What A Day - Texas Republicans Return To Islamophobia

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

The Texas Senate primary is already setting records for both Republicans and Democrats, with more than $110 million spent on advertising and reserved ad time. And on the Republican side, where Senator John Cornyn is facing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Representative Wesley Hunt, things have gotten incredibly messy. But there's at least one thing those three candidates can agree on: Islamophobic rhetoric. So, why is the Texas GOP laser-focused on Islam? To find out, we spoke with Forrest Wilder. He's a senior writer at Texas Monthly.And in headlines, Surgeon General nominee Casey Means testifies before the Senate Health Committee, South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace hopes to hold lawmakers accountable for sexual harassment violations, and Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar's State of the Union guest is arrested after standing up during the President's speech.Show Notes: Check out Forrest's story – https://tinyurl.com/2yep8yk4 Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Thursday, February 26th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is What Today? The show that thanks House Speaker Mike Johnson for sharing his deepest fears after the State of the Union Tuesday night. If we lost the midterms, heaven forbid. If we lost the majority in the House, it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect. Oh, no. That would be terrible. On today's show, South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace hopes to hold lawmakers accountable for sexual harassment violations. And Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, State of the Union guest, is charged with unlawful conduct after standing up during the president's speech.

But let's start with Texas. The Longhorn State's Senate primary is already setting money records for both Republicans and Democrats, with more than $110 million being spent in advertising and reserved ad time. But on the Republican side, where Senator John Cornyn is facing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Representative Wesley Hunt, things have gotten incredibly messy. How messy? This is an ad released Wednesday by Cornyn and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It's voting time. So let's cut through the bullshit. Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She's divorcing him on biblical grounds. So now Paxton's wrecking another home, sleeping around with a married mother of seven. Remember this. Crooked Ken has increased his net worth by as much as 7,000 percent since taking office.

And his actions in office even more troubling. Again, that is Republican on Republican violence. Woof. And President Donald Trump isn't making things better. He's refusing to endorse one candidate saying he likes all three men equally. You know, like how he definitely feels about his own children. But there's at least one thing those three Republican Senate candidates can. can agree on. Islamophobic bullshit. Muslims make up almost 2% of the population of Texas,

and yet the threat of, quote, radical Islam has completely overtaken the Republican electorate in the state. Cornyn and Paxton have spent millions on ads accusing the other of being soft on Islam. One GOP consultant told Politico in January, quote, the Muslim community is the boogeyman for this cycle, adding, this has been pulled up one side and down the other, and with Texas Republican primary voters, it works. It is a thing they are legitimately scared of. And it's not just a talking point in the Senate race. Here's a campaign ad from a Republican candidate for Texas Attorney General. Islam is not compatible with Western civilization. I'm Aaron Wright's, and that's just one lesson I learned as a Marine in Afghanistan. But politicians have imported millions of Muslims into our

country. The result? More terrorism, more crime. And they even want their own illegal cities in Texas to impose Sharia law. Not on my watch. Bullshit. It probably goes without saying, but just in case, there's no mass campaign pushing for illegal cities in Texas to impose Sharia law. So why is the Texas GOP laser focused on Islam? To find out, I spoke with Forrest Wilder. He's a senior writer at Texas Monthly. Forrest, welcome to what a day. Good to be here. Obviously, after 9-11, the U.S. has seen unprecedented levels of anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia in America has never really gone away. But it did kind of slip out of the GOP's major talking points in a lot of places until now. Why is this resurfacing now and why is it so heightened in Texas?

I really think it's because, I mean, look, fear cells, right? The culture wars cells. The border is not as salient of an issue, which is not that many people crossing. A lot of the ice activity is not popular. The trans panic doesn't have the same potency that it had. And so there's really a need for GOP campaigning in Texas, at least, to grab onto something to scare the crap out of people. And a lot of, frankly, a lot of base voters, Republican voters in Texas are really scared of the quote unquote Muslim invasion. it polls well for primary Republican voters.

And so the politicians are all in on it. Something that's been that's interesting to me. And if you just look online, you can see it, is that it's not just about Muslims. It's about South Asian immigrants writ large. There's a lot of concerns about, for instance, Hindu American folks in Texas. What do you think that says about how the GOP or how the right in Texas is viewing immigration? because there's also been a lot of concern about H-1B visa holders, for example. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, these things, they seem disconnected. They're really not. I mean, I think that, you know, you could say it's anti-Asian, and there is that, but it's really anti-South Asian, Indians and Pakistanis in particular, some of whom are Muslim, some of whom are not. We have a candidate running for statewide office for the Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas, who is, for example, calling for 100 million people to be deported. that would of course include tens of millions of U.S. citizens.

He even wants to deport Native Americans. Not kidding. Right. And, you know, and so there is this very broad kind of xenophobia and bigotry. But right now, yes, I think you're right, that it's pointed squarely at Muslims, is pointed squarely at South Asians. We have another candidate running for Attorney General who has said that South Asian people are unassimilated and unassimitable, complained about, you know, suburbs and

Dallas looking like, you know, Pakistan. You know, we're used to a lot of xenophobia in the air in Texas, you know, particularly among like Republican grassroots types. But even this is just like seems more extreme than I, than I expected, to be quite honest. Republicans have had control of Texas politics for 25 odd years. You know, I'm aware that I'm aware that. I'm aware that obviously there are Democratic mayors and several large Texas cities, but in general, Republicans have control here. So it seems very odd to be arguing essentially that Republican government wasn't enough to stop this evil from growing. Is it just this kind of doubling and tripling down on fearmongering that in a sense would seem to work against the Republicans trying to fearmonger?

Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right. And of course, people on the far right have noticed this. but it's used as a cudgel against, say, Governor Greg Abbott to ask for more and more and more and to push elected officials to take more extreme positions. That's how you end up, for example, with Greg Abbott designating the Council on American Islamic Relations care as a foreign terrorist organization, along with the Muslim Brotherhood, and legally prohibiting this nonprofit that operates peacefully in Texas for, you know, 30 years from being able to purchase. land. They're trying to strip care. Attorney General Paxton who's running for the U.S. Senate is trying to strip care of their nonprofit status and basically make it impossible for them to organize or to have a political voice in Texas. I'm curious, how are Muslim Republicans responding to this and how are

Texans in general responding to this? I mean, look, the Muslim community, if you can even talk about as such as extremely diverse. I mean, there's immigrants, there's people that aren't immigrants, there's black Muslims, there's people from South Asia, Indonesia, there's Democrats as Republicans. But if you kind of boil it down, Muslims tend to be politically mixed and, you know, tilt socially conservative. So there is a natural Republican constituency there. The two elected officials at the statehouse that we have who are Muslim are both Democrats, moderate Democrats. And, you know, obviously they're in touch with their communities. And I think what they're saying in others as well is that people are, you know, they're shocked. And in part is because this is manifesting not just at

a rhetorical level, but there are people that are being attacked. There was a woman in North, North Texas, and Ulyss who, you know, some white woman tried to drown her kids in a public pool and then ripped her hijab off while she's trying to rescue her kids. I can't say how that's going to manifest politically, but I would think that such a full frontal assault on people's rights doesn't sit well with a Muslim person regardless of their their political persuasion. But, you know, Texas is a really diverse state, despite its status as a deep red state. In our cities, Houston and Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, these are incredibly diverse places. They're immigrant gateways. They're very vibrant places culturally.

And I think the disconnect is that those cities are not enough to counter. Act, the huge rural and extremely conservative or red population that we have. So what the state politics that you see are catering to like the 3% of Texans who decide elections in the primary. They're not catering to sort of the average, average Texan. And so that's why it could be kind of confusing or discombobulating or lead to a conclusion that Texas must just be this completely whacked out extremist place. And that's not exactly reality on the ground. I've been fascinated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's primary run for Senate. You mentioned that earlier.

Paxton is running to unseat longtime Senator John Cornyn, and that race is strange for many reasons. We saw Cornyn, for example, brag about getting an endorsement from anti-Islamist campaigner, Ayan Herssey Ali, who is very anti-Islam. And then Paxton responded about retweeting someone who said Cornyn was bragging about being endorsed by a Somali immigrant. like that to me was indicative of just how far this has gone. Because it's not actually about someone who is Muslim. It's about a Somali immigrant who's actually extremely anti-Islam. What do you think that that says about what this race is doing and how people are kind of doubling and tripling down on not just Islamophobia, but racism in this race? Yeah, I mean, honestly, it'd be kind of funny if it weren't so serious because it's really absurd.

I mean, it's basically you have like Islamophobia. phobia up, you know, in a cage match with like xenophobia and racism, like, who's going to win, right? I mean, it's all stemming from the same place. They need an other. They need a fear campaign in order to mobilize voters to come out to the primary and then maybe for the general election. And so, you know, it's this kind of competition for who can grab the brass ring of the fear of the other that's the most potent at the moment. So that's how you end up with these like absurd situations, like as you describe, where corn and is holding up this anti-Muslim activist to claim his bona fides as someone who's going to go after,

you know, Islamist or whatever. And then you have his opponent, Ken Paxton, sort of, you'll say, well, how, you know, how dare you consort with this, you know, this foreigner, even though she is an American citizen, by the way. Who's more credible in the eyes of the Republican primary voter? That's the question. And I think the answer is going to be Ken Paxton. I'm curious in your view, whether or not, we're going to see this kind of Islamophobia become a mainstream talking point nationally. Because on the one hand, you have Texas Republicans doubling and tripling down on it. But on the other hand, the Trump White House is, you know, hosting Ramadan.

And we saw Trump make a big effort with Muslims in Michigan and elsewhere in 2024. So is Texas kind of leading the party towards its next big battle cry, which would be the same battle cry it was when I was in high school? or are they out of touch? Ultimately, I'm not sure. I will say that Texas is the king of the red states. You know, we are the laboratory. Molly Ivan said we're the national laboratory for bad ideas. I think that is like, that's still often the case when it comes to Republican politics.

You remember that a lot of the politics around the border and immigration came out of Texas. You know, Greg Abbott, for example, busing migrants to blue cities as a political stunt. a lot of the rhetoric, the actual facts on the ground of the border wall that's still being built here that came out of Texas. So there's a pipeline from Texas to national GOP politics and to the White House as well. With that said, I think there's a lot of risks that come with this kind of rhetoric, not necessarily so much in terms of an electoral price to pay, although that could be the case in a place like Michigan. But just in the sense of of going too far and saying things, maybe I'm being optimistic here, saying things that are so

extreme, so divorced from reality and don't comport with people's lived experiences that it's just not that potent of a message, particularly if there's a counterweight on the other side of messages that more resonates with people's actual needs and legitimate fears. Forrest, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Absolutely. That was my conversation with Forrest Wilder, senior writer at Texas Monthly. a link to his piece in the show notes. More news incoming. I know. It's a lot, but I promise I'll try to make it fun. If you like the show, please subscribe. Leave a five-star review on Spotify and

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All that woo-ness could explain why Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins asked about means experience using psychedelic. You also said that you were inspired to try psychedelics in what I can only describe as an internal voice that whispered, it's time to prepare. Illicit drug use remains a huge problem in this country, and this didn't happen in your teen years, according to your book, In 2021, you began using illicit psychedelic mushrooms. I can't verify this, but I would guess this is the first U.S. Surgeon General candidate to be asked about taking shrooms in a Senate hearing. The Health Committee would have to approve for nomination to send it to the rest of the Senate. Capital Police arrested Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, State of the Union guest

for refusing, quote, to obey our lawful orders to sit down during the speech, according to a statement. The guest, Aliyah Rahman, was previously dragged from her car in Minneapolis by federal agents, even though she told them she was disabled and driving to a doctor's appointment. Of the arrest, Omar said, quote, the heavy-handed response to a peaceful guest sends a chilling message about the state of our democracy. We spoke with Omar and Rachman Tuesday before the State of the Union. To watch our full interview with them, head to our YouTube page. We're announcing today that we have decided to temporary, temporarily,

halt certain amounts of Medicaid funding that are going to the state of Minnesota in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligation seriously to be good stewards of the American people's tax money. Vice President J.D. Vance was all self-important and smug Wednesday while announcing that the Trump administration is pausing some Medicaid funding to Minnesota because of fraud concerns. So what does that actually mean? What we're doing is we are stopping the federal payments that will go to the state. government until the state government takes its obligations seriously to stop the fraud that's being

perpetrated against the American taxpayer. The drastic move comes after allegations of fraud involving daycare centers run by Somali residents of Minneapolis prompted a massive immigration crackdown in the city. This announcement is part of a larger effort by the administration to spotlight fraud around the country, though notably not in the White House. In Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday, he previewed what was to come by announcing that Vance would spearhead a national, quote, war on fraud.

And clearly, Vance isn't wasting any time doing his leader's bidding. I filed a resolution that would expose all of the sexual harassment records of every single member of Congress, regardless of party affiliation, because of the Tony Gonzalez situation. I did call for his resignation. Others have done the same. South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace told NBC News this week, she plans on pushing a House vote on her resolution to publicly release all sexual harassment reports

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