GRAPEVINE, TX – On a cold spring morning in this tony Dallas suburb, dozens of activists had heard the call. They had read the posts; they understood the stakes: America was in crisis, facing a threat from within. It was time for action, and time to take a 5 a.m. bus to the state capital to protest Sharia law.
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the group that organized the trip, the True Texas Project, part of the “antidemocratic hard right.” Its leaders have expressed fears of white genocide; the woman who funded the trip runs a right-wing-themed cell phone company called Patriot Mobile.
This handful of activists, composed of a range of people — from retirees to Texans in their 30s — is part of a statewide campaign against Islam. In primaries and now the runoffs for the midterms, the Texas GOP placed a bet on using rhetoric about the supposed threat posed by Islam as a means to scare and motivate voters. It’s paid off. Almost 95 percent voted in favor of a proposition on the Texas GOP primary ballot telling the state to “ban Sharia law.” The prospect of being weak on Islam has become the subject of intra-Republican Party attacks, and, increasingly, inspired repression by state officials. Now, some argue that the party can take that strategy to the national level, making it a theme for the midterm elections in the fall.
Powerful officials like Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) have made targeting Islam and the Muslim community a priority. Abbott has singled out a Dallas-area mosque with ambitious expansion plans, the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), while Paxton has followed up with investigations into EPIC as he promises to fight “Sharia law.”
Local activists cast their fight against Islam as a crusade to preserve the Christian America that they know and love. Several of them told TPM that Islam poses a threat to their future. They’re not only echoing messaging from national politicians about the threat of Islam; they’re acting on it.
“This has national potential,” Vinny Minchillo, a Republican consultant based in Plano, Texas, told TPM. “If you are a Republican candidate, you would like to not be talking about the economy right now. So this gives you an opportunity to control the debate and move it from economy to problems with Islam. That’s something you are gonna want to do.”
‘Islam is a communist based ideology’
In Texas, Islamophobia played a leading role for Republicans in the March midterms, and is becoming a defining issue in runoff elections for Senate and offices at the state level, held in May.
They’re taking place with surging anti-Islamic sentiment in the background, the fruit of years of campaigning from the right. In February, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution subcommittee held a hearing on “Sharia-free America;” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a law this month that he described as “banning Sharia.” Across America, some who might describe themselves as liberals but who regard the American Muslim community as a threat to U.S. support for Israel have also supported similar moves.
Per NPR, Republicans have already spent at least $10 million on TV ads casting Islam or Sharia in a negative light. That’s significant given that Muslims represent around 1 percent of the U.S. population.
Sharia itself is a system of divine moral guidance for Muslims. It’s not a fixed legal code, though some Muslim-majority nations have laws based on Sharia, applying it in different ways.
In Texas, most of those vocally opposed to Sharia come from an elaborate network of right-wing activists.
Take the bus ferrying concerned Texans from the Dallas-Fort Worth-area town of Grapevine to Austin. It was set up to move activists to the state capital for a hearing about the Texas State Board of Education’s proposals for a new Social Studies curriculum, which includes sections on history, civics, and the history of communist regimes. The ad calling for activists to take the trip described Islam as a “communist based ideology.” It failed to elaborate on whatever links it had uncovered between Karl Marx and the Prophet Muhammad.
The stakes here may seem minor, but to activists boarding the bus at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the school board proposal was tied up with Christianity and the future of the country. One man brought a PragerU-branded “Make Education Great Again” book to the event; others described their trip to TPM as a chance to fight Sharia.
“Sharia law is the Muslim faith,” one busgoer, Jerry Stewart, told TPM as he boarded.
Stewart is a radio host, with a show syndicated on the Salem Radio Network, which hosts programming that is largely Christian and conservative. (The show, called One Moment in America, has episodes with titles including “Communion on the Moon,” “Who is Squanto?” and “New ‘Elvis’ Movie Disrespects God.”) Stewart described his decision to go as motivated partly by his own Christian faith within and what he saw as a threat from without.
“If they feel extreme in their circumstance, protecting their position, that’s where things in the past have happened and there’s been religious wars,” Stewart remarked.
The trip was organized by the True Texas Project. The group was formerly known as the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, renaming itself after the group’s founder, Julie McCarty, wrote on social media that she understood the motivations of a man who cited the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” in killing 22 people at an El Paso Walmart. The group has evolved towards Christian Nationalism: In 2024, it planned a conference aimed at opposing supposed efforts to “rid the Earth of the white race.” Its founders, according to the Texas Tribune, are tied to an influential Texas PAC whose former leader met with white nationalist Nick Fuentes; the Southern Poverty Law Center labels the organization a hate group.
True Texas Project said in the advertisement for the bus trip that it did not fund the bus to Austin. Instead, a local business called Patriot Mobile provided the funding, it said. Activist Jenny Story and her husband, Glenn, run Patriot Mobile, which bills itself as “America’s ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider.” Story didn’t return calls for comment.
Story appeared at 2026’s CPAC, also held in Grapevine, saying on a panel titled “Don’t Sharia My Texas” that her company exists in part to oppose Sharia law, and that her work has allowed people to say, “you know what, maybe I am Islamophobic. Maybe I am afraid of what they’re doing to our great country.”
Another activist on board the bus, who wished to go by “Sess,” told TPM that she voted for Joe Biden in 2020. But, she said, after seeing him decline, she stopped trusting the Democratic Party. During that time, immigrants from Muslim nations became more visible in the region, she said. A mosque was built near her mother’s home; “when she goes outside, they talk crap to her and she speaks Spanish,” Sess said.
“They come here, and they don’t know anything about America, and we don’t hardly know anything about them,” she added.
EPIC fail
Texas officials channeled Islamophobia toward two targets in particular: a large mosque in the Dallas area, and the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Abbott in 2025 designated CAIR-Texas a terrorist organization, accusing it of trying to “forcibly impose Sharia law.” Paxton followed up with a lawsuit this year seeking to dissolve the group.
Mustafaa Carroll runs CAIR-Texas. He’s originally from Gary, Indiana, and told TPM that his initial ambition in life was to become a Christian pastor. That changed as he grew more involved in activism during the Civil Rights Movement as a young man.
“For many of us who converted during that period, that had a lot to do with it. We were Christians, and we couldn’t imagine, ‘how is it that other Christians are beating us up? How are they hanging people at lynchings and doing all this stuff and claiming that it’s Christianity?’” he recalled. “And so I think it would be intellectually dishonest for me to say that didn’t have anything to do with it.”
CAIR-Texas has no foreign funding, Carroll said — he laughed off the attacks. “There’s nothing new under the sun. They shut the NAACP down in Texas back in the day.”
Carroll said that Muslims in the area have been a target since 9/11. Their numbers have grown, but that hasn’t stopped them from feeling like outsiders, in large part because federal and state governments periodically revive lingering suspicions of terrorism. The city where TPM met with Carroll, Richardson, hosted the Holy Land Foundation, which was designated a terrorist organization by President Bush in 2001 and the subject of prosecutions during the War on Terror.
State officials have remained at best wary of CAIR, but they’ve once again grown hostile in recent months.
If you are a Republican candidate, you would like to not be talking about the economy right now. So this gives you an opportunity to control the debate and move it from economy to problems with Islam. That’s something you are gonna want to do.
Vinny Minchillo
Much of the focus has been on the East Plano Islamic Center, a large mosque in the north Dallas suburb of Plano. The mosque has a large congregation and has as a resident theologian Dr. Yasir Qadhi, who is known internationally as a scholar of Islam.
The trouble for EPIC started last year as it sought to build a combination mosque-residential community in a town near the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Called “EPIC City,” the mosque released a video with renderings showing a sprawling community with a mosque at the center, promoting it as the “epicenter of Islam in America.”
The reaction was extremely swift and extremely predictable. The Daily Mail drew attention to the video; within days, Texas officials up and down state government were calling it a “Sharia compound.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) demanded the DOJ investigate the project for religious discrimination; it did for several weeks before dropping the case. State investigations into funerary practices, consumer harm, and financial wrongdoing all launched to a lot of fanfare before fizzling out. By June, Abbott had signed a law targeting the development, though it’s unclear whether it had any effect. The state has sued EPIC several times, tying the development up in court.
Since then, the mosque has also been the subject of drive-by videos from several conservative content creators who film people entering and exiting to worship. It’s all created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion; the mosque has hired private security to patrol the area. Abbott sent the mosque a kind of Christmas Card this year, alleging in a late-December video titled “Bye, Bye EPIC City” that the development had planned to exclude non-Muslims. The mosque has repeatedly denied that that was the plan.
Qadhi, the mosque’s scholar and a community leader, expressed some bewilderment at the intensity of the reaction. Muslims are called to pray five times a day, and find it convenient to live near a mosque. “Why not build a purpose-built community?” Qadhi asked.
Others in the area Muslim community say that, given America’s troubled history with the Muslim community, the video announcing their project may have been too aggressive, and that leaders failed to take into account the possibility that it might engender a backlash. “I hate to say it, but that’s something they shouldn’t have done,” Carroll said.
Midterms ahead
The Trump administration has already sought to make Islamophobia and targeting Muslims a part of federal policy.
Soon after entering office last year, it cited vague national security concerns in revoking the green card of Mahmoud Khalil, an activist opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza. Late in the summer, the DOJ signaled that it would begin to crack down on a list of nonprofits supposedly tied to pro-Gaza demonstrations.
They’ve been joined by many Republicans in Congress and, increasingly, candidates for elected office. There are now more than 50 members of the Sharia-Free America Caucus. After Rep. Andy Ogles (R-KY) tweeted “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters, “the demand to impose Sharia Law in America is a serious problem.”
In Texas, Cornyn released an ad this week promising to fight “radical Islam” as he fends off Paxton’s attempt to win his Senate seat. Abbott has excluded Islamic religious schools from a state education voucher program he promoted. In Georgia, state Sen. Greg Dolezal (R), running for lieutenant governor, released an AI-generated ad about Sharia that features a man detonating a suicide vest on the sidewalk of a suburban development.
To Minchillo, the Republican consultant, it’s all part of how the Republican Party is moving on from what it sees as a victory on changing immigration policy.
For the GOP, he argued, Trump has effectively closed the border. ICE is unleashed in much of the country. The question then, he said, is what’s next?
“With the work that’s been done on the border and ICE arresting people,” he said, “a lot of conservatives feel like, alright, you know what, while the issue may not be solved, we’re working on it.”
The “next problem,” he added, would be Islam, framed around concerns about assimilation.
“If you asked a very conservative Republican voter, ‘Are you anti-immigration?’ They would say, ‘No, I’m not anti-immigration. I’m anti-bad people immigrating.’” Minchillo suggested. “I think with the Muslim community, when they released this whole EPIC city thing, it was like putting up a big sign that says, ‘we’re not interested in assimilating.’”
The nation’s problems are the Republican party.
This particular case is just GOP politicians feeding people hate, and some people will take the bait.