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Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition and greetings from my adopted home of Nashville, a city that has a political history both rich and fractured. The latter term I mean literally: A few years back, state Republicans divided up the city’s congressional district into thirds to dilute Democratic power. The result was various communities that had been tied together were now strategically placed into different GOP districts. One of those is Little Kurdistan, a diaspora of Kurds who came to this country for reasons most immigrants do: because they were fleeing violence, looking for a better life for their family, or simply drawn to the quintessential American Dream.
I spent some time in Little Kurdistan last week in pursuit of another increasingly quintessential American story: to document the fallout of the virulent Islamophobia that has burst out on Capitol Hill in recent days. Among the GOP members of Congress who have declared that they don’t believe Islam to be compatible with America is Rep. Andy Ogles, a congressman whose district includes a slice of Little Kurdistan. What I found among the people there was worse than anger. It was fear—fear that the shift toward open Islamophobia presages something darker than mere rhetoric.
Before we get to it, a quick note. This is a newsletter dedicated to covering the Democratic party. The people of Little Kurdistan aren’t all Democrats, naturally. But the title of this newsletter is also The Opposition. And to understand what it means to oppose the Trump administration in this day and age, it’s vital to understand what the climate created by Trumpism has done to voters and communities across the country. That’s why I spent the day in Little Kurdistan. And it’s why our readers recognize the value of what we are doing here at The Bulwark.
The support of our Bulwark+ members makes possible this kind of on-the-ground reporting. Please consider becoming a member today—at 20 percent off the normal annual price:
–Lauren
What Life’s Like for the Muslim Constituents of Congress’s Nastiest Islamophobe
A visit to Nashville’s Little Kurdistan.
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Nashville, Tennessee
A SHORT FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE from Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk and Jason Aldean’s Rooftop Bar—just two of the many country music celebrity–branded establishments that dot Nashville’s lower Broadway—sits Little Kurdistan.
To make that trip from downtown is to encounter the American South at its most glorious. There’s a pitmaster working a smoker on the side of the road, a Waffle House packed to the brim, and people perched on lowered tailgates at the Sonic drive-in soaking in the pristine 75-degree mid-March weather.
Keep driving until you hit Nolensville Road, and you’ll eventually come upon Little Kurdistan. From the outside, it’s utterly unassuming; it looks like any of the other hundreds of roadside shopping plazas found throughout the city. But this one is different. Store fronts are plastered with Kurdish signs advertising halal meat and shawarma. A mural depicting people playing backgammon in the streets of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, wraps around the side of a building. You’ve reached the cultural hub for the 20,000 Kurds who live in Nashville, many of whose families began arriving here in the 1970s after fleeing persecution in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
Today, Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish population in North America. And the restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores, and mosques that fill Little Kurdistan’s block-long retail space have become a point of pride—a symbol that the city has transformed from a sleepy state capital into a booming international destination. On any given day, you can hear a mix of Kurdish and Southern accents chatting over plates of grilled kebabs at Edessa Restaurant, or browsing the pastry case stacked full of flakey baklava at Azadi International Food Market and Bakery.
For years, this place has been a relatively peaceful, if not sleepy, mosaic; an ethnic neighborhood that blossomed in one of the South’s fastest-growing hubs. But the climate has recently become more tense.
As it happens, Little Kurdistan falls within the boundaries of Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, which is represented by one of Congress’s most virulently anti-Muslim members. Republican Rep. Andy Ogles, now in his second term in the House, has spent the past week spewing Islamophobic comments on social media—and then unapologetically doubling down on them when called out.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie,” Ogles tweeted last week.
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In another post, he wrote: “If we don’t cease to import islam, the West falls.”
He shared images depicting Muslims as violent criminals and terrorists and said that “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.”
Forty-eight hours ago, he posted that he doesn’t “care about ‘dangerous rhetoric,’” because the “threat is dangerous muslims.”
Anyone thinking that Ogles might be doing this performatively, to cynically reap the political rewards of some sort of anti-Islam backlash from the war in Iran, need only check ou