On August 5, Senator Ted Cruz gaveled in a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the supposed threat American Muslims pose to the country. Every Democrat on the subcommittee refused to show up.
They had a reason. Cruz originally scheduled the hearing for May 20. He postponed it after two teenage gunmen opened fire outside the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in the county, on May 18.
They killed a security guard and two community members. They livestreamed it. Investigators found a manifesto that referenced the Christchurch mosque massacre.
Cruz put the hearing back on the calendar eleven weeks later.
What is Sharia?
It’s a term Republicans weaponize to stoke fear of Muslims: Sharia, as in “Zohran Mamdani is planning to impose Sharia law on New York City.”
Sharia is not a legal code waiting for someone to impose it. It’s closer to what “living by your faith” means to a practicing Christian.
It covers how you pray, what you eat, how you give to charity, how you treat your parents, how you bury your dead.
For the overwhelming majority of the roughly 4.5 million Muslims in the United States, “following Sharia” means fasting during Ramadan and not eating pork. It is a personal religious practice, in the same category as keeping kosher or observing Lent.
Besides, it can’t even be imposed here in America. The First Amendment forbids the government from establishing any religion — a protection that shields Muslims from Christian nationalism just as surely as it shields everyone else from an imaginary Islamic takeover.
There is no mechanism by which a mayor, a member of Congress, or all four Muslims currently serving in the House could install religious law in the United States. There is no bill. There is no plan.
There is no there there.
Out of the 535 members of Congress, only four are Muslim: André Carson, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Lateefah Simon.
Meanwhile, a group called the Sharia Free America Caucus, founded in December, has recruited roughly 40 House members to campaign against a legal system that does not exist in America.
The Rhetoric is Coming From Inside the Building
The fringe of the Republican Party no longer exists. The Party is the fringe.
Representative Chip Roy introduced a bill in April he named the MAMDANI Act — an acronym for “Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists” — which would strip citizenship from and deport people over their political and religious beliefs.
Side note: The ‘MAMDANI Act’ might be the most transparently reverse-engineered backronym in Congressional history—Roy clearly picked the person he wanted to target first and raided a thesaurus second.
Senator Tommy Tuberville wrote on X in December that “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult,” and greeted the swearing-in of New York’s first Muslim mayor with “the enemy is inside the gates.”
The consequences of comments like that are real. CAIR logged 8,683 discrimination complaints in 2025, the highest single-year total since the organization began tracking in 1996.
In Minnesota, complaints rose 96% over the prior year.
In the three months after the San Diego shooting, CAIR documented 17 incidents targeting mosques and Islamic institutions, including arson and threats of violence.
Who is Killing Americans?
The Cato Institute — a libertarian think tank, not an advocacy group for Muslims — reviewed 51 years of terrorist murders on U.S. soil. Islamist attacks account for 87% of all deaths.
But 88% of all terrorism deaths in that half-century came from just two events: 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing.
Strip those two outliers out, and among the remaining 430 murders, right-wing terrorists killed 45%, and Islamists killed 32%.
In other words: one catastrophic day in 2001 has been used to justify 25 years of suspicion targeting 4.5 million people, most of whom were children or not yet born when it happened.
America to Legacy Media: “We learned it from watching YOU, corporate media! We learned it from watching YOU.”
After 9/11, coverage of Muslims was always framed the same way: threat. That rhetoric never stopped, and the Gaza genocide exposed how legacy media is still using the “threat” framing.
The Intercept analyzed more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times covering the first six weeks after October 7. Israeli deaths were mentioned at a rate 16 times higher per death than Palestinian deaths.
The papers used words like “slaughter” and “massacre” almost exclusively for Israeli victims. They frequently avoided the word “children” for Palestinian children, substituting phrases like “under the age of 18.”
That wasn’t an accident. In April 2024, a leaked internal New York Times style guide instructed reporters that “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “carnage” conveyed “more emotion than information” and should be avoided.
The scale that language obscured: as of August 6, Gaza’s Health Ministry reports 73,382 Palestinians killed.
A UN commission of inquiry documented 20,179 children killed between October 2023 and October 2025.
Peer-reviewed mortality research published in The Lancet Global Health suggests the official count is an undercount, not an exaggeration.
UNICEF reported on August 6 that 300 children have been killed since the October 2025 ceasefire — roughly one child a day, during what the world calls peace.
Sexual violence against Palestinian detainees has been documented too, by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at Sde Teiman military camp and prisons including Megiddo, Ofer, and Damon.
Israel’s military indicted five reservists over one 2024 case in which a detainee suffered a punctured lung and a torn rectum.
Israeli prosecutors dropped that case in 2026. The legacy media in America reported these facts — then quickly moved on.
If the detainee in that case were Israeli and Palestinian soldiers were responsible for the horrific injuries, the case would have remained in the news cycle — and the headlines — for months.
The Mamdani Test
Zohran Mamdani is the clearest proof that the accusation was never about policy.
He was sworn in as New York’s 112th mayor on January 1 using a Quran.
In his first six months he delivered a rent freeze on stabilized apartments, oversaw falling crime, and passed a budget on deadline.
He rolled out 2,000 daycare seats in low-income neighborhoods, filled 100,000 potholes, and secured state funding with Governor Hochul for free childcare for two-year-olds.
Rent. Childcare. Potholes. Not one item on that list is religious.
He still spent his campaign answering claims that he would impose Sharia on New York, that he wanted an “Islamic theocracy,” that he would “cheer another 9/11.”
Standing outside a Bronx mosque a day before early voting, he pointed out that the attacks were not only against him but against the nearly one million Muslims living in the city he now leads.
Those million people are your neighbors’ doctors and your kids’ teachers and the guy who owns the corner store. They are 1.3% of this country.
They have been asked, for twenty-five years, to prove a negative — that they are not plotting something — while the people demanding proof are the same people who introduce bills to deport them.
The threat was never Sharia. The threat was always the people who needed you to believe it.
