Somali-American Day-Care Hysteria Is Latest Attempt To Distract Americans with Hate |
It happens almost every year.
An overblown, exaggerated, or manufactured controversy involving people of color, immigrants, Muslims—or all three at once—suddenly consumes America’s political discourse.
Remember the summer of 2010? Every media outlet spent the month of August in a frenzy over a Florida pastor's planned burning of the Quran in Florida and the expansion of Park51, a Muslim community center falsely branded the “Ground Zero mosque."
The flames of that controversy were stoked by fringe anti-Muslim bigots who were then elevated from the dark corners of the internet to cable news shows and weaponized by politicians ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.
When will we stop falling for this?
The hysteria over Park51 paved the way for a series of racially charged moral panics in the following years: the Obama “birther” conspiracy that culminated in 2011, the migrant caravans poised to invade the southern border in 2018, the viral videos that claimed to show Black election workers stealing the 2020 election, the stories about Haitian refugees eating pets in Ohio in 2024.
Since 2025, much of the manufactured outrage has targeted American Muslims. Anti-Muslim conspiracy theories that died out years ago have been resurrected by the usual suspects on social media along with politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). Even Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that Americans Muslims are on the verge of imposing "sharia law" on Paterson, New Jersey, of all places.
Why this renewed obsession with Muslims?
A poll commissioned last year by the Israeli Foreign Ministry found that the best way to restore support for Israel among Western populations upset about the Gaza genocide was to distract those populations with fear of Islam and Muslims.
Hence why the Israeli government and its supporters have been whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria over the past year. They hope to achieve various goals at once: smearing American Muslims who criticize Israel First policies, shoring up Israel’s eroding support among political conservatives, and distracting the broader public from real issues, whether the Epstein files or the billions of US taxpayer dollars being poured into Israel’s war crimes.
Most recently, this campaign of hate against Muslims has taken the form of racist hysteria targeting Somali Americans, driven by a dishonest and largely debunked video circulated by a conservative social media influencer.
It's also important to recognize that the crimes Americans........