For Rep. Ismail Mohamed, it was a simple video to tell his constituents about a new, ceremonial street name in his district.
But soon, two of the leading online provocateurs of an aggressively anti-all-things-liberal online right pushed a different interpretation of the clip to their millions of followers. They said the video from Mohamed – an attorney and Democratic state representative – was a mask-slip moment revealing his true intentions as a Manchurian candidate building political power in America for Somalia.
For Mohamed, the episode captures naked racism at the center of a growing anti-immigration sentiment on the political right, as unleashed against an educated and accomplished new American.
“The fact that they start targeting some of the folks that are actually the productive immigrants who should be positively highlighted indicates that this goes beyond really what’s a ‘good’ immigrant, right?” Mohamed said in an interview.
“This is just targeting ethnicities and saying, ‘This is not the kind of immigrant that we want,’ based on ethnicity. And that’s the unfortunate reality that, I think often we don’t like to say it, but that’s sadly what’s happening.”
The video started as a 90-second update for constituents in his Columbus-area Statehouse district, populated in part by tens of thousands of fellow Somali immigrants. He had convinced the city to temporarily and ceremonially rename a street after Sayid Mohamed Abdullah Hassan, a national icon in Somalia.
He also mentioned the 20 or so federal, state and local Somali-American politicians in the nation and their shared interest in improving lives of “our people” there, including by waiving the national debt and addressing the piracy crisis offshore.
As he always does for his video updates, Mohamed cut the tape twice. Once in English and once in Somali.
‘This is an immigrant who is trying to infiltrate’
Mohamed moved to Columbus from Somalia, a failed state on the eastern horn of Africa, with his family when he was about 12. After graduating from Ohio State University’s law school, he became the first Somali-American to practice law in Ohio and is now one of the two first Somali-Americans to serve in the General Assembly.
His success means little to the operators behind two aggressive social media accounts influential among President Donald Trump and his voters – “End Wokeness” (3.8 million followers on X) and “LibsofTikTok” (4.3 million). Both accounts shared only the Somali-language version of the video.
“Their goal is to elect Somalians across the United States to unite to lobby for Somalia at the federal and state levels,” a caption with the video states.
Rep. Jennifer Gross, an Ohio Republican who Mohamed bumps elbows with at the Statehouse, shared the video from End Wokeness with a caption stating that Mohamed is a lawmaker and asking for her followers’ thoughts. (He’s hoping, with little optimism, she apologizes for that.)
Plenty of politicians will publicly speak non-English languages to flex for immigrants in their district, including now Secretary of State Marco Rubio or former vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine. And historically, other national minorities, like the Irish or Italians, built political power through explicit recruiting of their own.
Mohamed said he’s being singled out because of his race, with nationality as a thin top cover.
“I mean, they’re leaning into the thing because it’s their base of saying, ‘Oh, this is an immigrant who is trying to infiltrate.’ It kind of really goes with the whole kind of racist agenda of excluding,” he said.
