Texas Rep. Gene Wu speaks during a rally featuring California Governor Gavin Newsom in Houston, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025.
Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle
The day after a shooting at San Diego’s largest mosque, where gunmen killed three community members, U.S. Rep. Keith Self, R-McKinney, didn’t issue a statement on social media acknowledging the attack. Instead, he warned tens of thousands of followers about Muslim “jihadists” taking over the U.S.
“If the jihadists take total control of our country, non-Muslim Americans will be forced to make a choice: convert, submit, or die,” Self wrote. “That’s the dark reality of Sharia. It cannot be allowed to operate in America.”
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The rhetoric from GOP leaders, some Texas Democrats say, is creating a climate of hostility against Muslims that can fuel violence. After the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, Democratic state Reps. Gene Wu, Salman Bhojani and Suleman Lalani put out a joint statement condemning the shooting in San Diego, as well as a threat law enforcement officials say was made at Houston’s Ismaili Center last month.
Authorities are investigating Monday’s shooting in San Diego as a hate crime. The victims were 51-year-old Amin Abdullah, 78-year-old Mansour Kaziha and 57-year-old Nadir Awad.
“This hatred does not come from a vacuum,” the Texas representatives said. “It is fed and allowed to fester by politicians like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, by the online figures who launder bigotry into content, and by the leaders who know exactly what they are doing when they talk about Muslim communities as an invasion, a conspiracy, or a threat to Texas.”
Bhojani and Lalani are the first Muslims elected to the Texas Legislature. Other Democrats who criticized Republicans’ messaging on Muslims included U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin.
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“Hate breeds violence and today that meant death in San Diego,” Doggett said on social media on Monday. “Hate of Muslims is every bit as despicable as hate of Jews or any other minority. Yet Texas Republican politicians have been fanning that hate daily with phony sharia tales just as so many have scapegoated minority communities for social ills.”
Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for Abbott, said in a statement to the Houston Chronicle the Democrats’ remarks were an attempt to make a tragedy political.
“Democrats making baseless claims that Governor Abbott is somehow responsible for horrific violence in California is a despicable effort to politicize the loss of human life,” Mahaleris said. “Governor Abbott strongly condemns all violence and threats against places of worship. Governor Abbott will continue to take decisive action against any group that seeks to violate our Constitution and laws, regardless of faith.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton did not respond to request for comment.
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Republicans have spent months running a campaign against “Sharia law,” using language that frames it as an anti-American legal system as opposed to a spiritual framework for Muslims. While some officials condemn Sharia, others, like U.S. Rep. Chip Roy — who is vying for attorney general — have said Islam in its entirety is a threat, incompatible with Western civilization.
Last month, a Washington-based think tank, the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, released a report tracing the origins of the recent wave of what it referred to as an anti-Muslim campaign. The researchers reviewed over a thousand social media posts from elected officials and said many “satisfy all five criteria for speech likely to inspire violence.”
The report attributes the start of the campaign to a social media post from Abbott on Feb. 24, 2025. Abbott responded to anti-Islam activist Amy Mekelburg and said that Sharia law, Sharia cities and “no go zones,” are not allowed in Texas. Mekelburg’s post was about the East Plano Islamic Center City, now called The Meadow, which is a controversial planned Muslim-oriented community that leaders accused of trying to implement Sharia law in Texas.
“Abbott’s post served as a catalyst,” the report said. “Multiple right-wing influencers immediately began posting about ‘creeping Sharia,’ ‘Sharia law,’ and ‘Sharia takeover’ in the US, citing EPIC city as an example.”
Gov. Greg Abbott speaks at a primary election night event hosted by the Young Conservatives of Texas and the Texas Young Republicans at Cedar Door Patio Bar & Grill in Austin on Tuesday, March 3, 2026.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
‘The Muslim boogeyman’
Raqib Naik, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, said in an interview with the Chronicle that much of the anti-Muslim rhetoric today had previously existed in more fringe political communities, but has now entered the mainstream through the GOP.
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“You have these MAGA influencers, social media influencers, and elected officials reinforcing each other’s talking points and building off of these giant national campaigns that sometimes turn into bills in Congress itself and the caucuses,” Naik said.
One influencer who has emerged as a prominent voice in anti-Islam online spaces is Alexander Duncan, who previously ran an unsuccessful bid in Texas for a U.S. Senate seat. Duncan frequently posts about an Islamic invasion in the U.S.
“In order to stop any and all future attacks on Mosques, there is one simple solution, close them all down!” Duncan wrote on X. “Mosques are not places of worship, they are demonic ideological breeding grounds.”
The violence, Naik says, won’t stop until the Republican-led campaign against Islam ceases.
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“They need to put an immediate end to this ongoing campaign of creating the Muslim boogeyman,” he said. “When you create an enemy, when you put out these dangerous narratives, you’re not just putting out those narratives, but along with that, you’re also putting a big target on their backs.”
Mainstream embrace of conspiracies
Amarnath Amarasingam, an associate professor at the school of religion in Queen’s University, Ontario, said there is a correlation between lawmakers’ rhetoric against Sharia and the violence exhibited in San Diego. He says some people accept the rhetoric as reality and decide they want to take action.
With “great replacement theory” entering the mainstream in recent years and X’s deregulation, finding an extremist community has become more accessible, Amarasingam said.
“Great replacement theory” is a conspiracy that claims there is a plan to bring nonwhite immigrants into Western nations to replace white populations, as well as their political and societal influence.
Officials like New York Attorney General Letitia James have cited the conspiracy as a motive for the white supremacist gunman who killed 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York in 2022. In another attack, the Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 people at mosques in New Zealand in 2019, had a manifesto titled “The Great Replacement.”
Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University, also said extremist rhetoric has been entering the mainstream with the help of elected officials. He, too, pointed to the embrace of great replacement theory.
“That has been directly connected to these mass shootings,” Lewis said. “But it’s also directly intertwined to things like the Muslim ban from the first Trump administration to a lot of these openly racist, openly Islamophobic narratives that have spread.”
Elected officials in Texas have helped to bring those anti-Islam narratives and grievances into the mainstream, though it isn’t the only state to do so, Lewis said.
“It’s not just an anonymous neo-Nazi social media account,” Lewis said. “It’s a governor, it’s a senator, it’s a state representative. And I think, unfortunately, that that rhetoric matters.”