Islamophobia Is Taking Over Texas

Over the weekend, officials at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport abandoned plans to add additional foot washing stations used for an Islamic purification ritual after Governor Greg Abbott threatened to pull federal funding over supposed “religious discrimination.”

The outrage was on its face ridiculous. Not only would the foot washing stations have been perfectly legal and accessible to all travelers, but there are already two foot-washing stations in DFW Airport. The manufactured controversy was part of a growing wave of dangerous anti-Muslim sentiment being pushed by conservative leaders in Texas, according to a sweeping report The New York Times published Monday.

Dallas-Fort Worth has become a popular destination for Muslim families looking to make their home and find community in the United States. Over the last decade, the population of immigrants from Muslim majority countries grew by an estimated 80,000 people in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.

Still, Texas’s Muslim population is estimated to be between 300,000 and 500,000 people, accounting for roughly 2 percent of the state’s entire population—and yet for many conservative voters in Texas, Islam has replaced the U.S. border as a major concern.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, this anti-Muslim vitriol hit a new wave in early 2025, after officials announced the construction of the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC City, a large housing development and mosque outside of Dallas. Governor Greg Abbott has launched an investigation into the project. In the past year, things have only gotten worse.

In November, Abbott designated the Council of American-Islamic Relations as a “terrorist” organization, just months after the group documented a surge of Islamophobic rhetoric nationally. In May, Abbott ordered the cancellation of a private “Muslims only” party at a water park to celebrate Eid al-Adha, inviting a wave of backlash against the organizers. In June, the Texas State Board of Education voted to make the Bible a permanent part of the K-12 education curriculum.

That same month, at a Texas State Republican Convention, every speaker expressed some form of Islamophobic sentiment. Multiple panels warned of a so-called “invasion.” In a post on social media, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, warned, “I know I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.”

Looking forward, Texas Republicans are looking for ways to use state laws to ban or regulate Islamic cultural practices governed by religious rules as soon as next year. Representative Alan Schoolcraft, a Republican candidate from San Antonio, told the Times that Islam is “much more than a religion” and urged Muslims to “try to become a citizen where you’re living. Otherwise there’s going to be conflict.”

But for many Muslims, “assimilating” comes with its own risks. Dr. Farhat Shaikh, a resident of Frisco, north of Dallas, told the Times that assimilating meant being “part of the decision making,” but noted that being actively involved in institutions can get labeled as a “take over.”

Jared Kushner spent four hours in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and still failed to get him to support the Trump administration’s peace plan for Gaza.

Kushner met with Netanyahu along with Board of Peace Director Nickolay Mladenov Monday to discuss implementing the 15-point plan, CNN reports. The president’s son-in-law, who doesn’t hold an official position with the Trump administration, asked that Netanyahu “not create obstacles,” an unnamed Israeli source told the network.

Netanyahu refused to commit to anything, telling Kushner and Mladenov that Hamas had to disarm before Israel begins withdrawing any troops from Gaza. The meeting with Netanyahu came one day Kushner met with Hamas representatives in Egypt on Sunday. Hamas said it agrees to Trump’s peace framework, but will only begin disarmament if Israel follows through on a sequenced withdrawal from Gaza at the same time.

Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the last three years, including at least 1,260 since a ceasefire was declared last October. But Netanyahu publicly rejected the proposed peace plan earlier this month, calling it “problematic” because of impending Israeli elections in October. The accused war criminal has tied his political fortunes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, using the war as an excuse to evade corruption charges and rally Israeli voters. Any concessions could undermine his chances of staying in power.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would spend between $10 million and $20 million to buy gloves that emit painful electric shocks. The devices, called G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are manufactured by Compliant Technologies in Kentucky and advertised as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution.” With these gloves, federal agents’ use of force will become nearly invisible to the eye and harder to prove, Mother Jones reported Monday.

“Low-optics” is the key term there. The new gloves won’t stoke public outrage like traditional weapons and they don’t leave any marks—making them the perfect tool for dodging lawsuits for excessive force.

Speaking in a promotional video for Compliant Technologies published in 2024, Adam Glueck, then-assistant chief of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, explained why his officers had grown so “attached” to the devices.

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said, adding that the glove “looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”

Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department recommended the glove for “anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

Video footage of the gloves in action show just how powerful they can be, causing grown men to crumple to the ground in a matter of seconds.

The gloves are considered less lethal—but federal agents will likely feel more empowered to use them against a wider range of people. The manufacturer warns against using their device on elderly people, pregnant women, children, and people with severe disabilities—individuals who have not been spared from the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants.

In the midst of a flailing war with Iran that has caused U.S. sailors to literally jump ship, gas prices to skyrocket, and President Trump’s approval rating to plummet, the U.S. Navy is now reviewing plans to give its Ford-class aircraft carrier fleet a makeover.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Navy is conducting an internal review on the viability of moving command towers from the starboard side of the aircraft carriers to the middle, in an attempt to mimic the older warships from World War II that Trump likes. The decision was spurred directly by Trump’s aesthetic preferences, with a Navy official telling The Hill that the president requested the Navy “implement design changes to our future aircraft carriers.” The review is due in “several weeks,” another former official said.

Trump has also ordered the Navy to switch from electromagnetic catapult systems to steam-powered ones, another aesthetic decision that would force the military to spend time and taxpayer funds on making its ships look more antiquated, all so that they can keep sitting around in the Persian Gulf while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

“The placement of the island on the Ford class was chosen to support the ship’s design purpose of maximizing aircraft sortie generation—which for an aircraft carrier, directly translates to combat power. A good-faith exploration of future carrier design based on real-world operational requirements is one thing,” Naval maritime strategist Hunter Stires told The Hill. “Expending millions of taxpayer dollars and the time and energy of the Navy’s engineering organizations redesigning the nation’s premier capital ship to indulge the president’s aesthetic whims is not only wasteful and abusive, it exemplifies President Trump’s evident contempt for America’s fighting sailors.”

This news comes as Trump’s upcoming class of 10 new aircraft carriers is estimated to cost $275 billion over the next 30 years.

Left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker appears to be gearing up to sue conservative commentator Scott Jennings for defamation. 

Jennings, a CNN contributor, went viral last week after posting a heavily edited, intentionally misleading video of what looked like Piker expressing extreme hostility towards Black voters and calling for lynchings. With the full context, it is obvious that Piker was being sarcastic. 

“Black voters have been voting against the socialists, only to be ruled in many cases by privileged white commies,” Jennings claimed, using Black identity as a bludgeon against the Democratic left. “Did you ever notice, by the way, how violent these people are? … Now [Abdul] El-Sayed’s best friend is out there calling for Black voters to be lynched. Beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these Communists.”

As Snopes reported, Jennings lied when he claimed that Piker wanted to bringing back lynchings, as “Piker’s remarks on lynchings were sarcastic reactions to a user’s chat comment and opinions expressed by someone else in a separate video.”

Jennings’s video was widely panned, with many calling for Piker to sue. The streamer called Jennings’s video “the worst instance of defamation” he’d seen. On Sunday, Piker confirmed that his team is preparing a defamation lawsuit, saying it seemed “unavoidable,” and that it might include Fox News.

“This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable,” Piker told Status. “It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility. I think someone has to push back against it at some point.”

“In Trump 2.0, we now traffic in lies all the time. Just because the Republicans are trafficking in lies with regular frequency doesn’t mean that you can’t uphold some kind of editorial standard,” he continued. “CNN can put whoever they want to on a panel at the end of the day, but it just signals to me, and I think a lot of other people, that some of their panelists are just going to be liars.”

Piker has been a boogeyman for right-wingers like Jennings and centrist liberals for some time, as they choose to focus their slander on him rather than constructing any kind of tangible, positive political message. And Jennings is perhaps the last person anyone should be listening to in regards to Black politics in America.