Representative Brandon Gill (R-TX) engaged in a fiery back-and-forth on social media with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan, a naturalized Muslim immigrant who has not been shy about wanting to see America become more racially and religiously diverse. Hassan drew ire from conservative politicians and pundits alike.
Initiating the latest brouhaha was a short clip posted to X by the account End Wokeness that featured Hassan defending the five-times-daily Muslim calls to prayer, saying “I think that if you can play church bells, you can pray the call to prayer. We are as American as anyone else, and don’t take any BS from any.”
Of course, this historically and culturally illiterate comment was instantly met with a ferocious defense of American history. As both Gill and conservative podcaster Matt Walsh noted in their own ways, America was founded on a specific set of ideals rooted in a specific set of traditions. None of those conditions originally had Muslim immigrants in mind, despite being a country where minority populations could nonetheless thrive.
Responding to the original post, Representative Gill quoted back a comment of Hassan’s, saying,“We can move here en masse and fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life.” In short, Gill exposed Hassan’s real agenda, which is less about tolerance and more about taking over aspects of public life and cultural norms.
Hassan weakly replied to Gill, ignoring the religious tone of both previous posts and switching to immigration status. “Your wife is an Indian American, the daughter of an Indian immigrant,” he said. And Gill was not having any of it, immediately bringing back the conversation to a religious focus.
“My wife is a Christian and doesn’t want to hear your oppressive Muslim prayer calls, either,” he retorted, then adding, “If you want to live in a Muslim country, go back to the UK.”
Matt Walsh also jumped into the internet kerfuffle by offering his own comments on the original post from End Wokeness. “Christianity built this country. Islam did not at all in even the slightest way. That’s why we can have our church bells, you ungrateful little b*tch,” he declared.
Hassan once again replied. “One in three of the slaves who built this country were Muslims,” he ignorantly stated. “They were here long before the Walsh family arrived. You’d know that if you’d studied history but I know MAGA has an issue with studying. Oh, and I am guessing you don’t count slaves as people, or Americans.”
Walsh was again not having any of it. “This country was not “built by slaves,”much less the handful of Muslim ones owned by the 2 percent of Americans who ever had slaves to begin with. The vast majority of infrastructure and industry in this country was built by the labor of free men.
“Every Muslim country on the planet had slavery for exponentially longer and relied on it exponentially more than the USA ever did. Which is why western countries had to shut down the Arab slave trade by force. Anyway, you’re a British Muslim who came here ten years ago so I don’t expect you to know anything about my country, and you don’t.”
Watch Hassan’s comments that set off the internet firestorm below:
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1980641679066689761