2021, according to Talking Points Memo, Gosar wrote to the FBI on congressional letterhead criticizing Fuentes's placement on the no-fly list as an abuse of power.

That is a sitting member of Congress spending the authority of his office to advocate for a white nationalist activist, with a federal law enforcement agency, in writing.

And then there was his digital director

In May 2023, TPM published an investigation into Wade Searle, Gosar's digital director — a staffer who had "served as the main contact on official press releases and represented the congressman at events," and who began working for Gosar in November 2021, months after graduating high school.

TPM found "an extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages using variations of the 'ChickenRight' and 'Chikken' handles that can be linked to Wade Searle" — including accounts placing him at Fuentes rallies and archived posts from 2020 and 2021.

What those accounts posted was, in TPM's description, "extremist, anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-vaccine content" — including that trans people are "pedophiles," that LGBTQ people engage in "sin," and a reference to "HOOK-NOSED BANKERS."

Fuentes himself praised the account. He called "Chikken" one of the "strongest soldiers of the movement," and after a $150 donation described "Chikkenright" as "one of the best."

TPM's note on the response: "Gosar, his chief of staff, his press secretary, and Searle have not responded to multiple detailed requests for comment."

That is the same answer he gave about AFPAC. Silence is his position.

This goes back further than Fuentes

The pattern predates the Groypers by years.

In October 2017, two months after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended with a woman dead, Gosar told VICE News that the rally may have been a false flag — organized by an "Obama sympathizer" and funded by George Soros.

He went further. He accused Soros of having "turned in his own people to the Nazis."

George Soros was born in Hungary in 1930. He was 14 years old in 1944, and he survived the Nazi occupation because his father arranged for him to pass as Christian. The claim Gosar repeated is a well-worn antisemitic conspiracy theory, and it is false. His Open Society Foundations told VICE: "George Soros survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary, and he has spent his life supporting efforts to ensure that such terrifying authoritarianism never takes root again."

VICE also noted the obvious problem with the "Obama sympathizer" claim: Jason Kessler, who organized the Charlottesville rally, has written for an anti-immigration website about his fear that America will face "white genocide."

The people who know him best

In 2018, the year after the Soros comments, six of Paul Gosar's nine siblings appeared in campaign advertisements for his Democratic opponent, identifying themselves on camera one by one — a rural physician, a lawyer, a medical interpreter, a private investigator — and telling voters in his district to reject him.

The Guardian reported that the falling-out traced directly to the Soros conspiracy theory and to Charlottesville. After the rally, his siblings wrote to an Arizona newspaper: "We are aghast that Paul has sunk so low." His sister Joan said in one of the ads that she believed her brother had traded away the values they were raised with.

Gosar's public answer to his own family was to call them "disgruntled Hillary supporters" who "put political ideology before family," and to add: "Stalin would be proud."

Then, as now, it changed nothing.

The through-line

We have written before about a Senate candidate whose own son-in-law is a white nationalist influencer posting Nazi imagery and about a governor candidate who went on a podcast whose host praised Hitler. The usual defense in these stories is that the member didn't know.

Gosar cannot use that defense, and to his credit he has never really tried. He spoke at the conference. He went back the next year. He wrote the FBI on House letterhead in Fuentes's defense. He hired a digital director whose online trail led into the same movement, and said nothing when reporters asked.

His party's leader said there is no place in the Republican Party for this. Gosar is still in it, still on a committee, still on the ballot.

Source

GOP leaders denounce Greene, Gosar for speaking at white nationalist event — NBC News, February 28, 2022
EXCLUSIVE: Capitol Hill Staffer Is A Prominent Follower Of Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes — Talking Points Memo, May 14, 2023
Congressman suggests Charlottesville was George Soros–backed conspiracy — VICE News, October 5, 2017. Photo: VICE News.

Three Republicans Just Endorsed Mike Collins' Democratic Opponent in Three Days. One of Them Used to Be a Republican Senator.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:02:00 +0000

Politicians endorse across party lines occasionally. It's rare, and it's usually one person, and it's usually quiet.

Three Georgia-relevant Republicans did it in three days. All of them endorsed Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff. All of them were choosing against Mike Collins, the Republican congressman running to take that seat.

That happened in the same week a coalition of Black pastors in Atlanta publicly demanded Collins answer for his campaign's reported ties to antisemitic and white nationalist figures.

Who left

Jeff Flake is a former Republican U.S. senator from Arizona. He endorsed Ossoff citing his "character, constituent work and respect for the institution," and said those outweighed his policy disagreements with a Democrat.

Flake also named the specific thing that pushed him: Collins' refusal to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Scott James Matheson is the Republican mayor of Valdosta. He knew exactly what his endorsement would cost him and said so:

"I will take heat for this endorsement, and it doesn't matter. There's no way I can turn my back on this relationship."

Julie Smith is the Republican mayor of Tifton. Her version was blunter still:

"He's been very good to South Georgia. I'm a Republican, but there are times when a person exceeds the party. They go above and beyond."

Two of these three are sitting Republican mayors in south Georgia — not retired officials with nothing to lose, not national commentators. They are elected Republicans in Republican towns who decided that publicly backing a Democrat was less costly than backing Collins.

What they're walking away from

Flake's stated reason was the 2020 election. The pastors' stated reason was extremism. Both are documented, and neither is new.

In July, a CNN investigation found that Collins' own son-in-law is a white nationalist influencer who shares antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi imagery with more than 1.5 million followers — while Collins publicly insists he stands with Israel.

Collins' campaign has denied the allegations about ties to antisemitic and white nationalist figures.

But the pastors' demand wasn't that he deny it. It was that he answer questions and say plainly whether he condemns the reported connections. A denial that the connections exist is not the same as condemning them, and Collins has consistently chosen the first.

This is a pattern, not an incident

The endorsements land on top of a record we've been documenting all year.

Collins wrote the Laken Riley Act — and then lied about how Ossoff voted on it, attacking his opponent for a vote his opponent didn't cast.

He says Congress shouldn't be trading stocks while being one of its busiest crypto traders.

And he spent $400,000 of taxpayer money on ads that look a great deal like campaign ads.

Put those next to each other and the mayors' decision looks less like a betrayal of the party and more like basic arithmetic. Matheson and Smith both framed it around constituent work — the unglamorous business of returning calls and moving federal money to south Georgia. That's the comparison Collins lost.

What an endorsement defection actually signals

It's worth being clear about what this is and isn't.

Three endorsements do not decide a Senate race. Flake has been at odds with his party since 2018, and one could argue he's a special case.

But the two mayors aren't. They hold Republican office in a conservative part of a state where crossing Trump's party carries a real price — and they said out loud that they expected to pay it. When local Republicans conclude that the reputational damage of endorsing a Democrat is smaller than the damage of standing next to their own nominee, that's information about the nominee.

Collins is asking Georgia to send him to the U.S. Senate for six years. The people who've worked alongside both candidates, in his own party, keep choosing the other guy.

Source

"3 Republicans endorse Jon Ossoff in Georgia Senate race as Mike Collins faces scrutiny", CBS News Atlanta, August 6, 2026.

Beth Van Duyne's Resolution Condemning One Imam's Tweet Ends With a Clause About Sharia Law

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:59:13 +0000

Senator Lindsey Graham died on July 11, 2026. Early the next morning, a Dallas-area imam named Omar Suleiman posted this:

"In other news, Lindsey Graham is dead. Bye Lindsey. May you live an eternity in ruins for the ruins you helped create in Gaza. Ameen."

That post was cruel, and plenty of people said so. Celebrating a death is indefensible, whatever you thought of the man. Nobody needs to defend it.

But four days later, a member of Congress introduced a formal resolution of the United States House of Representatives about it. And if you read all the way to the bottom of that resolution, you find out it isn't really about a tweet at all.

What H.Res.1436 actually says

Beth Van Duyne introduced H.Res.1436 on July 15, 2026. Here are its five resolved clauses, as her own office published them:

Honors the public service of Senator Lindsey Graham;
Expresses gratitude to Senator Graham for his commitment to advance America's foreign policy and national security;
Recognizes Senator Graham's role in strengthening the relationship between the United States and Israel;
Condemns the statement of Omar Suleiman celebrating the death of Senator Graham; and
"Supports the work of House Republicans in raising awareness about the dangers of Sharia Law and its incompatibility with American legal principles, Constitutional governance, and individual liberty."

Read number five again. One man wrote one bad sentence on the internet, and the remedy Van Duyne attached to it is a House endorsement of an entire political campaign against a religion's legal tradition.

Suleiman's post has nothing to do with Sharia law. He didn't mention it. Nobody has claimed he was applying it. The clause is a payload, and the tweet is the delivery vehicle.

She's been running this play since 2015

Van Duyne didn't discover the Sharia issue in July. She built her career on it.

In 2015, a mosque in Irving offered its members voluntary mediation. Van Duyne, then mayor of Irving, accused the mosque's leaders of "bypassing American courts" and pushed the Irving City Council to endorse a state bill barring judges from using "foreign laws" — a measure widely understood as aimed at Sharia. Mosque leaders said she was stirring up anti-Muslim feeling.

That same year, Irving police handcuffed and arrested Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim student, for bringing a homemade clock to school. Van Duyne went on Glenn Beck's show to defend the police and the school, and criticized President Obama for praising the boy.

Eleven years later, nobody has produced the Sharia takeover. We traced the current version of the panic — the one clause five of her resolution endorses — back to its source: a hate group's blog post and a subdivision of five houses in Little Rock, two of them lived in by Christians. Van Duyne is one of the officials named in that piece.

She is not responding to a threat. She is maintaining a franchise.

"From my hometown"

The language in Van Duyne's press release is worth quoting at length, because it tells you who she thinks she's talking about.

"The outpouring of love and appreciation for Sen. Graham was incredible and heartwarming to see. Equally, the hatred and truly evil attacks against him were utterly shocking, especially one that I saw from my hometown by an Islamist religious leader, Omar Suleiman."

"From my hometown." Suleiman is the founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, in Irving, Texas — the city Van Duyne governed for six years. She calls him an "Islamist religious leader," a label he did not choose, in a document that then pivots to warning about Sharia.

She continued:

"That is not compassion. It is not faith. It is the language of hatred from a man who presents himself as a religious leader."

A member of Congress is telling the House of Representatives which religious leaders are real ones.

Twenty-six colleagues signed on. Nothing has happened since.

Van Duyne led the resolution with the Republican Study Committee and 26 cosponsors, including RSC Chairman August Pfluger, Keith Self, Brandon Gill, Michael Cloud, Randy Fine, Monica De La Cruz, Chip Roy, Dan Crenshaw and Abraham Hamadeh.

And then: nothing. H.Res.1436 was referred to the House Committee on House Administration on July 15, 2026, and that is the last thing that has happened to it.

That is how these resolutions almost always end. They aren't legislation — they can't be, since a House resolution condemning a private citizen carries no force of law and changes nothing about anyone's life. They're press releases with bill numbers. Oklahoma's Stephanie Bice filed one declaring the national anthem must be sung in English, and it sat for over a year without a vote.

The difference here is that the dead-end resolution smuggles in clause five, and clause five is the point. The tweet gave her the occasion; the Sharia language is what she wanted on the record.

Who pays for the priorities

Look at what clause three does. In a resolution nominally about a tasteless social media post, Van Duyne wrote in a line specifically praising Graham's "role in strengthening the relationship between the United States and Israel" — and the post she's condemning was about Gaza.

Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Van Duyne $106,016. Only 7% of her campaign money comes from small grassroots donors, while 30% comes from PACs and another 35% from large individual donors. She ranks #293 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

She had time in July for a resolution about one man's tweet. She also voted for Trump's budget bill, under which an estimated 1.7 million Texans will lose their health coverage and Texas hospitals stand to lose $39 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade. We've added up what Texas's Republicans in Congress are costing the state.

What this is really about

The state's most powerful Republicans have been running the same operation. Governor Greg Abbott declared Texas's largest Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization — and Texas Monthly, after reviewing 1,300 pages of emails, found twelve of his thirteen stated reasons matched a report written by a fellow at a think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group.

Van Duyne's resolution is the congressional version. Find a Muslim who said something indefensible. Use him as the reason. Attach the clause you actually wanted.

Muslims in Irving are Van Duyne's constituents too. They pay her salary. And for eleven years, the thing she has most reliably done with her office is tell the rest of the country to be afraid of them.

We deserve better.

Source

Imam who prayed before Congress faces formal rebuke after celebrating Graham's death — Adam Pack, Fox News, July 15, 2026.

A Singer Protested ICE Raids in Spanish. Stephanie Bice Wrote a Resolution About It. It Hasn't Moved in Over a Year.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:07:15 +0000

On the night of June 14, 2025, a 30-year-old singer named Nezza stood on the field at Dodger Stadium and sang the national anthem in Spanish.

She had been told not to. A team staffer had said, on camera, "We are going to do the song in English today." She sang it in Spanish anyway. Federal immigration agents had been raiding Los Angeles since June 6. Her reason was simple:

"My parents are immigrants. They've been citizens my whole life at this point, but I just can't imagine them being ripped away from me. Not now. Not when I was a kid. Never."

Twenty-six days later, a member of Congress from Oklahoma City decided that this required legislation.

On July 10, 2025, Stephanie Bice introduced H.Con.Res.43 — "Expressing the sense of Congress that any public rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' must be performed as written by Francis Scott Key, in English."

Her explanation, given to the Daily Wire: "The United States is a nation built on shared values, and 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is a symbol of our unity and resilience."

What she actually filed

It's worth being precise about what this thing is, because the reporting wasn't.

It was described as a "joint resolution." It isn't one. A joint resolution goes to the president and, if signed, carries the force of law. What Bice filed is a concurrent resolution — a formal statement of opinion. Even if it passed the House and the Senate unanimously and every member signed it in blood, it would not change a single line of federal law. Nobody could be fined. No stadium could be penalized. It is a press release with a bill number.

And it didn't even get that far. According to the official congressional record for the resolution, here is the complete list of everything that has happened to H.Con.Res.43:

July 10, 2025 — Submitted in House.
July 10, 2025 — Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

That's it. That's the whole file. Thirteen months later, it has never had a hearing, never had a markup, never had a vote. Sen. Markwayne Mullin's Senate companion, S.Con.Res.17, was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 14, 2025 and has sat there ever since.

There's one more tell. The title of Bice's resolution says the anthem "must" be performed in English. The actual operative text — the part that would have been adopted — says it "should" be, and that performers are "encouraged to honor the tradition." The Senate version drops "must" from the title entirely.

So the strong word is in the headline, and the soft word is in the document. That's how you write something built to be reported on rather than enacted.

The Spanish version was commissioned by the United States government

Here is the part that makes the whole exercise collapse.

Nezza did not improvise a translation. She sang "El Pendón Estrellado," and that song exists because the U.S. government paid for it.

In 1945, the State Department's Division of Cultural Cooperation went looking for an official Spanish-language version of the anthem to distribute through American consulates across Latin America — part of the Good Neighbor policy. A Peruvian-born composer in Brooklyn named Clotilde Arias won. The State Department paid her $150 for what its own letter called a "satisfactory translation." Her version is the only official translation of the national anthem cleared for performance, and it still is today. Her original handwritten manuscript went on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which commissioned a choir to record and perform it for the exhibition.

So a congresswoman filed a resolution declaring that a song the United States commissioned, paid for, and sent out into the world under its own seal is a threat to national unity.

There's a second problem with "as written by Francis Scott Key." Key wrote four verses. At a ballgame you get one. Under the standard Bice put in her own title, essentially every performance of the national anthem in America — including every English one — falls short.

Who she was writing this about

Bice represents Oklahoma's 5th District, which is most of Oklahoma City.

According to the Census Bureau, 22.1% of Oklahoma City is Hispanic or Latino, and 21.6% of residents over age five speak a language other than English at home. That's more than one in five of her neighbors.

Those are the people the resolution is aimed at. Not the Dodgers. Not a singer in Los Angeles. The message lands at home, on the people in her own city who speak Spanish at the dinner table and are now being told, by their own representative in Congress, that there's a wrong language to be patriotic in.

And the trigger matters. Nezza wasn't making a statement about music. She was protesting immigration raids. The thing Bice moved to formally discourage was a protest — a person using the anthem to say something about her own government. That is about as close to the core of the First Amendment as it gets. It is also, probably, why the operative text only "encourages" and never requires: a rule would have to survive a court.

What was happening in Oklahoma that same summer

While this resolution was being drafted, filed, and press-released, here is what Bice's constituents were dealing with.

Hospitals. Oklahoma hospital leaders were warning that the budget bill Bice voted for would cut federal reimbursements to Oklahoma hospitals by $8.7 billion over the next decade and eliminate nearly 15,000 jobs. That warning ran on June 27, 2025 — two weeks before she filed the anthem resolution.

Food. Two weeks after she filed it, Oklahoma Watch reported that the same bill put 131,000 Oklahomans at risk of losing SNAP benefits.

Health insurance. With the enhanced ACA tax credits expiring, a 60-year-old Oklahoma couple earning $85,000 was looking at annual premiums going from $7,225 to $30,784. The same Census profile for Oklahoma City shows 15.7% of people under 65 already have no health insurance at all, and 15.1% live in poverty.

Access. That August, a constituent finally got a question through on one of her telephone town halls — by pretending to ask about something else — and told her the phone events are "a joke, and are screened, carefully screened." He asked why she wouldn't look her constituents in the face. Her answer: "I am never going to get that kind of engagement if I'm doing in-person town halls."

She had time to legislate the language of a song sung at a ballpark in Los Angeles. She did not have time to stand in a room in Oklahoma City and take questions about the hospitals.

Eleven other members signed on

This wasn't a solo act. H.Con.Res.43 picked up eleven cosponsors, every one of them a Republican: Mike Rogers and Barry Moore of Alabama, Randy Feenstra and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, Gregory Murphy and David Rouzer of North Carolina, Troy Downing of Montana, Erin Houchin of Indiana, Buddy Carter of Georgia, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin.

Twelve members of Congress, one week's work, on a document that cannot become law and never got a vote.

This is a genre now

If the pattern feels familiar, that's because we keep writing it down.

In February 2026, Missouri's Mark Alford went on cable news and said House Republicans were investigating Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, threatened to call the FCC chairman about it, and admitted in the same breath that he doesn't speak fluent Spanish — he was reacting to what he'd heard about the lyrics, not the lyrics.

In October 2025, during a government shutdown, Nebraska congressional candidate Brinker Harding posted his own version of the White House's sombrero memes, then refused to take it down when Omaha's Latino leaders — including the former head of a group he'd asked to join — requested an apology.

And in 2019, Missouri's Jason Smith shouted "Go back to Puerto Rico!" across the House floor at a Latino colleague, then wouldn't own up to it when the man turned around and asked who said it.

Different states, different props — a halftime show, a hat, a song. Same move every time: pick something a lot of Latino Americans love, declare it un-American, and let the news cycle do the rest. It costs nothing, it fixes nothing, and it never once lowered a grocery bill.

The scoreboard

Bice's resolution has now been sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, untouched, for over a year. In that same period, the hospital cuts she voted for went on the books, the SNAP cuts went on the books, and the premium increases hit.

The anthem is still sung in English at almost every game in America, exactly as it was before she filed anything. Nothing she did changed that, because nothing she did was supposed to.

What it was supposed to do was tell one in five people in Oklahoma City where they stand. That part worked.

Source

After Spanish National Anthem Debacle, Lawmakers Move To Keep 'The Star Spangled Banner' In English — Spencer Lindquist, The Daily Wire, July 14, 2025. Photo: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images.

A Man Laughed Out Loud When Josh Brecheen Warned About the Ottoman Empire. Then Brecheen Put It Into Legislation.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:57:23 +0000

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