By Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
IndyPolitics.org
October 29, 2026
I know what that headline just did to your blood pressure. Good. Take a Tums and keep reading.
Nobody with a political future steps to a podium in 2026 and drops the actual N-word. Do that and you’ll lose your donors, your committee chairmanship and your seat at the Lincoln Day dinner before the salad course. Polite society settled that one. But every era seems to need one group it can say anything about, out loud, with applause breaks and a merch table, at no cost. This cycle, the lucky winners are Muslims.
Let’s go to the tape.
On Oct. 25 in Port Huron, Michigan, the leader of the free world announced he had come to stop a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” from joining the U.S. Senate. He meant Abdul El-Sayed, an American-born doctor who has about as much to do with the Brotherhood as I do with the Rockettes. There is no evidence of any tie. There never needed to be.
Two days earlier, Fort Myers. The president spent several minutes on Rep. Ilhan Omar. He accused her of marrying her brother, demanded she resign and called Somalia, the country she fled as a child, a “shithouse country.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warmed up that crowd, then took the show on the road to Grand Rapids. There, riffing on the Muslim Brotherhood, he informed the world that “500 million Arabs” don’t produce science or win Nobel Prizes. Somebody call Naguib Mahfouz and Ahmed Zewail and tell them to send their medals back.
Not to be outdone, Florida Congressman Randy Fine offered that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” One nonpartisan think tank counted more than 1,100 posts from 46 GOP elected officials targeting Muslim Americans in about a year. That’s not a fringe. That’s a caucus.
Now, before my inbox fills up: no, this isn’t slavery, and it isn’t Jim Crow. And we are not talking N-word in the Blazing Saddles sense, either. Mel Brooks put that word in the mouths of bigots so we could laugh at them, and the joke was always on the guys in the hoods. What’s happening on the campaign trail isn’t satire. The crowd is laughing with the guy at the microphone. My point is about permission. The N-word was never just a word. It signaled that a group of Americans was less than, and that saying so in public was perfectly fine. Swap in “jihadist,” “Sharia” and “the enemy within,” and you’ve got the same playbook with a new cover.
Hoosiers, of all people, should know better.
Article 1, Section 5 of the Indiana Constitution says no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office of trust or profit. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution says the same thing. When a candidate tells voters a man is unfit because of how he prays, he’s trying to impose by mob what both documents forbid by law. I’ve read both. Some of these folks apparently stopped at the Second Amendment.
And remember 2015? This state nearly set itself on fire over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Lawmakers stood on the House floor and swore up and down that religious liberty was sacred. I took them at their word. I just assumed the warranty covered everybody, not only the folks who share a pew with the bill’s sponsors.
It’s cheap politics, too. Muslims are about 1 percent of the country, small enough to kick without losing many votes. Never mind the inroads Republicans made with conservative Muslim voters who care about schools, faith and family. Apparently that’s a small price to pay for a good chant.
It wasn’t always like this. Six days after 9/11, George W. Bush walked into the Islamic Center of Washington and told the country Muslims were not the enemy. If W. could find his backbone in September 2001, what’s everybody else’s excuse in October 2026?
In fairness, Democrats aren’t choirboys here. Andrew Cuomo caught heat for his own remarks in last year’s New York mayoral race. And El-Sayed has rhetoric of his own he ought to answer for. Press him. Grill him. That’s the job. But criticize the candidate and leave his God out of it.
Homework before Tuesday, class. Ask everyone on your ballot, from Congress down to the Statehouse, one question. Take any line you’ve heard about Muslims and swap in another group. If it would end a career for them, it should end a career now.
As we have said before, you stick around long enough and you will see everything a few times. The last time we heard this kind of talk was Berlin, 1938.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He finished second in the 2023 Republican primary for Indianapolis mayor.
