Auntie is going to say something that, six months ago, she would have filed under tinfoil hat and moved on. She is going to say it anyway, because the evidence is sitting right in front of us on the table, and Unfugginbelievable did not build this publication to look away from evidence because it makes us uncomfortable.
Here it is: the Islamophobic posts flooding out of the United States Congress in the last two weeks are not a mistake, not an overreaction, and not a failure of message discipline. They are kindling. They are deliberate. And the people posting them know exactly what fire they are trying to start.
Auntie is not a conspiracy theorist. She is a person who reads, and sources, and refuses to let what she is reading be explained away. So let’s go through it together.
We are two weeks into a war that the “President” of the United States started without a declaration from Congress, without authorization, and without explaining to the American people what winning looks like, how long it takes, or what it costs. The country is not united behind this war. It is fractured, furious, and afraid, which is — and this is not an accident — exactly the condition this administration needs to maintain in order to do what it is doing without consequence. A united country asks questions. A united country demands answers. A fractured country points at itself.
So: point at itself.
The week the bombs started falling, Representative Randy Fine of Florida posted that we need more Islamophobia, not less, that fear of Islam is rational, that the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted that Muslims don’t belong in American society, that pluralism is a lie, that no country is freer or safer because Muslims moved there. Senator Tommy Tuberville posted the burning Twin Towers next to a photograph of Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor, at Ramadan dinner and called him the enemy inside the gates. These are not anonymous accounts. These are sitting members of the United States Congress, with security clearances, with committee assignments, with votes on war appropriations. They posted this with their names on it, in the middle of a war, at the exact moment when American Muslims — who are Americans, who have always been Americans, who serve in the military and pay taxes and go to school and live in your neighborhood — are already the most frightened they have been since 2001.
And then violence came.
In Virginia, a man with a prior terrorism conviction opened fire at Old Dominion University. In New York, two men brought homemade bombs to a far-right protest outside Gracie Mansion. In Michigan, a man drove a vehicle into Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield — a synagogue with a preschool inside — and was shot dead by security guards who had trained for exactly this scenario. Every child in that building went home. The security team saved their lives.
And then we learned who the man at the synagogue was. He was a naturalized American citizen from Lebanon. He had lost four members of his family — four people — in an Israeli airstrike the week before. He was not a terrorist cell. He was not an Iranian operative. He was not recruited, radicalized, or directed by a foreign government. He was a man who watched his family die in a bombing and then drove a car into a building. He was grief made catastrophic. He was what war does to human beings.
Now ask yourself: what did Randy Fine’s posts do for that man’s radicalization timeline? What did Tommy Tuberville’s Twin Towers image do for the anger of every Muslim American watching their faith being used as a synonym for enemy? What did the rhetoric coming from the floor of the United States Congress — that Muslims don’t belong, that fear of them is rational, that they are the enemy inside the gates — do to the people already on the edge of something irreversible?
This is not a hypothetical. This is cause and effect. Rhetoric precedes violence with the reliability of a natural law. We have seen it happen. We watched it happen after 9/11 when the same language — alien, enemy, incompatible with our values — produced attacks on mosques, on Sikh temples, on anyone who looked to a frightened and angry public like they might be the wrong religion. We watched it happen after El Paso and Pittsburgh and Charleston. Every single time. Named. Sourced. Documented. The words came first. Every time.
And here is the part that Auntie needs you to understand about why this is not just ugly rhetoric from ugly people: it is a strategy. A fractured country is this administration’s preferred operating environment. A country where the Muslim family down the street is looking over its shoulder is a country that is not asking who authorized this war. A country where the synagogue has to send every child home through a trauma is a country that is not asking how seventeen Americans died and why the man responsible said bad things can happen. A country that is fighting itself — neighbor against neighbor, faith against faith, grief against grief — is a country that cannot hold power accountable.
And here is the part that should make you set down whatever you are holding and sit very still: the people who are supposed to be protecting us from the violence this rhetoric predictably produces have been systematically removed from their jobs.
Just days before Operation Epic Fury began, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff from CI-12, the bureau’s specialized counterintelligence unit that tracked threats from Iran. He fired them not because they had failed to do their jobs. He fired them because they had done their jobs — on the investigation into Trump’s classified documents. The unit that spent years building the intelligence networks, the source relationships, the institutional knowledge required to identify Iranian-directed plots on American soil — fired. Gone. Just before we started a war with Iran.
At the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which had been established specifically to counter secret campaigns by Iran and other countries. About half of the DOJ’s National Security Division counterterrorism prosecutors have left since the Trump administration took office. About a third of the division’s senior leadership is gone. The State Department office that oversaw counter-Iran terrorism initiatives was eliminated entirely during DOGE reorganizations and replaced with contractors who, by multiple accounts from former officials, have limited direct experience working on Iran. Matthew Olsen, who led the National Security Division during the Biden administration, said on the record and without equivocation: this is not an exaggeration. They are not as capable as they were a year and a half ago.
The White House, meanwhile, blocked DHS from releasing a joint security bulletin alerting state and local authorities to heightened threats after the Iran strikes began. The bulletin was written. The agencies that wrote it wanted it distributed. The White House stopped it. The same White House that posted Wii Sports memes decided that state and local law enforcement did not need to know that the threat environment had changed. When the FBI eventually released its own bulletin — warning California authorities that Iran had allegedly aspired to launch drone attacks against the West Coast before the war started — multiple U.S. and state law enforcement officials told CBS News the bulletin was not actionable, that there was no credible intelligence behind it, that it was not a real threat assessment. What it was, those officials suggested, was a story. Something to point to. Something to make people afraid of the right enemy at the right time.
Auntie has been doing this long enough to know that she is not supposed to say what she is about to say. It belongs in the file of thoughts that respectable people keep quiet. Conspiracy territory. QAnon. Tin foil. The kind of thing that gets you dismissed.
But Auntie is looking at the receipts, and the receipts are saying this: they started a war without a plan for winning it. They gutted the agencies responsible for protecting us from retaliation. They turned off the warning systems. They let the Islamophobic posts run. And they are now pointing at every act of violence — foreign-inspired, domestic, grieving-man-in-a-car, all of it — and saying: you see? You see why we have to keep going? You see why we cannot stop?
That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a pattern. And patterns are exactly what Unfugginbelievable was built to document.
The core lesson of September 11th was simple and it cost three thousand lives to learn it: when we fail to connect the dots, Americans die. The people who fired the dot-connectors, who dissolved the units, who blocked the bulletins, who posted the kindling — those people know what they did. They are counting on you not to say it out loud.
Auntie is saying it out loud.
Stay furious. Stay grounded. Stay human. And watch who benefits when the next thing burns.
Tits up, elbows out, babies. Auntie’s got the shillelagh and she is not going anywhere.
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