Randy in a post asked the question I think many ask here. Why do I champion the trans community so forcefully? Nan asked me a few years ago if I was feeling like I was trans, and no I am a cis gay male and happy in it. Although if not for my past I would have liked to be free to explore a more feminine side of myself. Ron and I do have trans people in our family but I have never met them. The truth is in the page why I do this. I want to give a voice to those that have no voice and right now the most targeted unfairly groups are trans people / kids and brown skinned people ICE is going after. Why do I put so much effort in to giving them a voice? Because as an abused little boy people in my town knew I was being abuse but no one gave me a voice, no one spoke up for me. Hugs.
How Americans are manipulated by online misinformation and political rhetoric.
Joseph McConville’s first memory of being online was at 13 years old when he started playing Neopets, a virtual pet game, at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. At the time, he had no clue that just months later, the internet would suck him into the alt-right.
As a young, white man, McConville says he was taught to believe that he’d have everything he wanted.
He started to realize this dream wouldn’t come to fruition when he was pulled out of private school as his parents struggled during the 2008 recession.
McConville quickly graduated from kids games to popular social media sites like Myspace and Facebook. But it was when he found FunnyJunk.com in ninth grade that he started being exposed to alt-right content.
The website gave users the ability to upload memes and upvote popular content. When McConville began using it, he was initially exposed to dark humor and edgy right-wing memes.
He then migrated to 4chan, a website known for hosting anonymous, fringe, right-wing communities, where he started engaging with content used to stoke extremist meaning —pushing us vs. them narratives that alienated McConville from his multicultural South Florida community.
“Everyone else is wrong. … These guys are right. These guys get it,” says McConville. The deeper he got, the more anger he felt—especially towards transgender people.
“It’s all a psyop … there’s a big trans psyop to destroy manhood,” McConville remembers believing for nearly a decade. “It’s all about making men hate themselves, to become women, to weaken the American hegemony.”
McConville, now 30, eventually found his way out of the alt-right world around 2018 when he was deradicalized by a friend who had previously been a part of the community.
But since then, the pervasiveness of this thinking has grown. What was once conspiratorial thinking on fringe websites has now become commonplace. “The [2016] Trump election changed a lot of things, it all became serious,” McConville told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “You feel like, ‘Wow, we’re actually being listened to—we’re changing the mainstream talking points.’”
Transgender Americans have been one of the biggest targets of this alt-right rhetoric, and it’s effective. Since 2022, Americans have increased their favorability towards laws limiting protections for trans people and have become less favorable towards policies safeguarding them.
The site of Charlie Kirk’s assassination after it took place. (KSL News Utah)
This change in public perception may be because of the growing claims that falsely link transgender people as perpetrators of mass violence and domestic terrorism. After Charlie Kirk’s death in September, these narratives reached a boiling point.
But how did Americans get taken to believe this anti-LGBTQ lie? And what does it say about how people can be brainwashed to hate?
Who’s Pushing the False Link Between Trans People and Domestic Terrorism?
One reason many Americans began to believe that trans people are more likely to be linked to terrorism is because trusted sources in mainstream conservative spaces are telling them it’s true. Even though the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men, the Heritage Foundation, notably behind Project 2025, recommended the FBI create a category of domestic terrorism called Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism, which suggests transgender people pose an imminent threat.
“I think some people know that this is false, but push it,” Thekla Morgenroth, a professor of psychology at Purdue University, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “It’s worth giving false information if you get people on your side and support your opinion, and I think that is malicious.”
Unlike when McConville was in the alt-right, many of the people behind the rhetoric today hold powerful positions in the government. After a shooting in August at a Minnesota Catholic school perpetrated by a transgender person, Rep. Lauren Boebert falsely said there was a “pattern of transgender violence in our country.” Trump officials and other members of Congress used this as an excuse to attack gender-affirming care. And Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice, has insisted that hormone replacement therapy played a role in the shooting, although officials do not believe the perpetrator was using hormones.
This narrative has bled into the mainstream media who are used to trusting government sources. Just a few hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets picked up claims from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the bullet case engravings pointed to a motive related to “transgender ideology,” a term coined by transphobic commentators. The bullet casings ultimately did not have any reference to transgender people.
Nevertheless, suspicions around this shooter being connected to the transgender community spread like wildfire.
Megyn Kelly in her video. (Megyn Kelly on YouTube)
Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly posted a video titled “Megyn Kelly Reveals the Truth About the ‘Trans’ Phrases Found on Ammo of Gun Which Shot Charlie Kirk,” to YouTube on Sept. 11, 2025, where she falsely told over 4 million subscribers, “There’s a particularly high percentage [of transgender people] committing crimes these days and it is responsible and important to say so.” The video now has 2.1 million views and Kelly has not retracted these comments.
Her followers—who believed her false claims—began calling for extreme action in the video’s comment section. @WonkoTheDork wrote, “Trans insanity needs to end. I don’t care how, this has to stop.” And @kathleenbarton-m6c wrote, “As an American, I completely agree that this [Trans] movement needs to be completely eradicated.”
Referencing Kirk as a martyr, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took it a step further, writing in a press release that “corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people.”
The Social Psychology of Transphobia
Morgenroth thinks many people who endorse rhetoric around transgender domestic terrorism are threatened or afraid of otherness and of the breaking of traditional gender norms.
“People are very attached to the way that they think about gender because it gives them a sense of certainty—it gives them a sense of who they are and who they’re not,” they say.
Morgenroth says people come up with justifications for their discomfort, even if they don’t make sense.
“‘Here’s an explanation for why I should be scared. I’m gonna endorse that and I’m gonna believe that regardless of whether that makes logical sense or not,’” they told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I think that’s what’s happening and why people are so willing to endorse these conspiracy beliefs or theories about trans people.”
Joseph Vandello, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, says that when influential figures ramp up a threat, it triggers an emotional response of fear or anger, which leads to a desire to punish or exclude people.
“This is the same playbook that people were using against gay people going back to the 1970s or against other kinds of marginalized or minority groups like Jews,” Vandello told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES, referencing the gay panic of that era. “I think there’s this idea that if you frame the issue in terms of a threat, then it becomes an issue of moral protection of the community.”
Another One Down the Rabbit Hole
Vandello says many young men fall for anti-trans narratives because they confirm their place of privilege in the world and validate their insecurities. He coined the term “precarious manhood,” which is the idea that manhood is a social status that has to be won and can be lost. His research indicates that threats to one’s sense of manhood—like trans and queer identities—provoke not only insecurity, but aggression.
Jordan Peterson (right) being interviewed by Sean Hannity in 2025. (Fox News)
Ten years ago, Justin Brown-Ramsey became a case study of precarious manhood, lashing out when he began thinking that trans people were a threat. At 18 years old, and in search of an escape from his parents’ divorce, he started binge-watching YouTube lectures from Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist who’s best known as an outspoken anti-trans thought leader and has said that using someone’s preferred pronouns is the road to authoritarianism.
“He has a degree, he’s working at an institution, it seems like if that’s the kind of guy that has this opinion, I should probably also have that opinion,” Brown-Ramsey told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.
This intellectualized version of transphobia appealed to the sense of insecurity Brown-Ramsey faced growing up in a household with strictly enforced gender roles.
Eventually, Brown-Ramsey became an active participant in anti-trans rhetoric. As an anonymous keyboard warrior, he’d fight in the YouTube comments against the #MeToo, feminist and trans rights movements.
Near the end of his senior year of high school, Brown-Ramsey brought this hatred into the real world against another classmate.
“They mentioned they were trans, and I recall always taking issue with that for seemingly no reason, and being just generally antagonistic about that,” says Brown-Ramsey, now 28.
He purposefully misgendered the student in class and started lashing out against friends, family and romantic partners until he was almost totally isolated.
“I think over time, the less acceptable my behavior was for people in person, the more it became acceptable to lean into the online version of that,” he says. “It went from those lecture videos to watching long rant videos about trans people and gay people, or seeking out stuff that was more 4chan-adjacent.”
Brown-Ramsey, who eventually left the alt-right after deeply engaging with U.S. history in college, believes he was manipulated to hate trans people because it helped him displace his anger about other elements of his life. “I think it was the fact that I was lower working class or lower middle class, and didn’t have an economic future ahead of me,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well if the world is that way then I just might as well be hateful and try to be more powerful than somebody.’”
Undercover in the Alt-Right
Anthony Siteman (Photo courtesy of Siteman, design by Sam Donndelinger)
This phenomenon of young men getting drawn in by alt-right algorithms fascinated 21-year-old Anthony Siteman, who started investigating online extremism ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“My main goal was to understand how and why people became radicalized,” Siteman, a senior at Quinnipiac University, told Uncloseted Media.
Siteman immersed himself on right-wing sites like Rumble and Gab as well as encrypted messaging apps like Telegram where he joined channels that included Proud Boys. He noticed trends that draw people in: all caps text, red alarm emojis and inflammatory language, which all trigger a sense of urgency and concern.
He saw constant racist, sexist and transphobic language, but also violent videos and memes created from the livestreamed footage of the 2019 mosque shootings in New Zealand that left 51 people dead.
Even though he entered this project to learn about indoctrination, sometimes he felt his own views slipping. “ I was really questioning myself and what I believed,” he says, adding that he had to turn to his professor to keep him grounded. “They make you really question all of reality.”
“Social media companies are feeding people more extreme content, more emotional content,” Vandello says. He explained that emotionality is what has made the online alt-right successful at manipulating users against transgender people.
Siteman agrees: “ It’s always framed about fear, anger, and just some sense of belonging.”
The Way Out
Siteman believes that to exit these spaces, people outside the alt-right should use empathetic communication to help those in their network who have been radicalized.
For Brown-Ramsey, it was a professor that pulled him out.
“Unlike online spaces, where I curated the information that I wanted to see, and the algorithm fed me more of the same bigoted, hateful content, college was perhaps the first time I was required to engage with media outside of my usual diet,” Brown-Ramsey published in an essay about his experience.
Brown-Ramsey had to read books aloud in class like “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” which detailed the abolitionist’s experience being born into slavery. “The narrative turned a mirror onto me and, in upsetting detail, showed me that my inclinations toward antagonizing those who looked, acted, or believed differently than myself [were the same beliefs that] led to Douglass’ dehumanization,” he wrote.
“That trajectory is really just me learning, ‘Why should I be at odds with a trans person if both of us work crappy jobs and can’t pay our bills?’ Obviously, that’s not who I should be angry at, but it took a while to get around to that,” Brown-Ramsey says.
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PLEASE buy from people who have not filled their goals!
Did you know that for a long time, Girl Scouts has openly included transgender and nonbinary individuals in its membership? I first learned of this five years ago while searching for a source for my annual Girl Scout cookie purchase. At that time, a wave of anti-trans sentiment was intensifying, prompting me to seek out transgender Girl Scouts from whom to order. One major benefit of their online ordering system is that it allows for trans girl scouts to sell their cookies with relative privacy and no contact between the scout and the purchaser when it comes to online orders.
My initial effort was a success, meeting the goals of every single scout featured on the page. The achievement felt wonderful during what seemed like one of the most severe legislative attacks on transgender children in recent memory. Unbeknownst to us, each subsequent year would bring greater such attacks. Since then, every year I’ve repeated this initiative, we’ve surpassed our previous sales, leading to coverage in multiple major media outlets. Last year, scouts on our list sold 50,000+ girl scout cookies!
It is that time of year again. Please consider choosing a trans girl scout to get your cookies from this year – the kids are under attack this year more than ever, so lets give them some joy. And for those of you who have a trans scout yourself, you can submit your scout’s info here.
Note: When purchasing from one of these trans girl scouts, please choose the “ship the cookies” option and not the “deliver the cookies” by hand option. And make sure to refresh the page, more will be added every few days. I will also be rearranging their order periodically.
With no further adieu, here are the scouts! Please check back as many more often request to be added after publication, and I will keep this post updated with any that join in:
Troop 65426: Troop 65426 is an inclusive troop with two trans scouts and two nonbinary scouts (Junior and Cadette levels). They’re raising funds for an educational trip to Europe and to support a local agency that trains service dogs for people with autism, PTSD, and other disabilities. You can buy cookies from them here!
Yaz: Yaz is working on their Silver Award by running self-defense classes for local LGBTQIA+ youth. They’re also creating an LGBTQIA+ Acceptance patch. You can buy cookies from them here!
Omri: Omri is a Brownie Girl Scout who loves gymnastics, figure skating, and swimming. She also enjoys researching the Titanic and mythical creatures, and her troop is saving cookie money for a trip to Rollhouse! You can buy cookies from her here!
Wxy: Wxy is an 11-year-old nonbinary scout who loves cats (current obsession: Garfield). They helped start a kids filmmaking program for their troop’s Bronze Award project so everyone can tell their story, and they’re fundraising to replace seven refrigerators at Camp Hoover. You can buy cookies from them here!
Phoenix: Phoenix is a first-year Junior, and their troop is saving up for a big Savannah trip next year. They’re also excited for horseback riding, camping, Sea World, and service projects. You can buy cookies from them here!
Ace: Ace is an out-and-proud nonbinary scout who’s active with their troop, service unit, and council, and also shows up for their local LGBTQ youth group. They’re currently working on their Silver Award and leadership hours, always ready to support their rainbow friends. You can buy cookies from them here!
Three children’s hospitals are under federal investigation for providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, as the Trump administration continues to use all the levers it can to block such care.
Health and Human Services (HHS) General Counsel Mike Stuart has referred three children’s hospitals to the agency’s inspector general’s office: Seattle Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado, and Children’s Minnesota. Gender-affirming care for trans youth is legal in all three states. But HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month announced that medical practitioners who provide gender-affirming care to minors are out of compliance with federal health care standards. Now, the agency is enforcing that declaration.
In response, Children’s Hospital Colorado has reportedly paused gender-affirming care for trans youth. Children’s Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment, and its website states that “at this time, our gender health services remain unchanged.” Seattle Children’s hospital also did not respond.
Another hospital, Denver Health, has also paused gender-affirming care for trans youth since Kennedy’s declaration, although the hospital does not appear to be under investigation.
In earlier efforts by Trump administration officials to investigate and halt gender-affirming care, both Children’s Hospital Colorado and Seattle Children’s Hospital successfully fought back against Justice Department subpoenas seeking trans patients’ medical information.
The administration previously pressured hospitals to halt gender-affirming care by threatening to revoke federal funding, which worked in many cases, but these HHS investigationsmark a new escalation. They stem from Kennedy saying that, under his authority as health secretary, he can unilaterally decide that gender-affirming care — which he calls “sex-rejecting procedures” — is not a safe and effective treatment for trans youth.
The response from states has been swift. Just before Christmas, 19 states — including Washington state, Colorado, and Minnesota — and Washington, D.C., sued Kennedy and the federal health agency over the announcement. The states’ lawsuit says the declaration harms their ability to administer state Medicaid plans in accordance with local laws protecting gender-affirming care.
“To me, the declaration is the extremely clear way they are trying to just shut down this care all across the country,” said Katie Keith, director of the center for health policy and the law at the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown Law. “They are trying to ban it nationwide for minors.”
On X, Stuart said that all three hospitals were referred to the agency’s inspector general’s office for failing to meet “recognized standards of health care,” citing Kennedy’s declaration.
The HHS has also proposed two new rules to restrict gender-affirming care for trans youth — both of which must still go through an approval process before they can be enforced. One rule would blockhospitals from receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds if they provide gender-affirming care to trans youth. That care includes hormone replacement therapy for adolescents and puberty blockers for young kids who are experiencing dysphoria — intense discomfort or anxiety felt when someone’s physical gender is out of sync with their identity. It also includes surgery, which is very rarely performed on minors.
Another proposed rule would bar Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care for youth under 18 and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) from covering such care for youth under 19. This would disproportionately impact low-income trans youth.Technically, states could still use their own funds for coverage — but experts say that would be extremely burdensome and ultimately cause gaps in care.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, an organization of 67,000 primary care pediatricians and other specialists, strongly condemned these proposals, saying that they misrepresent current medical consensus and create uncertainty for patients.
“These rules are a baseless intrusion into the patient-physician relationship,” the group said in a statement. “Patients, their families, and their physicians — not politicians or government officials — should be the ones to make decisions together about what care is best for them.”The American Civil Liberties Union has said it will challenge these two restrictions in court if they are finalized.
Food reviews, other interesting bits from Australian travel Josh took. Of course protect your screen and keyboard in prep for those little unexpected reactions/remarks he makes while telling a story!
OK let’s discuss the hidden thing here. A 20 plus year old claims he has never had sex. I remember being a 16 yr old newly inducted into the SDA church. Any touching of your male members was a huge sin they constantly harped on. I did try, but seriously, a teen boy with my history but any normal teen boy is going to do the deed to get off. And for many of them it leaves them with after crippling guilt of not pleasing their god who watched them do it. God is a perv. I can’t tell you the number of boys in that church school I hugged with and they cuddled with me … but we never had sex. Two wanted to but if I got thrown out of the school I had to return to the brutal home I was using the school to escape from. But the idea of just ignoring one’s hormone driven sex drive is not healthy and the religious leaders pushing that all did it when they were teens. But the grift has to be kept up. Hugs
MAGA influencer Nick Shirley speaks during a roundtable discussion on antifa at the White House on Oct. 8, 2025. ( Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Nick Shirley really wants the world to know that he’s never had sex. The YouTuber who moved from “prank” videos to the more lucrative world of creating MAGA disinformation apparently believes that sexual inexperience is an armor against accusations that he’s a liar. “I’m a virgin. I don’t have sex with random girls. You’re not gonna catch me on those sexual allegation charges,” he rambled on “PBD Podcast,” insisting that he is “religious” and doesn’t “have any vices.”
A deeper dig shows even more how ridiculous this situation is. Shirley has a history of dishonesty, which includes paying immigrant laborers to hold pro-Biden signs, clearly hoping voters would think they were self-motivated. In another video, he claimed Portland had “fallen” and “antifa” had taken “control of the city,” an unvarnished lie.
CNN verified that children were being dropped off at a day care center Shirley had targeted. The Minnesota Star Tribune visited the day cares in question and found, when they were allowed access, children playing and napping peacefully. CBS News reviewed security footage showing kids being dropped off at one targeted center. Others were indeed empty; they had gone out of business before Shirley filmed outside the buildings.
Shirley stands accused of lying for racist reasons, so his “but I’m a virgin” defense is irrational — at least on the surface. But it makes more sense, in a psychosexual way, in light of the right’s long-standing fear and loathing of day cares.
Shirley stands accused of lying for racist reasons, so his “but I’m a virgin” defense is irrational — at least on the surface. But it makes more sense, in a psychosexual way, in light of the right’s long-standing fear and loathing of day cares. After all, the scandal Shirley is exploiting isn’t really about day cares. It’s about a larger case in Minnesota of Feeding Our Future, a fraudulent food pantry that was run by Aimee Bock, a white woman who was convicted in March of cheating taxpayers out of nearly $250 million of pandemic funds. While Bock was the mastermind, other defendants in the case are Somali American. On Dec. 30, a federal judge cleared the way for the government to seize $5.2 million in assets from Bock.
If Shirley was only interested in building his hoax on that existing and very real case, he could have targeted anti-hunger charities for his fake sting. Instead, he went after day cares, which are only tangentially related insofar as they are — along with churches, mosques, schools and community centers — sites that were supposed to get assistance from the fraudsters but never received it.
These businesses were picked almost certainly because Shirley and his colleagues have tapped into the long-standing tendency of paranoid reactionaries to make day cares the subject of conspiracy theories. Along with birth control and abortion — whose providers are also smeared constantly with right-wing lies — day care is loathed on the right for allowing women to work instead of being financially dependent on a husband. In the 1980s, day care workers were accused of being Satanists. Now, during the MAGA era, the scapegoat for men’s fears of female independence has shifted from imaginary devil-worshippers to real immigrants. White women are implicitly accused of using immigrant labor as a cheat to avoid their god-given duty to quit work to stay home and raise babies. Vice President JD Vance has been especially loud with his belief that day care is pushing women away from their supposedly inherent desire to be housewives.
Vance almost certainly doesn’t believe his own narrative. For one thing, it’s illogical to believe women would think, “Gosh, I want nothing more than to stay at home, but if there’s a day care down the street, I guess I have to use it.” His own wife has been outspoken about how much she loved working at her law firm that offered on-site childcare — and how much she misses it. But Vance has apparently decided that the bulk of support for his 2028 presidential bid will be rooted in the world of extremely online, sexually dysfunctional misogynists that love shady influencers like Shirley. The vice president’s messaging strategy has long been focused on this loose conglomerate known as the “manosphere”: bitter divorced men, “incels” (involuntarily celibates) and devotees of the “red pill,” an ideology that holds that dating and marriage aren’t about love but about men tricking or forcing women into submission.
The manosphere isn’t just deeply misogynist; it’s also incredibly racist. For liberals taking a cursory glance into that world, it can be very confusing how MAGA men can somehow blame immigrants for their own dating woes. But in the cesspool of incoherent resentment that Vance is clearly absorbing, the alleged evils of feminism and immigration are seen as part of a larger “woke” conspiracy against the white man. Before he died, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk often posted about how “who we actually can’t stand are angry, liberal, white women.” He would portray white women as idiots for not perceiving immigrants as a threat. “If woke is a mind virus,” he posted, “then white college indoctrinated women are the most susceptible hosts.” Influencers like LibsofTikTok hold up white women who resist mass deportations as selfish ninnies who just want to keep their babysitters.
Shirley has engaged in this rhetoric himself. “White liberal women tend to support the people that steal and rob from them,” he claimed in one post. Another was more ominous: “Liberal white womens [sic] logic and empathy will get them killed eventually.”
In this toxic stew of sexual resentment, misogyny and racism, it makes more sense that Shirley thinks his virginity is relevant. Anti-immigrant sentiment is woven into a larger MAGA narrative about expelling allegedly decadent and foreign influences. White male dominance, people like Shirley believe, can be restored by adhering to strict sexual and social mores prescribed by right-wing Christianity. Abstaining from sex until marriage is part of a larger program meant to produce male-dominated marriages, where wives are too busy with large broods of white children to hold jobs. Attacking Black immigrants at a day care center has powerful symbolic resonance; it’s seen as an important front in a war both to make America whiter and to restore white women to a submissive role in the home.
The irony is that Shirley’s diatribe about his sexual status only underscores how much the attack on the day cares is not, contrary to his claims, driven by a nonpartisan, disinterested desire to end fraud. That much was always obvious. Shirley loves Donald Trump, who is himself a convicted fraudster who continues to use his office to enrich himself in blatantly corrupt ways. Shirley has followed the president’s lead — he, too, has a long history of posting racist vitriol about immigrants.
But bringing his sexuality and views on gender relations into the discussion — when no one else has done so — suggests that those issues aren’t far from mind, either. The fixation on “purity” is a common fascist obsession, manifesting in backwards fantasies of racial and sexual purity. None of this has any relation to the real world where people of all races and genders are just trying to do their jobs, raise their children and live their lives.
Throughout its history, the United States has characteristically remained a country of two things: a country of immigrants, and a country of unmatched religious diversity. And yet when compared with the rest of the world – where these two very factors alone have so often engendered horrible religious wars and decades of enduring conflict – the history of religious conflict in the United States seems almost nonexistent.
That is not to say the United States has been immune to its share of conflict explicitly rooted in religion. This paper explores the various manifestations of religious conflict throughout the history of the United States, from the Revolutionary War to the attacks of September 11th and their fallout. A distinction is drawn between religious intolerance, which is not the focus of this paper, and outright religious persecution or violence. Similarly, the paper reflects efforts made to de-conflate religious conflict from ethnic and racial conflict, which has been much more prominent throughout the history of the United States. In examining the history of religious violence, intolerance, discrimination, and persecution in the United States, we arrive at some possible explanations for why the United States has seen such minimal religious conflict despite being so religiously diverse.
The Revolution
It has been said that the United States is a nation founded on religious conflict. The colonies were settled by those escaping religious persecution in Europe. There is even some evidence that religion played a major role in the American Revolution and that revolutionaries believed it was willed by God for the Americans to wage war against the British.[1]
As the Church of England was striving to establish one, uniform religion across the kingdom, colonial America was divided, each of the colonies being dominated by their own brand of Christianity. Due to the distance from England and the room in the colonies, many religions were able to establish themselves in America, colony by colony. For example, Anglicans, who conformed to the Church of England, populated Virginia. Massachusetts was home to the Puritans. Pennsylvania was full of Quakers. Baptists ruled in Rhode Island. And Roman Catholics found a haven in Maryland, where they could establish themselves amid the other colonists’ protestant majority. Each of these colonies maintained a distinct religious character and favored one religious denomination’s power.
The American colonists saw the revolution not only as a war for political independence, but to protect the religious diversity of the thirteen colonies. Put in other terms, it was a war for religious independence and freedom. To sever ties with Mother England would be to ensure that the various Christian denominations could co-exist on the American continent. The conflict was, in part, a conflict that pitted the various American religious denominations against the Church of England, who wanted to impose a uniform, Anglican religion on the colonies.
Early Religious Persecution
The period after the Revolutionary War saw a lot of infighting between the various states and Christian denominations. Virginia, which was home to the largest portion of Anglicans loyal to the Church of England, was the scene of notorious acts of religious persecution against Baptists and Presbyterians. Anglicans physically assaulted Baptists, bearing theological and social animosity. In 1771, a local Virginia sheriff yanked a Baptist preacher from the stage at his parish and beat him to the ground outside, where he also delivered twenty lashes with a horsewhip. Similarly, in 1778, Baptist ministers David Barrow and Edward Mintz were conducting services at the Mill Swamp Baptist Church in Portsmouth, Virginia.[2] As soon as the hymn was given out, a gang of men rushed the stage and grabbed the two ministers, took them to the nearby Nansemond River swamp, and dunked and held their heads in the mud until they nearly drowned to death.
The period during and soon after the Revolutionary War also saw abundant political manifestations of religious conflict. At the time, some states abolished churches, while supporting others, issued preaching licenses, and collected tax money to fund and establish state churches. Each state constitution differed in its policy on religious establishment, or state-supported religion. It would not be until well after the adoption of the Constitution of 1789 and the First Amendment religion clauses that the disestablishment for which the United States is so recognized became the de facto practice.
1800s
The early part of the 19th Century was relatively quiet in terms of religious conflict in America. The religious conflict that stands out in this period involves tensions between Catholics and Protestants, culminating in violence directed at Irish Catholic immigrants. The surge in immigration from Europe during the 19th Century coincided with and influx of Catholics and the rise of activist Protestantism in the U.S. As strong Protestant values permeated the country, immigrants who were Catholic also became viewed as outsiders and undemocratic. These views are separate from, but on top of, the harsh anti-Irish sentiment that also spread during the period.
In the 1830s and 1840s, anti-Catholic violence broke out in the Northeast and elsewhere. In 1835, one incident was ignited by a speaking tour by Lyman Beecher, who published Plea for the West, a book about a Catholic plot to take over the U.S. and impose Catholic rule. After Beecher’s speaking tour passed through Charlestown, Massachusetts, a mob set fire to the Ursuline convent and school.[3] In Philadelphia in 1844, pitched gun battles broke out between “native” Americans and mostly Irish Catholics. Martial law had to be declared in order to end the violence.[4]
The Mormon War, the Utah War
Around the same time as anti-Catholic violence broke out in the Northeast, another religious group was being chased out of the same area. The Mormons, who emerged after the 1830 discovery of The Book of Mormon, were a religious community chased out of New York, out of Ohio, out of Missouri, and out of Illinois, to Utah, where they finally settled.
In Illinois in 1839, the Mormons settled Nauvoo and built a thriving Mormon town there, complete with a large Mormon temple. In the short period of three years, the Mormons prospered, announced the doctrine of polygamy, and founder Joseph Smith announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Locals were intimidated and envious. Smith and his brother Hyrum were arrested on morals charges and held in jail. On June 27, 1844, an anti-Mormon mob attacked Nauvoo and burned it to the ground.[5] They also invaded the jail cells where Smith and his brother were being held, and executed them.
Shortly after the sacking of Nauvoo, Brigham Young announced his leadership of the Mormons and led them to Utah, where they flourished. In 1857, fears of a religious state of Mormons grew and the president ordered federal troops to enforce the installation of federal judges and a new non-Mormon governor. At some point in the interim, this is still a subject of debate, the infamous Mountain Meadow Massacre happened – in which local Mormons slaughtered a group of 120 California-bound pioneers who were openly hostile toward their religion and making threats to return from California to attack them.[6]
The massacre only fueled anti-Mormon sentiment. Tensions escalated. The Mormon army, also known as the Nauvoo Legion, was called out to respond to the imminent arrival of 2,000 U.S. Army troops. Salt Lake City was evacuated on standing orders to burn the city should an invasion occur. No violence was to break out, as attention was diverted to the Civil War.
As the federal government focused its energies on fighting the Civil War, legal sanctions and political oppression of the Mormons continued that virtually dissolved the church by 1887. It wasn’t until the 1890s, when the Mormons ended the practice of polygamy, that Utah finally achieved statehood in 1896.[7]
The Jewish Experience
At the end of the 1890s, the U.S. began seeing the first wave of anti-Semitism, just as the federal government began restricting immigration from Europe. While concentrations of Jews have lived in America since colonial times, they were largely tolerated and discriminated against in localized incidents. By the 1920s, immigration quotas had taken effect and limits on the basis of national origin. These quotas were not repealed during the Holocaust, even as Jewish refugees were fleeing Hitler’s Europe.
Between 1933 and 1939, the period of the Great Depression, anti-Semitic fervor reached heights never before seen or later seen in entire the history of the Jewish experience in America. In urban areas such as New York and Boston, Jews were violently attacked.[8] Most anti-Jewish sentiment was manifested in social and political discrimination. Assaults, propaganda and intimidation were mostly carried out by special societies, such as the Silver Shirts or the Ku Klux Klan.
Overall, the experience of Jews in America has been encouragingly free from the violent persecution seen elsewhere in the world. Indeed, racial and social intolerance persisted since the colonial days until the 1950s, as Jews were not allowed membership in country clubs, excluded from colleges, banned from practicing medicine, and from holding political office in many states. However, religious conflict rooted in anti-Semitism has been largely non-violent.
Hate Crimes as Religious Conflict
The incidents of violence against individual Jews that characterized the anti-Semitism of the Great Depression would have fallen under the category of religious hate crimes if the FBI, then known as the Bureau of Investigation, were collecting those statistics at the time. Despite the diversity of the United States, in all aspects such as race, national origin, religion and sexual orientation, the federal government (by way of the FBI) did not start keeping tabs on hate crimes until 1992. Religiously speaking, anti-Semitic hate crimes have always dominated the national hate crime statistics gathered by the FBI for the past ten years. However, the current numbers paint a changing landscape.
According to the ACLU, the U.S. is home to more than 1,500 religions and 360,000 religious centers.[9] Christianity has long dominated the country’s religious make-up, followed by Judaism. According to the latest statistics released by the Harvard University Religious Pluralism Project, Islam has surpassed Judaism and is the country’s Number Two religion.[10]
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the FBI found that anti-Muslim sentiments spiked and verifiable, religiously motivated hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. increased 1,600 percent in 2001 from the prior year.[11]
In fact, the FBI, which has tracked hate crimes since 1992, reports that Anti-Muslim hate crimes had previously been the second-least reported. But in 2001, they became the second-highest reported, second only to anti-Jewish hate crimes. It should be noted that these statistics are separate from crimes motivated against race, national origin or ethnicity – these are crimes against person and property in which religion was a motivating negative factor.
Conclusion
The U.S. has been fortunate in that it has not witnessed religious war and conflict of the scale seen in the Middle East and Europe. Although the number of different religions in the U.S. has steadily grown over the decades, this diversity has not let to conflict. Some propositions for why this may be:
The United States as a country of immigrants
This factor defuses historical and religious claims to territory, which are not as strong as they are in places such as the West Bank and Ireland. It also may explain a greater likelihood for a system of conflict to eventually resolve itself in favor of tolerance rather than further conflict, as each new group of immigrants to America has generally shared a story of persecution.
Constitutional protections and religious disestablishment
The American tradition of the separation of church and state cannot be overlooked in mediating and possibly preventing religious conflict to erupt. In many other parts of the world, religion is still highly influential and, in some cases, sponsored by the state. However, in a country with such religious diversity, religious disestablishment has proved necessary so that the government could not take sides in a religious conflict.
Diversity creates tolerance
The argument also exists that the immense diversity in and of itself has promoted tolerance among religions. Religious pluralism inspires attitudes that homogeneity is a natural part of the religious environment and that there is room for each religion to exist in America.
As the United States enters the 21st Century, these important factors will prove to be influential in the face of catastrophic events, and economic, social and political changes that challenge the level of religious tolerance the nation has maintained for over two centuries.
Imran Ahmed, the founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), giving evidence to joint committee seeking views on how to improve the draft Online Safety Bill designed to tackle social media abuse. Credit: House of Commons – PA Images / Contributor | PA Images
Imran Ahmed’s biggest thorn in his side used to be Elon Musk, who made the hate speech researcher one of his earliest legal foes during his Twitter takeover.
Now, it’s the Trump administration, which planned to deport Ahmed, a legal permanent resident, just before Christmas. It would then ban him from returning to the United States, where he lives with his wife and young child, both US citizens.
After suing US officials to block any attempted arrest or deportation, Ahmed was quickly granted a temporary restraining order on Christmas Day. Ahmed had successfully argued that he risked irreparable harm without the order, alleging that Trump officials continue “to abuse the immigration system to punish and punitively detain noncitizens for protected speech and silence viewpoints with which it disagrees” and confirming that his speech had been chilled.
US officials are attempting to sanction Ahmed seemingly due to his work as the founder of a British-American non-governmental organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
“An egregious act of government censorship”
In a shocking announcement last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that five individuals—described as “radical activists” and leaders of “weaponized NGOs”—would face US visa bans since “their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the US.
Nobody was named in that release, but Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, later identified the targets in an X post she currently has pinned to the top of her feed.
Alongside Ahmed, sanctioned individuals included former European commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton; the leader of UK-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI), Clare Melford; and co-leaders of Germany-based HateAid, Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon. A GDI spokesperson told The Guardian that the visa bans are “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.”
While all targets were scrutinized for supporting some of the European Union’s strictest tech regulations, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), Ahmed was further accused of serving as a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against US citizens.” As evidence of Ahmed’s supposed threat to US foreign policy, Rogers cited a CCDH report flagging Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. among the so-called “disinformation dozen” driving the most vaccine hoaxes on social media.
Neither official has really made it clear what exact threat these individuals pose if operating from within the US, as opposed to from anywhere else in the world. Echoing Rubio’s press release, Rogers wrote that the sanctions would reinforce a “red line,” supposedly ending “extraterritorial censorship of Americans” by targeting the “censorship-NGO ecosystem.”
For Ahmed’s group, specifically, she pointed to Musk’s failed lawsuit, which accused CCDH of illegally scraping Twitter—supposedly, it offered evidence of extraterritorial censorship. That lawsuit surfaced “leaked documents” allegedly showing that CCDH planned to “kill Twitter” by sharing research that could be used to justify big fines under the DSA or the UK’s Online Safety Act. Following that logic, seemingly any group monitoring misinformation or sharing research that lawmakers weigh when implementing new policies could be maligned as seeking mechanisms to censor platforms.
Notably, CCDH won its legal fight with Musk after a judge mocked X’s legal argument as “vapid” and dismissed the lawsuit as an obvious attempt to punish CCDH for exercising free speech that Musk didn’t like.
In his complaint last week, Ahmed alleged that US officials were similarly encroaching on his First Amendment rights by unconstitutionally wielding immigration law as “a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”
Both Rubio and Rogers are named as defendants in the suit, as well as Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Acting Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons. In a loss, officials would potentially not only be forced to vacate Rubio’s actions implementing visa bans, but also possibly stop furthering a larger alleged Trump administration pattern of “targeting noncitizens for removal based on First Amendment protected speech.”
Lawsuit may force Rubio to justify visa bans
For Ahmed, securing the temporary restraining order was urgent, as he was apparently the only target currently located in the US when Rubio’s announcement dropped. In a statement provided to Ars, Ahmed’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, suggested that the order was granted “so quickly because it is so obvious that Marco Rubio and the other defendants’ actions were blatantly unconstitutional.”
Ahmed founded CCDH in 2019, hoping to “call attention to the enormous problem of digitally driven disinformation and hate online.” According to the suit, he became particularly concerned about antisemitism online while living in the United Kingdom in 2016, having watched “the far-right party, Britain First,” launching “the dangerous conspiracy theory that the EU was attempting to import Muslims and Black people to ‘destroy’ white citizens.” That year, a Member of Parliament and Ahmed’s colleague, Jo Cox, was “shot and stabbed in a brutal politically motivated murder, committed by a man who screamed ‘Britain First’” during the attack. That tragedy motivated Ahmed to start CCDH.
He moved to the US in 2021 and was granted a green card in 2024, starting his family and continuing to lead CCDH efforts monitoring not just Twitter/X, but also Meta platforms, TikTok, and, more recently, AI chatbots. In addition to supporting the DSA and UK’s Online Safety Act, his group has supported US online safety laws and Section 230 reforms intended to protect kids online.
“Mr. Ahmed studies and engages in civic discourse about the content moderation policies of major social media companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union,” his lawsuit said. “There is no conceivable foreign policy impact from his speech acts whatsoever.”
In his complaint, Ahmed alleged that Rubio has so far provided no evidence that Ahmed poses such a great threat that he must be removed. He argued that “applicable statutes expressly prohibit removal based on a noncitizen’s ‘past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations.’”
According to DHS guidance from 2021 cited in the suit, “A noncitizen’ s exercise of their First Amendment rights … should never be a factor in deciding to take enforcement action.”
To prevent deportation based solely on viewpoints, Rubio was supposed to notify chairs of the House Foreign Affairs, Senate Foreign Relations, and House and Senate Judiciary Committees, to explain what “compelling US foreign policy interest” would be compromised if Ahmed or others targeted with visa bans were to enter the US. But there’s no evidence Rubio took those steps, Ahmed alleged.
“The government has no power to punish Mr. Ahmed for his research, protected speech, and advocacy, and Defendants cannot evade those constitutional limitations by simply claiming that Mr. Ahmed’s presence or activities have ‘potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,’” a press release from his legal team said. “There is no credible argument for Mr. Ahmed’s immigration detention, away from his wife and young child.”
X lawsuit offers clues to Trump officials’ defense
To some critics, it looks like the Trump administration is going after CCDH in order to take up the fight that Musk already lost. In his lawsuit against CCDH, Musk’s X echoed US Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) by suggesting that CCDH was a “foreign dark money group” that allowed “foreign interests” to attempt to “influence American democracy.” It seems likely that US officials will put forward similar arguments in their CCDH fight.
Rogers’ X post offers some clues that the State Department will be mining Musk’s failed litigation to support claims of what it calls a “global censorship-industrial complex.” What she detailed suggested that the Trump administration plans to argue that NGOs like CCDH support strict tech laws, then conduct research bent on using said laws to censor platforms. That logic seems to ignore the reality that NGOs cannot control what laws get passed or enforced, Breton suggested in his first TV interview after his visa ban was announced.
Breton, whom Rogers villainized as the “mastermind” behind the DSA, urged EU officials to do more now defend their tough tech regulations—which Le Monde noted passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and very little far-right resistance—and fight the visa bans, Bloomberg reported.
“They cannot force us to change laws that we voted for democratically just to please [US tech companies],” Breton said. “No, we must stand up.”
While EU officials seemingly drag their feet, Ahmed is hoping that a judge will declare that all the visa bans that Rubio announced are unconstitutional. The temporary restraining order indicates there will be a court hearing Monday at which Ahmed will learn precisely “what steps Defendants have taken to impose visa restrictions and initiate removal proceedings against” him and any others. Until then, Ahmed remains in the dark on why Rubio deemed him as having “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” if he stayed in the US.
Ahmed, who argued that X’s lawsuit sought to chill CCDH’s research and alleged that the US attack seeks to do the same, seems confident that he can beat the visa bans.
“America is a great nation built on laws, with checks and balances to ensure power can never attain the unfettered primacy that leads to tyranny,” Ahmed said. “The law, clear-eyed in understanding right and wrong, will stand in the way of those who seek to silence the truth and empower the bold who stand up to power. I believe in this system, and I am proud to call this country my home. I will not be bullied away from my life’s work of fighting to keep children safe from social media’s harm and stopping antisemitism online. Onward.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
Ten Bears has it correct. If we do not stand up for each another now while it is bad and hard, who will stand up for anyone later when it is far too late. Hugs
Right wing provocateur Nick Shirley has published a video claiming he has proof of fraud in Somali daycare centers. I watched the video so you don’t have to. The entire video is, in a word, propaganda. Despite this complete lack of substantiation, Vice President JD Vance praised Shirley and suggested he deserves a Pulitzer Prize. MAGA media has since moved immediately to demonize the Somali community in Minnesota as a whole—facts be damned.
That framing is not just reckless—it is intentionally racist. And it obscures the real issue entirely. Here are the critical facts they leave out, and hope Americans don’t see.Let’s Address This.
Watch my breakdown on YouTube, or read the full article below.
Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
A Propagandized Claim With Zero Evidence
Shirley begins his interview with a man named “David,” who apparently investigated this alleged fraud for years. Shirley provides no explanation of who David is, what qualifications he has, or what actual evidence of fraud he’s uncovered. Instead, while waving around documents that he never bothers to validate, David makes the following bombastic and factless claims:
“Compared to worldwide, the fraud is worse here in the Twin Cities than anywhere else ever, in history, anywhere.”
“The allegedly stolen funds are being sent to terrorist organizations.”
“We have to be careful because these [Somali] people are very violent, they’re exceptionally violent.”
“Tim Walz is guilty of misconduct with a public employee.”
Note—the above are actual quotes from David. At no point in the video does David or Shirley provide any actual evidence for the above claims. We are simply meant to believe them—even to the absurdity that in the entirety of human history, the alleged fraud in Minnesota outranks all of them. As far as the claim that “Walz committed misconduct with a public employee,” there’s zero evidence of this malicious claim. It’s especially rich coming from two men who are silent on Trump’s dozens of cases of sexual assault of women, and God only knows the full extent of his involvement in Epstein’s child sex trafficking atrocity.
Shirley and David espouse obviously and demonstrably false claims. The majority of Shirley’s video then entails he and David driving from center to center, harassing employees, and attempting to enter childcare centers without permission. The employees are clearly frightened that two angry men with cameras are repeatedly yelling “where are the children!”, while trying to gain unauthorized access to spaces meant to protect children. Unsurprisingly, the employees refuse to answer questions from men they rightly see as strangers. Shirley and David therefore conclude that the employees’ refusal to answer their questions means there must be fraud.
That is the extent of their “evidence” of fraud.
Shirley Ignores What Actual Journalists Have Already Reported
Now, let’s make four points absolutely clear—points Shirley deliberately ignores, and hopes his viewers don’t realize.
First, what Shirley allegedly “uncovered” is not some new scandal. Since 2022 several of these same day care centers have been fined and shutdown for violating the law. Local media in Minnesota has already reported on that alleged fraud and reported on the subsequent FBI investigations. Even in his video, Shirley admits that the FBI is already investigating these facilities and is already aware that there may be potential fraud. You can literally see him at the exact same locations that have already been investigated and reported upon.
Top Screen grab: News report from local Minnesota reporters 1 year ago. Bottom screen grab: Shirley pretending he’s breaking new news right now.
Top Screen grab: News report from local Minnesota reporters 1 year ago. Bottom Screen grab: Shirley pretending he’s breaking new news right now.
Fourth and finally, for as much as Shirley insists fraud problems in Minnesota begin and end with Somalis, nowhere in his 42 minute propaganda piece does he admit, let alone acknowledge, that the accused ring leader who was convicted of leading the largest prosecuted fraud in Minnesota is a white woman named Aimee Bock.
Aimee Bock was found guilty in a jury trial of defrauding Minnesota $250M in an overlapping “Feeding Our Future” fraud case.
In short, Shirley hasn’t broken any new news, this alleged scheme has nothing to do with terrorism, the day care center employees themselves sounded the alarm, and Shirley ignores Aimee Bock altogether. What exactly is Shirley exposing? Will his next story reveal Watergate? It seems quite clear that Shirley saw news reports from years ago, saw Donald Trump demonize Somalis, and attempted to recreate work done by actual journalists while trying to pass it off as his own to gain clout, clicks, and views.
Here Are The Facts
Now, let’s discuss what is true.
Shirley alleges that Somalis have somehow “taken over” Minnesota. This is fear-mongering and racist propaganda. Minnesota is home to approximately 60,000 Somalis, representing a whopping 1% of Minnesota’s population of 6 million people.
Moreover, it is absolutely not the case that Somalis somehow uniquely committed fraud. It is the case that, among the people accused of fraud in Minnesota, some happen to be Somali. That is a critical distinction. Fraud, where it occurs, should be investigated and prosecuted fully and fairly—for everyone involved, regardless of race, religion, or immigration status. No person gets a pass, and no group deserves collective blame. But Shirley or MAGA figures are not interested in accountability. They are interested in scapegoating.
Shirley’s video ends with him demanding answers from a Democratic member of the Minnesota legislature—who correctly reminds him that such fraud is in all 50 states, under Democrats and Republicans, and that this is not a partisan or racial issue. Shirley never actually rebukes her. He cannot, for the very simple reason that she is absolutely correct. On June 30, 2025, The Department of Justice reported:
The Justice Department today announced the results of its 2025 National Health Care Fraud Takedown, which resulted in criminal charges against 324 defendants, including 96 doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and other licensed medical professionals, in 50 federal districts and 12 State Attorneys General’s Offices across the United States, for their alleged participation in various health care fraud schemes involving over $14.6 billion in intended loss. The Takedown involved federal and state law enforcement agencies across the country and represents an unprecedented effort to combat health care fraud schemes that exploit patients and taxpayers. (emphasis added)
If fraud were actually the MAGA concern, their outrage would not be selectively triggered only when the accused are Black, brown, Muslim, or immigrant. Yet we have overwhelming evidence that the same political movement now pretending to care about alleged fraud in Minnesota, instead openly celebrate and reward white fraudsters—at vastly larger scales—nationwide.
When MAGA Approves Fraud
And yet here’s another critical and substantive point that Shirley entirely ignores. Donald Trump has personally granted clemency or pardons to at least two dozen individuals convicted of fraud totaling well over one billion dollars. None of them are Somali. Nearly all of them are white. And this fraud has also been well reported, meaning Shirley and his supporters are either willfully ignorant, or deceptively censoring it. Among them include:
Trevor Milton, founder of an electric truck company, was convicted of securities fraud and wire fraud and ordered to pay $676 million in restitution.
Ross William Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, was convicted of running a massive criminal enterprise facilitating drug trafficking and money laundering and ordered to pay nearly $184 million.
HDR Global Trading Limited, operator of a cryptocurrency exchange, was fined $100 million for violating anti-money laundering laws.
Lawrence Duran, owner of a Miami-area mental health company, was convicted of healthcare fraud and sentenced to 50 years in prison with $87.5 million in restitution.
Trump pardoned them anyway. In total, Trump has pardoned at least 24 mostly white Americans (so far) for committing Medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud, and/or securities fraud. And not in his first term either—this is right now as we speak while the alleged fraud in Minnesota is taking place. And I say “so far” because Trump’s pay to pardon bribery scheme has become so open and brazen, that the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s handlers are now reportedly charging convicted fraudsters upwards of $1M to lobby their pardon before Trump.
Somalis face demonization on the mere accusation of a crime—yet we hear complete silence from Shirley and MAGA pundits on Trump’s open bribery to pardon convicted felons who are white. Thus the open hypocrisy—when white Americans commit fraud, they are treated as individuals. When Black, brown, Muslim, or immigrant communities are accused—even speculatively—the entire community is put on trial. One person becomes “proof” that everyone is guilty. That is de facto racism.
So let’s be explicitly clear: if you are outraged at alleged fraud involving Somali daycare operators, but celebrate Trump for pardoning white men convicted of fraud at ten or twenty times the scale, then fraud is not what you care about. What you care about is protecting white supremacy.
The Core Issue Remains Ignored
Just as importantly, we cannot forget this critical point: Racializing fraud allegations to demonize all Somali Americans of Minnesota, while ignoring the much greater fraud nationwide by predominantly white Americans, is another culture war waged by the MAGA right. And they’re waging it right now for two reasons.
One, to distract Americans that MAGA Republicans have failed to extend ACA subsidies, which means come New Year’s Day your ACA premiums will skyrocket. MAGAs will point to Minnesota to convince Americans that the “real” reason premiums are spiking is not the exploitative for profit healthcare system or the deliberate failure of MAGA Republicans to extend ACA subsidies—but the lie that it is due to Somali Americans. MAGAs will try to convince Americans nationwide that this is a “Somali problem.” Do not let them.
Two, to prevent Americans from realizing these devastating facts—that 16 years after the ACA was passed, Republicans still don’t have a healthcare plan. That Trump has pardoned far more fraud than is alleged to have happened in Minnesota. That Medicare and Medicaid fraud is a nationwide cancer caused by our exploitative for profit healthcare system, that could be addressed with a universal healthcare model, but that would cost politicians immense financial loss in campaign donations and in their stock portfolios, so they will not let it happen.
In short, MAGAs are demonizing Somali people to ensure healthcare remains a for profit exploitation scheme.
The truth is this: fraud in healthcare is not an aberration. It is a feature of a system designed to extract wealth rather than deliver care.
I have already written at length about America’s HELL Corporations, and the fraud ridden for profit exploitation business model that causes at least 68,000 preventable deaths annually. For example, UnitedHealth is being sued for denying 90% of valid Medicaid claims to senior citizens—undoubtedly enabling preventable death. Yet, we don’t see MAGA Republicans or their pseudo-journalists like Shirley accosting them to explain their billions in fraud.
Closing Points
The difference between MAGAs outraged over alleged fraud in Minnesota by some Somali Americans, and the rest of us, is this. We loudly condemn that fraud whether its committed by a Somali American, European American, Latino American, or Asian American. MAGAs only care if the alleged fraud is committed by non-white people, and celebrate the pardoning of convicted fraudsters who are white. This is not my opinion, as the above receipts show this to be true.
But we have a solution to this fraud enabled by an exploitative, for-profit insurance system. If we joined every other developed nation and guaranteed healthcare, politicians could no longer use our lives as bargaining chips. And fraud—real fraud—would be far harder to commit in a system built around care rather than profit extraction.
So when MAGA figures obsessively target Somalis in Minnesota, understand what is really happening. They are not exposing corruption. They are deflecting from it. They are protecting an exploitative system by redirecting rage toward a vulnerable community. Because two things can be and are true at once: individuals who committed fraud should be held accountable regardless of their racial background, and the overwhelming majority of fraud—and harm—comes from a corporate healthcare system that thrives on exploitation, protected by politicians who pardon billion-dollar criminals while demonizing immigrants.
Until we confront that reality honestly, we will keep repeating the same cycle: scapegoats on the margins, impunity at the top, and a system that continues to kill tens of thousands of Americans every year—quietly, profitably, and with corporate media silence.
Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Tiny, nimble, and sporting a bold black mask and “bib” under its bill, the Golden-winged Warbler might be mistaken for a Black-capped Chickadee at first glance. But it’s the long, thin bill and the splashes of vivid golden-yellow on its crown and wings that distinguish this long-distance migratory warbler.
Though they are denizens of shrubby, early successional habitats (areas that are in the early stages of regenerating following a disturbance, such as a fire or a clearcut) in the nesting season, Golden-winged Warblers and their recently fledged young relocate to nearby mature forests that provide adequate cover for fledglings from predators. The loss of quality brushy, young forest habitat across much of its breeding range has contributed to sharp declines in an already uncommon warbler.
Another threat comes from a close relative, the Blue-winged Warbler, which shares more than 99 percent of its genetic material with the Golden-winged Warbler. The two species regularly hybridize, and the once-uncommon Blue-winged Warbler has surged northward into the Golden-winged’s range. The Golden-winged Warbler has become much scarcer and is at risk of being genetically “swamped” by its more numerous and widespread relative where their ranges meet.
To gain a foothold and begin to recover from the loss of more than 60 percent of its population, the Golden-winged Warbler needs active habitat conservation throughout its annual life cycle, from the shrubby, early successional habitats where it nests to the open forests of Latin America and the Caribbean, where it spends its nonbreeding season.
Threats
Birds around the world are facing threats, and many species are declining. The Golden-winged Warbler has experienced a drop in its population of more than 60 percent, including a loss of nearly all of its population in the Appalachians. In addition to competition and hybridization with the Blue-winged Warbler, the Golden-winged Warbler faces challenges throughout its full annual cycle from habitat loss and degradation, and collisions. (snip-More on the page, including the songs)
Scottie's Playtime 