The Counter-Islamist Movement Has Won
The Muslim Brotherhood is on life support, and Israel is about to pull the plug.
I'd like to thank
for inviting me to appear on his Livestream last week (embedded above), in the wake of the news that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had announced the State Department had started the process of designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group.Jason hoped that I could join him to explain to his audience of "alternative spirituality" types—Jason is a fellow occultist in the Western Esoteric tradition—to explain the significance of this move and to lay out the history of the Brotherhood.
I accepted more out of obligation to speak out on the subject I'd built my career on over the last 15 years—and as a favor to a friend. I was not so eager to try to explain the Muslim Brotherhood and its history. It's a subject that documentaries lay out (this one is the best), and that I've seen long presentations and read in-depth books about by former colleagues. And I’m supposed to condense it and make it interesting to a bunch of viewers who are more eager to see content about Aleister Crowley than Hassan al-Banna? Man …
I reviewed some of these books that I hadn't dug into much in the last few years to refresh myself on the names, dates, and those details which I was not inclined to remember, in my attempt to give the broad sweep of Islamist history, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire provoking al-Banna to found the Brotherhood in Egypt on March 22, 1928, to the situation today, in which Hamas gasps for breath.
As I thought about these Islamist origins and where the movement had been in 2009, when I came on board as part of the opposition, compared to where it had arrived now, in 2025, I considered the potential impacts of Rubio’s announcement.
What if the federal government does designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist group? What difference will that make? Will it impact American Muslim groups long-identified with the Muslim Brotherhood network that emerged in the 1960s—and its allied Hamas support network that emerged in the early 1990s? (These are functionally different heads of the same Hydra.)
I named the key players in the essay embedded below, which sought to explain the American network:
And I came to an odd conclusion. I had not anticipated this, but in retrospect, I’d considered it to varying degrees for a few years now:
The Islamists are doomed.
The Muslim Brotherhood has had a terrible last 15 years. And Hamas has had an atrocious last couple of years.
And further: The American branch of this group, as symbolized in the various organizations long identified as Brotherhood support groups, have made no meaningful progress. In fact, they have only suffered further unmasking at this point.
Even mainstream and moderate Democrats now recognize the malevolence in CAIR that “fringe” right-wingers—as I was considered in 2010—were talking about. The facts are just there. This isn't anti-Muslim bigotry or conspiracy-mongering. The documents are available for anyone to peruse; the evidence presented at trials by the government is easily available.
And when we've been saying for 15 years that “CAIR = Hamas,” and then CAIR’s co-founder and head for decades, Nihad Awad, declares that the Oct. 7 terror attacks made him happy? The game's done. The mask's off. The Biden administration had to formally cut ties. CAIR and its allies have been exposed unambiguously at this point: They're Hamas supporters.
But it's even worse for the American Islamists. Here's a question I've been trying to answer for the last 10 years, but have come to no serious conclusions on:
Who are the leaders for the next generation of Islamists in America?
Who are the Millennials and Gen-Z Islamist activists?
Linda Sarsour was born in 1980. She is an Xer, and no one has emerged to take her position. I’ve been waiting for some young Muslim activist to arise, out-organizimg her and knocking her off the throne of anti-American Islamist activist hate. But no: Sarsour remains, Sarsour endures.
Even then, she is not akin to a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist in the objective of “chop-your-hands-off” sharia spreading across the planet. She's just another antisemite who has wormed her way into Democratic Party progressivism, using the multiculturalism card to deceive the naïve.
And that's really what's become of the next generation of potential Islamist activists. They just moved into being standard-issue leftists. The handful of millennial Islamists—serious religious fundamentalists, all—nobody outside of this little niche area of domestic extremist subversion knows who the hell they are.
So let’s just start considering it seriously now: The Muslim Brotherhood is dying. Hamas is almost destroyed—and that was the Brotherhood's crown jewel, its most powerful fighting force, and the most successful antisemitic terrorists of all time since the end of the Holocaust.
The Brotherhood's army is almost destroyed, its American branch is exposed—unable to replenish itself with fresh blood—and even throughout the Arab world, it has become a pariah. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced the same decision of terrorist designation on Nov. 14, 2014—more than a decade ago!—when it became clear to them and many of their neighbors that the Brothers were not exactly down with monarchies. They would be next for revolutionary destruction. The UAE even went as far as to name CAIR and MAS as part of the Brotherhood.
And how did much of this happen? Because of the Counter-Islamist movement—the network of nonprofits, authors, bloggers, publications, politicians, and public figures who have advocated so long at significant personal costs.
They called us racists and anti-Muslim bigots. But we knew all along that authentic, moderate Muslims throughout the Middle East agreed with us 100 percent about the Brotherhood. After all, we had to follow their lead: They were the ones on the front lines of the fight.
The facts about the Muslim Brotherhood have spread all around the globe. They're now exposed in front of the whole human race. Everyone knows who they are—and who they have been for nearly a century.
And so, while there are still battles to be fought and work to be done to oppose Islamism, if you look at the these various trends, this comes into focus as the direction we're headed. And in some ways, we can see this as the most dangerous time of all. As the enemy is coming so close to its demise, it will grow more desperate and less predictable in its drive to survive.
But as I came to these realizations about the death of Islamism and the success of the activist movement which I'd participated in, I took the insights a few steps further, which I'll detail in future follow-ups here, along a similar theme:
If the Muslim Brotherhood is on its last legs, if the war against Islamism is almost won, then what of the broader "War on Terror?" Is that nearing victory too? Yes, and I’ll explain why.
What if the collapse of Islamism is representative of a further shift in 21st-century ideology? What if part of the reason we're not seeing the Islamism of 100 years ago transfer to the young is because, as an ideological system, it was built on the technological mediums which enabled it in the 1920s and the 1930s? What if the text-based movements of the 19th and the 20th centuries were expressions of the technological capabilities which enabled them to spread?
We got newspaper ideology, magazine ideology, radio ideology, broadcast TV ideology; then we truly started degrading into cable TV ideology, talk radio ideology, internet ideology; then social media ideology, streaming ideology, smartphone ideology, algorithm ideology, and TikTok ideology.
What next? Are you as sick of ideology as I am yet?
Perhaps it's time to start saying goodbye to the “Ism” ideology that we grew up with all our lives and to prepare as the newest innovative technology—AI—will now come to shape and transform our perceptions of everything—all over again.
As we try to predict what will emerge next, Special Agent Dale Cooper’s words come to mind: that we are preparing to enter “a place both wonderful and strange.”
Thank you for this, David. Our teacher, Prof. Barry Rubin, would be proud. We need him, and if not him, his wisdom, more than ever these days.