Washington Finally Calls the Muslim Brotherhood What It Is — and States Aren't Waiting for the Courts
Washington's January 2026 terror designation of Muslim Brotherhood branches has opened a reckoning — exposing decades of ideological infiltration and financial plunder enabled by failed progressive policy.
When federal authorities designated three Muslim Brotherhood branches as Foreign Terrorist Organizations in January 2026, they pulled back a curtain that powerful institutions had spent decades keeping shut. What emerged underneath was not fringe paranoia but a documented, decades-long infiltration strategy — one that Minnesota's Medicaid fraud catastrophe had already exposed in brutal, human detail.
The State Department pointed to a 1991 document seized by the FBI that outlined a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" designed to "eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within." That memo was no theoretical exhibit. Five Holy Land Foundation leaders were convicted in 2008 for terrorism financing on the strength of it, drawing sentences up to 65 years. Georgetown scholars dismiss it as an outlier; the federal courtroom record does not.
Minnesota's fraud epidemic shows precisely how open borders, multiculturalism and DEI mandates built the conditions for industrial-scale theft. U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson made the stakes concrete: billions in Medicaid funds disbursed since 2018 represent fraud — not estimates, not projections. Nearly all defendants in the Feeding Our Future scheme were Somali immigrants who stripped pandemic relief programs bare while Minnesota officials deflected accountability.
"This fraud crisis didn't come out of nowhere," Thompson said in a December 2025 Star Tribune interview. "It's the result of widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Politicians who turned a blind eye. Agencies that failed to act. Prosecutors and law enforcement who didn't push hard enough. Reporters who ignored the story."
Those words land harder knowing who shaped the legislative environment. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat representing the affected Minneapolis district, sponsored the MEALS Act, which streamlined the precise funding channels the fraud network exploited. She asserts no knowledge of the schemes despite that legislative role. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison declined interviews about their administrations' awareness of the fraud.
The scale of the theft only became visible when a YouTuber looked through a window. Nick Shirley's December 2025 video showing Somali-owned day care centers operating without a child in sight went viral, exposing a pattern that federal prosecutors traced directly to international money transfers. It was not the first signal. Fozia Sheik Ali received a federal prison sentence in 2017 for defrauding more than $1 million in child care payments — a conviction that drew little sustained attention from the institutions Thompson would later indict with words.
Multiculturalism, as activist Brandon Smith argues, functions as "an updated version of Gramsci's Marxist cultural hegemony strategy, combined with third world notions of ethnic supremacy or religious supremacy." The theory describes a "war of position" — a patient campaign to capture civil society institutions and hollow out state power from within. Minnesota's multicultural policy framework constructed exactly the infrastructure that Brotherhood-linked organizations then turned to both ideological and financial advantage.
The alliance between leftist politicians and Brotherhood-linked organizations is documented and deliberate. The New York Post reported that CAIR donated to Zohran Mamdani's Unity and Justice Fund during the 2025 New York City mayoral race; CAIR disputed the claim without independent verification. The Middle East Forum documented 389 donations from Columbia University employees and 508 from NYU employees to the Mamdani campaign — numbers that raise pointed questions about whether academic institutions now serve as conduits for coordinated political support.
State governments moved to protect their citizens where federal hesitation lingered. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated both the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist organizations in November 2025, blocking the groups from acquiring land. Abbott stated the groups had made their objectives "clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam's 'mastership of the world.'" Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed with an executive order, though a federal judge issued a temporary injunction in March 2026. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit in February 2026 to shut down CAIR chapters operating in the state.
The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs documented what it calls a "Red-Green alliance" between Marxist radicals and Islamists in a 2025 report, citing the May 2025 murders of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington and a June 2025 incendiary attack in Boulder, Colorado. The report's framing is unsparing: "the Reds' revolution requires revolutionary momentum, which Islamists provide through the religious compulsion of jihad, while far left progressives serve as 'useful idiots' by Islamists whose objective is religious totalitarianism."
The alliance's most glaring contradiction plays out in the LGBTQ+ community. Hamas imposes imprisonment, torture and death for homosexuality in Gaza. LGBTQ+ Palestinians risk their lives to flee to Israel for protection. Yet the Middle East Forum documented groups including "Queers for Hamas" and "Gays for Gaza" actively aligning with Islamist terrorist organizations.
"As a member of the LGBTQ+ community and advocate for human rights, it is troubling to witness segments of our community aligning themselves with Islamist terrorist organizations," the forum stated. "The alliance between segments of the LGBTQ+ community and Islamist terrorist organizations is a dangerous and increasingly lethal contradiction."
Dr. Kobby Barda of the Multidisciplinary School – HIT Holon frames the challenge with precision. What the United States faces, he argues, is "a slow, delayed response to a Brotherhood system built over three decades — an ecosystem of schools, community institutions, campus networks, nonprofits, international funding and local projects designed to shape cultural, political and legal influence." Three decades of infrastructure do not dismantle in a news cycle.
Yet Barda sees the inflection point: "The year 2025 may be the moment when the United States not only recognizes the scope of this program but finally begins to dismantle it."
The scholarly record supports that reading. Lorenzo Vidino of George Washington University documented a "substantial and well-organized" Brotherhood presence in the United States reaching back to the late 1950s. Vidino and Sergio Altuna wrote in January 2026 that a post-2013 wave of Egyptian Brotherhood members constructed a "decentralized, yet tightly interconnected ecosystem" of schools, nonprofits and campus networks — findings that track precisely with both state designation actions and federal legal strategy.
The January 2026 federal designation is not the end of this story. It is, at most, the end of the beginning — a first reckoning with a network that progressive policy built the scaffolding for and complacent institutions refused to see. States that act now, while federal courts hesitate, are not overreaching. They are governing.