There is something profoundly wrong happening in American politics right now, and perhaps the most disturbing part is how ordinary we have allowed it to become.
Then again, much of American politics has devolved into rage, hate, and ignorance. We’ve come to expect that from MAGA. But one of the types of bigotry even the Democrats are at best ignoring and at worst participating in is hatred and discrimination toward Muslims.
Rampant anti-Muslim sentiment has been normalized during this election cycle — not merely in the fever swamps of the internet, but among elected officials, political operatives, and institutions that would recoil, correctly, from employing the same language about almost any other religious minority.
Muslim candidates are expected to answer for Muslims they have never met. Their names, families, religious practices, and associations become legitimate subjects of suspicion.
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has been subjected to a barrage of attacks, including false claims about his academic and professional credentials (e.g. somehow, a physician with a medical degree from Columbia University and a PhD from Oxford is “not a doctor”) alongside attacks on his faith, family and associations.
The latest controversy again involves streamer Hasan Piker, who is (this week) being falsely accused of making calls for violence against American Jews, after saying he was concerned that people who are mad at Israel for its continued genocide in Gaza may wrongly try to hurt American Jews as a result.
Congresswoman Hillary Scholten falsely and brazenly claimed on social media that Piker was issuing “calls for violence against Jews.” Piker made no such statement.
Most of the public anger has somehow been redirected to El-Sayed, who has since been pressured to answer for comments Piker never made, despite saying plainly that his campaign speaks for itself, and reiterating his opposition to antisemitism.
That standard is worth noticing.
There is no public pushback against Scholten for her flagrant, dangerous, bigoted lie about Piker, but El-Sayed is being asked how he feels about something Piker never even said.
Yes, Jewish Americans deserve protection from discrimination and violence without qualification like every other American — including Muslims.
And increasingly, Muslims are receiving something very different.
Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon has similarly been interrogated about her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America more than many of the policies that would actually affect Floridians. DSA advocates labor rights, economic equality and democratic socialism, while also taking forceful positions against the apartheid and genocide Israel is committing against Palestinians.
Increasingly, support for Palestinians carries consequences that extend well beyond political debate, and lately they’ve been thinly-veiled as attacks on any person or organization who speaks out against genocide.
The antisemitism investigation that targeted Muslims
Last week, former Justice Department attorney Haley Van Erem provided perhaps the clearest window yet into this double standard.
Van Erem spent nearly a decade in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before being assigned to work connected to the Trump administration’s investigations of alleged antisemitism at elite universities.
The government described the problem in extraordinary terms. Trump’s Justice Department created a multi-agency “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” in 2025, declaring that its first priority would be rooting out antisemitic harassment in schools and universities.
The administration subsequently canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and contracts and threatened universities with billions more in lost funding.
Then someone involved in the process told us what investigators were actually finding.
Very little.
According to Van Erem’s whistleblower complaint, investigations involving Brown, Columbia, and Harvard were marked by “predetermined outcomes” and, in some cases, “little to no factual predicate.” At Brown, investigators reportedly concluded there was no evidence to establish a Title VI violation. The administration pursued a settlement anyway.
More disturbing was what investigators were allegedly encouraged to look for instead.
Muslims.
Van Erem’s disclosure describes a plan to “systematically interview Middle East studies professors, particularly Muslim faculty,” including professors against whom investigators apparently had no evidence of wrongdoing.
Van Erem and other career officials also proposed investigating allegations of anti-Muslim discrimination on campuses.
According to her complaint, those proposals “were not pursued by leadership.”
Think about that.
A federal task force ostensibly created to investigate religious discrimination encountered concerns that Muslim professors and students might themselves be experiencing discrimination. Those allegations were allegedly ignored while Muslim professors became investigative targets.
The government went looking for antisemitism.
According to one of its former investigators, it often lacked sufficient evidence for the conclusions it wanted.
But it found Muslims.
And somehow Muslims became the suspects.
And it won’t stop there — DOJ is now investigating universities for “discrimination in favor of minorities.”
One form of hatred gets a task force. Another gets legislation targeting the religion.
Our response to Islamophobia has become a beacon of hypocrisy.
The federal government created an antisemitism task force. The Justice Department created an Anti-Semitism Advisory Committee. Congress has considered legislation directing the Department of Education toward a specific definition of antisemitism for civil-rights enforcement that would reclassify any criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
Now compare that response with what government itself says about Muslims.
This year, Republican Senators John Cornyn and Tommy Tuberville introduced the “Defeat Sharia Law in America Act.” Cornyn described Sharia as an “existential threat to our way of life” that America must “root out and eradicate.”
A House version followed.
Another bill, the “Countering Radicalism Under Sharia And Defeating Extremism Act,” would require certain immigrants to formally disavow Sharia law.
Imagine Congress requiring Catholic immigrants to disavow canon law.
Imagine demanding Orthodox Jewish immigrants renounce halakha.
Imagine a senator describing Judaism as an “existential threat” America must “root out and eradicate.”
The outrage would be immediate.
It should be.
Substitute Islam, however, and suddenly we’re having a policy discussion.
Florida has gone further.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation his office explicitly advertised as a measure to “Ban Sharia Law in Florida.” His administration subsequently began implementing a state system for designating terrorist organizations and moved to classify the Council on American-Islamic Relations (the country’s best-known Muslim civil-rights organization alongside actual federally designated terrorist groups.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has similarly attempted to designate CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist or transnational criminal organizations.
Then this month Abbott discovered another menace requiring government intervention:
Muslims washing their feet.
Muslims traditionally perform wudu, ritual washing before prayer. Some airports provide washing facilities so travelers aren’t balancing their feet over bathroom sinks.
Abbott demanded a federal investigation into such facilities at Texas airports, questioned whether they constituted religious discrimination, and threatened state funding.
We are talking about plumbing.
One of America’s most powerful governors transformed a place to wash before praying into a matter for federal investigation.
This is where we are.
We’ve seen this before
During the Nixon administration, Operation Boulder subjected Arab Americans and Arab immigrants to surveillance, interrogation, and heightened scrutiny.
After September 11, Muslim communities were surveilled, infiltrated, and treated as pools of potential suspects rather than Americans exercising ordinary constitutional rights.
Then Donald Trump campaigned on a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Once in office, he issued the travel bans.
The language changes.
“Muslim ban” becomes “extreme vetting.”
Surveillance becomes “national security.”
Religious discrimination becomes “fighting Sharia.”
Palestinian activism becomes “antisemitism.”
Muslim civil-rights organizations become “terrorist organizations.”
Eventually the abnormal becomes administrative.
There is a form for it.
A task force.
A bill number.
A press release.
That is how bigotry becomes respectable.
The media helps decide which hatred counts
American media has always had peculiar blind spots when covering dissent.
One of my journalism professors used to quip that American media loves everyone’s protests but our own.
Watch coverage of labor strikes overseas and protesters are often citizens demanding something from their government. Watch American students erect tents protesting their government’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and suddenly the dominant vocabulary becomes disorder, extremism, security, and threat.
Some Jewish students on campuses have reported harassment, though many of those claims proved to be false or nonsensical (e.g. feeling threatened by a Palestinian flag).
So Jewish students demanded action — and got it in the forms of media attention and laws.
But the perception of harassment via seeing a flag in no way justifies making anti-Muslim hatred acceptable.
Nor does it justify treating criticism of a foreign government as presumptively suspicious while American politicians openly describe Islamic religious practices as threats to civilization.
That is the contradiction.
A Muslim candidate can condemn antisemitism repeatedly and still be asked to condemn it again.
A Muslim politician can be held responsible for something a streamer said.
A Muslim professor can become an investigative target because someone wants to know what he might say.
A Muslim civil-rights organization can be labeled a terrorist organization by governors.
A Muslim traveler washing before prayer can inspire demands for a federal investigation.
And senators can introduce legislation explicitly targeting Islamic religious law.
Then we turn on television and solemnly debate whether Muslims have sufficiently reassured everyone else that they aren’t dangerous.
At some point we should ask who actually needs to reassure whom.
This is what normalization looks like
The frightening part isn’t that America contains bigots. America has always contained bigots.
It is that institutions capable of recognizing prejudice instantly when directed toward one group suddenly become philosophers when the target is Muslim.
They debate context.
They ask what the Muslim said first.
They investigate his associations.
They examine her political affiliations.
They demand condemnations.
They scrutinize professors.
They investigate prayer facilities.
They write legislation about religious doctrine.
They turn a faith practiced by millions of Americans into something foreign, sinister and vaguely incompatible with citizenship.
And they call this normal politics.
It isn’t.
History’s ugliest periods of institutionalized bigotry rarely begin with everyone suddenly consumed by hatred. They begin with repetition. Language softens the ground. Bureaucracy follows. What would once have been considered outrageous becomes a proposal; the proposal becomes legislation; the legislation becomes precedent.
Eventually nobody remembers why it was shocking in the first place.
We should be considerably more alarmed that elected American officials are openly targeting Islam and Muslim civil institutions than we are that Muslims have noticed.
And we should stop demanding that Muslim Americans continuously prove that they belong to a country whose politicians increasingly feel no obligation to prove that the country belongs to them, too.