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Mehdi Hasan Tries To School Islamophobic Republican On Freedom Of Religion, But MAGA Bigots Just Won’t Be Educated
Source: Shannon Finney / Getty At this point, writing about the bigotry of white conservatives is child’s play. It’s the lowest of low-hanging fruit. Water is wet news. A headline that reads, “MAGA Is Racist” serves the same practical function as a headline that reads, “The Sky Turns Less Blue When The Weather Is Bad.” Still, it’s important that this time be well-documented. When history tells the story of America’s MAGA era, what kind of people its leaders and followers were should be what sits at the top of the archives. How the white majority felt about the Black and brown minorities should be as well-known as how they felt about us during the civil rights era of the ’50s and ’60s — and white America’s effort to erase that history should be documented as well. So, I will continue to write about people like Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), who, much like Vice President JD Vance, reminds us that even a white Republican who has a wife of Indian origin can be the most passionate of xenophobic white Christian nationalists. On Tuesday, Gill got into a back-and-forth with journalist Mehdi Hasan, who, in the ill-equipped MAGA mind, invoked heresy by simply pointing out the U.S. Constitution’s freedom of religion clause applies to all religions, not just the Judeo-Christian faith. It began with Gill posting a video of Hasan telling a reporter that if Christians have the Constitutional right to ring church bells for everyone to hear, Americans of Islamic faith have a right to play their call to prayer from mosque loudspeakers. Gill, of course, had a different interpretation of Hasan’s simple lesson on how our nation’s most important document works. “We can move here en masse and fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life,” Gill wrote in a caption with its own set of quotation marks, implying that this is what Hasan was really saying. The way white conservatives of today — these great replacement theorists whose ideological narratives are virtually indistinguishable from those of the KKK members of yesteryear — continue to believe they have an inherent right to be the only people mirrored in American culture, is a thing that needs to be studied. Again, this is why these stories are still important to write up, redundant though they may be. Hasan shot back at Gill by pointing out that his wife, Danielle D’Souza Gill, “is an Indian American, the daughter of an Indian immigrant,” prompting Gill to reply, “My wife is a Christian and doesn’t want to hear your oppressive Muslim prayer calls, either.” To be fair, Gill’s wife does do her damndest to make sure MAGA America knows she’s at least Caucasian in spirit. Hasan responded by rightfully pointing out that white nationalism in the Republican party isn’t a Gill problem, it’s a GOProblem. “Multiple sitting GOP members of Congress now sound like Ku Klux Klan wizards,” Hasan wrote. “The levels of ignorance, racism, and Christian nationalism are off the charts. Good luck to the poor Muslim Americans who have to live in this guy’s district.” As usual, Hasan isn’t wrong. Besides the glaring truth that President Donald Trump is the most outwardly racist and xenophobic president in recent history, his poison has emboldened many Republican officials and their constituents to live their bigotry out loud. In the last couple of weeks alone, we have seen two Republican group chats that were chock full of anti-Blackness and Nazism. One of those chats included at least one GOP senator and a slew of Young Republicans group members who were well out of childhood, despite Vance’s insistence that their 2,900-page-long text log full of racism, antisemitism and threats of violence, including sexual violence, is simply “what kids do.” Before the virtual ink was even dry on that headline, another group chat exposed Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, who called Martin Luther King Jr. “the 1960s George Floyd” and said his holiday, along with every other Black holiday, “should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.” Last year, when Trump and Vance were on a mission to spread as much racist, hateful and thoroughly debunked propaganda about pet-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio — a lie that MAGA supporters across the country instantly bought into, despite every relevant authority in Springfield saying there was no evidence of it — Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) felt compelled to hop aboard the white supremacist propaganda train, tweeting with his whole chest, “Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the Western hemisphere, cults, splatstick gangsters… but damn if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP,” in reference to charges filed by the Haitian Bridge Alliance last year against Trump and Vance for endangering the Haitian community with what should absolutely have been categorized as hate speech. It’s worth noting that non-white political figures on the Democratic side, like NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — who has been enraging the MAGA world just by being a Muslim man who is popular with NYC voters — aren’t the only ones who regularly face the wrath of lowly MAGAts. This week, FBI Director Kash Patel learned the hard way that doing something as simple as celebrating Diwali out loud as an Indian man can be the milkshake that brings all the Klan cadets to his yard. Here’s what I wrote about that previously: Maybe Patel was asleep last year, when Vice President JD Vance was compelled to do a weak job of defending his Indian wife and children against the onslaught of racist and xenophobic MAGA attacks that erupted on social media the second he was announced as President Donald Trump’s running mate. Perhaps he just wasn’t paying attention to the way Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has spent the last couple of years fending off attacks from white Christians, including the Caucasian Jesus freaks who recently grilled him at a Turning Point USA event over his Hindu background. Ramaswamy probably also thought cozying up to white supremacists by calling Juneteenth a “useless” holiday and promoting the Great Replacement Theory — as if he isn’t one of the brown people white people are afraid of being replaced by — would stop racists like Ann Coulter from telling him to his face that he’d never have their votes because “you’re an Indian.” Just for good measure, here’s Indian right-wing talking head Dinesh D’Souza encountering a MAGA bigot online, and acting flabbergasted, claiming he’s “never encountered this type of rhetoric,” and that “the Right never used to talk like this.” Really, D’Souza? Never in your “career spanning 40 years” have you ever heard a right-winger be hateful towards brown foreigners? Not even when you were literally defending slavery? Again, I could do this all day, but back to Gill. The other issue when it comes to right-wingers like the Texas Republicans is that, as much as they love to consider themselves the purest of American patriots, they just don’t seem to know or care what’s in their own nation’s Constitution outside of its Second Amendment. Trump’s second term has revealed unequivocally that these people only care about the First Amendment as it applies to the free speech of conservatives. They certainly don’t want to acknowledge that freedom of religion is explicitly granted in that same amendment’s establishment clause, which protects the rights of Americans to celebrate all religions as well as the lack thereof. Despite what so many MAGA rubes believe, America is not, nor has it ever been, a Christian nation. After the U.S.’s nearly 250 years of being an independent nation, you would’ve thought they would have gotten over it by now. SEE ALSO: JD Vance Defends ‘Indian Hate’ Despite Family Black Republican Learns MAGA Is Racist Movement
