The demonization of Dearborn, Michigan
Islamophobic attacks on Michigan's seventh-largest city are a long-running staple of online discourse
With a sizable population of residents of Middle Eastern descent and the largest Muslim population per capita of any city in the United States, Dearborn, Michigan has been frequently subject to racist and Islamophobic scapegoating on social media. Attacks over the years have ranged from insinuations that the city is home to terrorist sleeper cells to complaints about an on-duty police officer wearing a hijab.
As seen in the graph of X posts above, the volume of this activity is not consistent; posts regarding Dearborn tend to occur in waves, and these waves are often triggered by major events that do not directly involve Dearborn. While these patterns of activity have historically been driven primarily by right-wing influencers, liberal participation increased significantly during the 2024 election season.
Right-wing Twitter (now X) influencers have been posting Islamophobic content about Dearborn for many, many years. Themes of these posts include fearmongering about sharia law, complaints about Muslims marching peacefully in public, and low-effort whining about a photo of a hijab-wearing cop standing next to a police vehicle. Occasional posts attacking Dearborn can be found throughout much of X’s history.
In a sudden reversal, numerous right-wing influencers pivoted temporarily to praising Dearborn in fall 2022 during efforts to ban various books with LGBTQ themes from public school libraries. Some of these posts specifically praise Muslim residents of Dearborn for participating in the efforts to remove the books in question, despite some of the posters having issued Islamophobic attacks against Dearborn on other occasions.
In the wake of the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, X posts from right-wing influencers targeting Dearborn surged in volume. These posts are laden with unfounded allegations of a significant terrorist presence or “sleeper cell” in the Michigan city, along with claims that Dearborn is “one of the top ISIS recruitment locations in the U.S.” Many of these posts originated with blue -check “verified” accounts, indicating that the influencers who posted them may have been paid by X for the engagement the posts received.
The 2024 U.S. election season brought the first wave of anti-Dearborn X posts driven significantly by liberal and anti-Trump accounts. These posts initially emerged in response to uncommitted votes during the primary, when former President Joe Biden was still running for re-election, but morphed into scapegoating over the general election outcome following Kamala Harris’s November 2024 loss. (Blaming Dearborn for the outcome is not based in mathematical reality, as even if every single eligible voter in Dearborn had voted for Harris, Trump would still have won the state of Michigan and the accompanying electoral votes.)
The tail end of 2025 saw a massive explosion in anti-Dearborn posts from right-wing X influencers. These posts include a mix of Islamophobic and general anti-immigrant rhetoric, and frequently equate immigration with invasion and conquest. Purveyors of recent anti-Dearborn material include U.S. Representative Randy Fine (R-Florida) and YouTube livestreamer Nick Shirley, better known for a recent misleading viral video alleging fraud in Minnesota daycare centers.
In 2025, anti-Dearborn traffic from liberal X users died down again, in part due to many liberals leaving the platform following the 2024 U.S. general election. Some of this rhetoric subsequently emerged elsewhere as these users became active on other platforms. On Bluesky, posts inaccurately blaming the relatively small city for Donald Trump’s electoral victory have become a periodic staple of liberal discourse, and have sometimes garnered significant engagement.
While the anti-Dearborn rhetoric originated as (and largely remains) a right-wing phenomenon, this particular Islamophobic dog whistle has unfortunately lodged itself to some extent into liberal narratives regarding the 2024 election as well. Unfortunately, susceptibility to bigotry and misleading rhetoric is a cross-ideological problem.