WASHINGTON D.C.: On the evening of May 21, 2025, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead in Washington, D.C. That same night, Republican Randy Fine of Florida took to social media. The suspect, Elias Rodriguez, had no Muslim background whatsoever. Fine posted, declaring that Muslim terror had arrived at the nation's capital and that the perpetrators were "demons" who must be "put down by any means necessary."
The suspect was not Muslim. Fine posted regardless. This follows a pattern.
The Spark
The story begins fourteen months earlier, on a February morning in Texas. On February 24, 2025, Governor Greg Abbott shared a post from Amy Mek, a figure the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as an anti-Muslim provocateur. Mek had been targeting a proposed Muslim-led housing development near Dallas called East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) city claiming it was a "Sharia city."
Abbott amplified the claim, declaring that "Sharia law is not allowed in Texas." His post was viewed 3.6 million times and received over 57,000 likes.
What followed, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), was one of the most rapid and coordinated escalations of anti-Muslim bigotry by elected officials in American political history.
Within thirteen months, that single gubernatorial repost had metastasized into a campaign involving 89 Republican elected officials, 1,111 social media posts, eight pieces of proposed federal legislation, and a formal congressional caucus with 62 members.
The Numbers
The scale documented in the CSOH report is striking. Forty-six Republican elected officials, who are members of Congress, governors, and a state attorney general, published posts targeting Muslim Americans between February 2025 and March 2026. Monthly posting volume increased by 1,450 percent over the study period, from roughly 11 posts per month in the early phase to nearly 177 in the later months, exceeding 260 posts in March 2026 alone.
The campaign was not evenly distributed. Five members of Congress produced 73 percent of all posts. Rep. Randy Fine alone accounted for 29 percent, averaging more than one post per day during his most active months. He was followed by Rep. Keith Self of Texas at 17 percent, Rep. Chip Roy at 14 percent, Sen. Tommy Tuberville at 7 percent, and Rep. Andy Ogles at 5 percent.
Geographically, Texas and Florida officials dominated, together producing 71 percent of all posts.
The report notes an interesting asymmetry. While Texas ranks fifth among U.S. states in Muslim population share and the EPIC City controversy gave it national visibility, Florida has a relatively small Muslim American population. The report describes Florida as a "laboratory for testing the most extreme ideas within the GOP," with its officials pushing "the limit on outrage and sensationalism to create a groundswell of support for anti-Muslim policies."
The Architecture
The CSOH report documents what it calls a "strategic digital architecture", a coordinated system of mutually reinforcing narratives designed, in the report's words, to "reduce a diverse religious community into a threatening caricature, construct a Muslim bogeyman, fuel hatred, and convert manufactured fear into legislative and political capital."
The master frame of the campaign was "Sharia." The term appeared in 48 percent of 528 posts under study. The report traces this directly to the EPIC City controversy and Abbott's February 2025 repost. From there, "Sharia" became, as the report puts it, "the primary linguistic vehicle through which the entire campaign operates."
The report is careful to note what Sharia actually is. It is not a single codified legal system, but a broad set of religious and ethical principles derived from the Quran and the Hadith, governing personal conduct, prayer, dietary practices, family matters, and charitable obligations.
The report draws an explicit analogy to halakha in Orthodox Jewish practice or to canon law among Catholics. The bills introduced by these lawmakers, the report argues, are not banning a legal system; they are targeting the religious practices of Muslim Americans. "There is no evidence that Muslims seek to impose Sharia on anyone in the United States," the report states flatly.
Nearly a third of all posts (322) framed Muslims through the lens of terrorism and national security. The report documents how real incidents of violence were systematically weaponised.
After the June 2025 Boulder, Colorado attack, in which Mohamed Sabry Soliman attacked Jewish demonstrators with a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, Rep. Brandon Gill blamed Biden's immigration policies, writing that "uncontrolled mass migration is suicidal." Rep. Lauren Boebert claimed it was "impossible to know how many Radical Islamic terrorists are residing in America after four years of Biden's open borders."
Sixty-four posts contained explicit demands for the deportation or denaturalisation of Muslims. 63 used dehumanising language. Senator Tuberville repeatedly characterized Islam as a "death cult" and a "cancer." Rep. Fine described Muslims as "demons." The report notes that such language among elected officials "significantly amplifies its normalising effect, contributing to reduced empathy toward the targeted group and justified discriminatory and violent action against them."
The Legislation
The campaign moved decisively off social media and into the machinery of Congress. Eight bills referencing Sharia were introduced across both chambers between June 2025 and March 2026, sponsored or co-sponsored by 48 Republican lawmakers.
The report maps a tightly coordinated legislative core. Rep. Keith Self co-sponsored all six House bills. Rep. Fine and Rep. Roy each sponsored two and co-sponsored two of the other's, forming what the report describes as "a reciprocal authorship pair." Rep. Gill co-sponsored four. Together, the report states, "these four lawmakers - Self, Fine, Roy, and Gill - constitute the core of this legislative apparatus in the House."
Some of the legislation strains credulity. Rep. Fine introduced the "Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act," a bill that would prohibit federal funds to states that prevent residents from owning dogs, a power no state government has exercised or proposed.
The report states, "The bill is incoherent as legislation but effective as provocation as it reduces Islam to a caricature about dogs, manufactures a threat that does not exist, and uses the machinery of Congress to legitimize anti-Muslim bigotry as pet advocacy." The bill has 13 co-sponsors.
Less absurd but more far-reaching, Rep. Roy's "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act" would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to prohibit the entry of individuals who "adhere to Sharia law." As of April 2026, it has 26 co-sponsors. A Senate companion bill introduced by Sen. Tuberville would make those who "advocate Sharia law" deportable.
The Caucus
On December 18, 2025, Reps. Keith Self and Chip Roy launched the Sharia-Free America Caucus. By early April 2026, it had 62 Republican members.
The report describes the caucus as a "concentric structure." At its core, 22 members are active across all three campaign tracks - social media posts, legislative co-sponsorship, and caucus membership. A middle ring participates in one additional track. At the periphery, 20 members have simply lent their names, posting neither anti-Muslim content nor co-sponsoring legislation, but the report argues this matters, nonetheless.
By joining a caucus "explicitly organized around the conspiracy theory that Sharia poses a threat to America, these members provide a broader base of apparent congressional support for the campaign's central conspiracy theory, inflating the appearance of consensus beyond the small group that actually drives it."
The Rhetoric
The report identifies several overlapping narrative layers that give the campaign what it calls its "cumulative power."
One in five posts (215) invoke a clash of civilizations frame, pitting "Western civilization" against Islam. One hundred and thirty posts deploy the vocabulary of "invasion," "conquest," "takeover," and "Islamification", which the report qualifies as a language that closely mirrors the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, "framing Muslims as replacing the white majority population and culture while engaging in a deliberate civilizational conquest of the US."
Cities with visible Muslim populations are singled out. New York City appears in 66 posts, driven substantially by the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, whom Rep. Fine called "this proud Muslim terrorist." Dearborn, Michigan appears in 15 posts. Dallas in 11, linked to the EPIC City controversy.
The report notes these cities are described as having been "conquered" or "invaded", a framing long associated with what the report calls "narratives of urban degeneracy due to high levels of immigration."
Thirty-seven posts invoke a "fifth column" frame, portraying Muslim Americans as a disloyal internal enemy. Muslim elected officials, including Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, are explicitly included. The report notes that this framing "undermines their credibility and authority as elected officials, and by extension, sowing distrust in political institutions."
Sixty-eight posts reference Europe and the United Kingdom as cautionary examples with cities like London and Paris held up as having already been "destroyed" or "conquered" by Islam. The report observes that this framing serves multiple functions.
It provides seemingly concrete evidence for speculative claims, creates urgency, and frames calls for tolerance as naïve. The report notes that it also enables attacks on domestic political opponents, with the narrative that “Democrats who resist anti-Muslim legislation are leading America down the same path."
The Danger
The CSOH report draws on the framework of the Dangerous Speech Project to assess whether this rhetoric is likely to inspire violence. The Project identifies five criteria: the content itself, the speaker, the audience, the medium, and the social and historical context.
The report concludes the posts satisfy all five. The content is inflammatory. The speakers are prominent elected officials. Their audiences have been "primed with years of xenophobic, Islamophobic rhetoric." The medium of official social media accounts lends institutional credibility. And the historical context includes real episodes of violence that have repeatedly been deployed to assign collective blame to all Muslims.
The report draws on Cherian George's concept of "hate spin" to describe the underlying mechanism: demonization and fabricated victimhood operating in tandem. Elected officials simultaneously portray Muslims as barbarians, terrorists, and invaders while casting themselves as defenders of a civilization under siege.
The report describes certain posts as constituting "explicit endorsement of, or incitement to, violence against Muslims", including calls for mass deportation and denaturalisation. "When issued by state actors, it amounts to the advocacy of ethnic cleansing through policy," the report notes.
Comments on the posts studied reflect the intended effect. "We are being invaded, and it's terrifying," wrote one commenter. Others shared images of Muslims praying together, framed with the caption: "They are not here to assimilate. They are here to dominate."
The Warning
The CSOH report documents "the construction of a comprehensive framework of hostility toward Muslim Americans by people sworn to uphold the Constitution and serve all their constituents." With midterm elections approaching, the report warns that anti-Muslim hostility is "taking root in both GOP strongholds and battleground swing states," suggesting that a major political party is engaged in excluding Muslim Americans from political representation while increasing their "political and physical vulnerability."
Rep. Fine has repeatedly declared that "Islamophobia is a lie" and "fear of Islam is rational." The report reads this as a deliberate strategy to strip Muslim Americans of the language to describe their own targeting, to rationalise bigotry as common sense, and to position any pushback "as an attempt to silence legitimate criticism."
The report's gives a final warning. It points out that the pattern being documented - the positioning of a religious minority as an enemy within that must be expelled from public life - is, "often the precursor to ethnic violence campaigns against rhetorically targeted groups."
The full report can be accessed here:
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