“25 years ago today.” How many social media posts and articles have you read today that started that way? People recall where they were, what they were doing, and how it impacted them. We’ve now even reached an era of adults who weren’t even alive when 9/11 happened. Everyone has their own story, but unfortunately, for too many in America, that story post-9/11 has been about fear and hate.
Yesterday, Governor Greg Abbott was at that clown show in Dallas, bragging about how he banned the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
He did this back in November 2025, in the same sloppy manner that Republicans do everything. Fact-checking Abbott’s proclamation is problematic for him:
A Texas governor has no legal authority to designate a foreign terrorist organization. That’s exclusively a federal power.
CAIR has never been charged with anything. It’s all about an accusation involving a 30-year-old FBI liaison.
CAIR has successfully sued Abbott three separate times over First Amendment violations tied to pro-Palestinian advocacy, and frames this proclamation as retaliation for that advocacy.
All of this is part of Republicans’ latest ramp-up of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate. Of course, Abbott is just pandering to the base.
This week, do what got under my skin, almost more than anything? More than the RNC, more than the high price of gas, and even more than Abbott’s latest political theater? The way the far-right was treating Mayor Mamdani regarding the 9/11 memorial.
They didn’t want him to attend because he was Muslim.
Guiliani also made the cable rounds, saying Mamdani shouldn’t show up because he reads a different book. Like it’s 1952. It’s so archaic. If you want to know what Conservatives are trying to “conserve,” it’s this. Whiteness. Christianity. Hate. Conformity.
As you would expect, Mamdani responded with complete grace.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has about a 60% approval rating.
For contrast:
LA Mayor Karen Bass: 24% approval.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson: 23% approval.
Maybe the culture wars are finally failing. Wouldn’t that be grand? If Republicans finally just minded their own business and allowed everyone in America freedom and liberty…
This week, in Dallas, Islamophobia was all the rage.
The Republican candidate from Michigan attacked Abdul El-Sayed at the RNC over it. The Dallas Morning News released an article yesterday, talking about the sharp rise in Islamophobia. Then, there was Abbott’s tirade.
According to recent reporting from the New York Times, Texas Muslims are experiencing a sharp increase in daily and institutionalized Islamophobia driven by state political rhetoric and new policy changes. It’s mostly coming from our government, government officials, and the Republican candidates running to represent us.
Abbott claims EPIC City “requires anybody who bought a lot there to abide by Sharia law.” That’s a flat-out lie (documented, on-camera), per Chaudhary, per the DOJ’s own investigation. He built a law around a premise that doesn’t exist, then went on TV to lie about it anyway, because why let a failed federal investigation get in the way of a good moral panic?
And the strategist’s line at the end is the real giveaway. This is just “the next logical step” now that the border’s not doing the job anymore. That’s the most honest sentence a professional Republican operative has probably ever said. That Muslims are being fed into the outrage machine as a scapegoat replacement for migrants at the border, since the base has moved on from that.
Meanwhile, a half-million Texans are watching their governor build a legislative career out of a threat he made up, using their zip codes as the prop.
Republicans think playing with people’s lives is “just politics.”
Representative Lalani (D-HD76) said on Houston Public Media recently that his colleagues pull him aside in the coffee room and say, “No harm done, it’s just politics.” That’s the whole rot right there.
They know exactly what they’re doing. “Just politics” is what you say when you’ve made peace with being cruel for a paycheck.
Even Lalani said that when the real issues fail, when there are no actual answers on healthcare, on affordability, on flood preparedness, they go looking for a scapegoat and pick the weakest community they can find.
And, in Texas, we see it over and over again. The immigrant community. The LGBTQ community. The Black community. This month, the Muslim community. With the GOP, it’s always “the others.”
If you’re reading this, they may have already come for your community. If not, your community may be next.
Twenty-five years later, and the most honest way to honor the people we lost on 9/11 is refusing to let their deaths keep getting weaponized against people who had nothing to do with it.
Nineteen men committed an atrocity in 2001. They do not get to be the permanent, standing indictment of 3.5 million American Muslims, forever, on a loop, every election cycle, in perpetuity.
The Muslim doctors who spent that day in the towers with everyone else. The Muslim first responders who went in. The Muslim Americans who buried friends and coworkers just like the rest of us. They get to just be Americans who lost people too.
If your version of “never forget” somehow always lands on “and therefore be suspicious of your Muslim neighbor,” you didn’t learn anything from that day.
So here’s what “never forget” actually should look like. Show up. 🫵🏻 You physically get off your couch.
A block walk or phone bank is happening near you this weekend. Find it. Check Mobilize or check your county Democratic Party’s page. Knock the doors. Make the calls.
Republicans in this state have made their whole platform “the others.” Immigrants. Queer kids. Black voters. Now Muslims. It will never stop being someone, because scapegoating is the entire strategy. The only thing that ends it is enough of us showing up loud enough, often enough, that fear stops being a winning bet.
So get up. Go find your block walk. We don’t have time to sit this one out.
53 days until the November election!
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Thank you, Michelle. This is a perfectly timely calling out and reminding us what Never Forget should mean.
Thank you for this. Calling out Muslims as the problem when our government is in a lovefest with the Saudis, Qatar, UAE and more. Disgusting.