“[Zohran] Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.” These are the words of venture capitalist Shaun Maguire directed at Muslim New York Assembly member Zohran Mamdani.
Shaun Maguire is a general partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. He has used his social media to spread and platform anti-Muslim rhetoric and conspiracies.
Maguire has persistently tweeted Islamophobic rhetoric regarding Assembly member Mamdani. In the same tweet in which Maguire claimed that Mamdani “came from a culture that lies about everything,” he also engaged with notorious and proud Islamophobic figure Laura Loomer to promote the false and inflammatory “taqiyya” narrative, a trope often used by Islamophobic and far-right circles to accuse Muslims of deceit and lying as a religious mandate. In 2024, the conservative New York Post’s editorial board reported that Loomer is a self-described “pro-white nationalist.”
In another tweet on July 4, 2025, he pushed the conspiratorial belief that Muslims are engaged in a global religious plot, stating: “People don’t understand the game being played. There are hundreds of millions of people whose #1 objective is ending Israel; then America. It’s a religious goal... NYC is a chess piece in a bigger game.”
Maguire’s Islamophobic views are not new. On October 7, 2023, seemingly referring to the Palestinian population in Gaza, Maguire tweeted, “Just so you understand why Israelis have been so vigilant in the past… it was living with knowledge that there were barbarians at the gates.”
Maguire has also claimed multiple times that the deaths in Gaza are “Pallywood”—a derogatory term used to allege that the videos displaying the suffering in Gaza are staged. In just one instance, on October 25, 2023, he tweeted, “In Gaza there’s what is sometimes referred to as ‘Pallywood’… This is an *Info War* — trust nothing.”
On his X platform, Maguire also frequently circulates media and content from MEMRI, a media monitor that has earned a reputation for distributing selective translations of Middle Eastern media that “create the impression that Arab media is full of anti-Western bias and urges Muslims in the West to commit acts of violence and terrorism.” MEMRI’s translations are consistently used by prominent Islamophobes to forward anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.
On May 7, 2025, Shaun Maguire escalated his pattern of Islamophobic rhetoric in a tweet replying to Muslim religious figure Dr. Omar Suleiman, in which he appears to be referring to all Muslims: “Their strategy is to provoke you with terrorist attack after terrorist attack. And then when you finally respond, they portray you as the villain.”
Shaun Maguire’s online presence has also veered into threatening and paranoid territory, particularly in response to public criticism of his Islamophobic comments. On July 7, 2025, he wrote to an individual critical of his remarks: “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me. You may not know this… but I’ve been watching you.”
Even following criticism for his July 4 remarks, Maguire has continued to post and endorse anti-Muslim tropes. On July 13, 2025, Maguire reposted a tweet from Amy Mek, who is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rise Align Ignite Reclaim (RAIR), a hate organization and website that regularly publishes anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, including that Muslims seek to “infiltrate and destabilize the West.” In the tweet reposted by Maguire, Mek claims that the “Islamization of America rages on,” yet again forwarding an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory. In the past, Mek has also repeatedly promoted hatred against other racial and religious minorities, reportedly encouraging, for example, her readers to follow a white supremacist and anti-Semite who praises Hitler and denies the Holocaust.