Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America's Freedom

Published by Bombardier Books

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-63758-004-2

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-005-9

Woke Army:

The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom

© 2023 by Asra Q. Nomani

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Tiffani Shea

Interior Design by Yoni Limor

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To my family by birth—my mother, Sajida Nomani, and father, Zafar Nomani; my son, Shibli; brother, Mustafa; and niece, Safiyyah, and nephew, Samir—for your unconditional love.

To my family by destiny—Lily and the accidental activists from school boards to the streets of Tehran who triumph over fear with moral courage for goodness upon this earth.

Woman. Life. Freedom.

Table of Contents

Letter to the Reader

Cast of Characters

Preface

Chapter 1

Establishing Legitimacy in the Resistance

Chapter 2

Building a Base at 500 Grove Street

Chapter 3

Parallel Ideological Movement Emerging

Chapter 4

Silencing Reformers with Disinformation

Chapter 5

Weaponizing Islamophobia

Chapter 6

Launching a Disinformation Website

Chapter 7

Living with the Reality of Jihadis

Chapter 8

Exploiting the Ground Zero Mosque

Chapter 9

Battling for the Narrative: One-Two Punch

Chapter 10

Discrediting House Muslims

Chapter 11

Building a Propaganda Machine

Chapter 12

Hunting Masked Keyboard Warriors

Chapter 13

Going After Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Chapter 14

Killing Charlie Hebdo

Chapter 15

Waging Character Assassination

Chapter 16

Mounting a Muslim Reform Resistance

Chapter 17

Fighting a Political Campaign

Chapter 18

Recognizing New Field Marshals

Chapter 19

Unmasking

Chapter 20

Facing a Woke Army

Chapter 21

Exploding into an American Intifada

Chapter 22

Waging a War on America’s Children

Chapter 23

Courage is Contagious

Chapter 24

Woman. Life. Freedom.

Gratitude

About the Author

Letter to the Reader

Mahsa Amini’s death sentence was written decades ago.

When the twenty-two-year-old student emerged from the Shahid Haqqani Metro Station, just off Haghani Highway in Iran’s capital of Tehran, the so-called morality policy blocked her path. She was a victim of not only the security forces in Iran but decades of disinformation by a dangerous network of academics, activists, ideologues, and others who have been the propaganda arm of extremists within the Muslim world who push an interpretation of Islam that denies the woman the freedom to feel the wind in her hair.

I call them the Woke Army.

Mahsa Amini’s blood is on their hands.

Starting with my first encounter with their character assassins in 2002 and ending with our battle cry in 2022—Woman. Life. Freedom.—our lived expertise fighting the Woke Army is a guide for you into its sick, depraved operations in the West over the past two decades. And a guidepost for how we can defeat it with the moral courage and intellectual clarity we see on the streets of Iran today, among girls also declaring death to tyranny.

May you be inspired to action and truth.

Asra Nomani

October 25, 2022

Morgantown, West Virginia

Cast of Characters

The Woke Army is an organized, well-financed global network of Muslim radicals and leftist activists who exploit the freedoms of the West to promote a system of beliefs that runs counter to any values of freedom.

Today, Woke Army adherents exploit the ideas in critical race theory, a philosophy that is at its heart a form of cultural Marxism—whereby slavish adherence to orthodoxy and ideology, however dangerous or stifling, is equated with justice. All cultures and societies have been marked by a hierarchy of human value in which people have been devalued and denied fundamental human rights because of identity, from race to religion, gender, and other elements of humanity. What has happened is that ideologues from this new ideology have created a new hierarchy of human value that denigrates people based on new biases, prejudices, and bigotry. In this upside-down system, peoples of color are the perpetual victims of systemic racism that can be traced directly to the incorrigible white supremacist views of the Caucasian majorities throughout history.

Never mind that America fought a war to end slavery, abolished Jim Crow segregation, integrated its military and public schools, enacted landmark civil rights legislation barring racial discrimination, and elected a black president. This is all blithely ignored or written off by the Woke perpetual grievance-mongers as the propaganda of the patriarchy undergirded by the bogeyman of white supremacy. Because the Woke Army asserts that its arguments are unassailably correct, any and all who oppose them are branded—often by well organized social media mobs or actual ones—as recalcitrant racists.

The cancer of cancel culture spreading throughout America, the West, and even my motherland of India—with people singled out for firing, ridicule, or shaming for statements that to the sane majority represent the parameters of necessary debate—can be directly laid at the feet of the silencers. Atop this, the Woke Army has embraced all forms of identity politics so that the list of uncriticizable interest groups—gays, the transgendered, women (well, women of color and liberal women, at least), and Muslims of a certain stripe (and particularly anti-Semitic Muslims)—grows larger every day. While activists in the Woke Army vow they wish to have an honest conversation about race in America, they in fact want the exact opposite.

Their edict is clear: you will comply with our views of systemic racism and our cures for it—granting slavery reparations, enforcing quotas, defunding the police, and indoctrinating your kids, for starters—or we will shut you up and shut you down.

There are some brave free thinkers who resist the Woke Army.

The Woke Army must be stopped to save America—and the world.

The Woke Army

Muslim Ideologues and Their Allies

1.Hatem Bazian—Director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, at the University of California, Berkeley; Students for Justice in Palestine cofounder

2.John Esposito—Founding director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University

3.Khaled Beydoun—Associate professor at Wayne State University Law School

4.Jonathan Brown—Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University

5.Nathan Lean—Former research director at the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University

6.Omid Safi—Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University

Donors

1.Open Society Foundations

2.Proteus Fund

Woke Organizations

1.Antifa

2.African American Policy Forum

3.Black Lives Matter

4.Center for American Progress

5.Emgage

6.International Institute of Islamic Thought

7.Justice Democrats

8.ReThink Media

9.Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

Muslim Organizations

1.Council on American-Islamic Relations

2.Dream Defenders

3.Electronic Intifada

4.Islamic Networks Group

5.MPower Change

6.MoveOn.org

7.Muslim Advocates

8.MuslimMatters

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

1.Nihad Awad—CAIR cofounder, executive director

2.Zahra Billoo—CAIR San Francisco Bay Area executive director

3.Arsalan Bukhari—Former CAIR national strategic communications manager

4.Ibrahim Hooper—CAIR cofounder, national communications director

5.Robert McCaw—CAIR government affairs department director

6.Corey Saylor—Former director of the Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia at CAIR; deputy director of strategy at ReThink Media

7.Imraan Siddiqi—CAIR Washington executive director

LoonWatch

This is an online blog where anonymous writers smear people they oppose as racist, anti-Muslim, and Islamophobic. These bloggers refer to their targets as loons, or lunatics.

1.Muhammad Tauseef Akbar a.k.a. Garibaldi—CAIR Chicago research director

2.Javad Hashmi a.k.a. Danios at LoonWatch, a.k.a. J. Hashmi at MuslimMatters, a.k.a. DrMaxtor, a.k.a. 1DrM—Physician and Harvard University PhD student

3.Ahmed Rehab a.k.a. Emperor—CAIR Chicago executive director

Writers and Allies

1.Wajahat Ali—Contributing New York Times Opinion writer; former co-host, Al Jazeera America

2.Amani Al-Khatahtbeh—MuslimGirl founder

3.Shahed Amanullah—Cofounder, numerous blogs; former Obama administration senior technology advisor

4.Reza Aslan—Author

5.Hamdan Azhar—Muslim Writers Collective cofounder

6.Glenn Greenwald—The Intercept cofounder

7.Mehdi Hasan—Former Al Jazeera host; MSNBC host

8.Murtaza Hussain—The Intercept reporter

9.Arsalan Iftikhar—Former national legal director at CAIR; The Muslim Guy blog founder

10.Hoda Katebi—Writer

11.Sheila Musaji—The American Muslim blog founding editor

12.Aziz Poonawalla—Brass Crescent Awards cofounder

13.Cenk Uygur—The Young Turks founder; Justice Democrats cofounder

Activists

1.Maha Elgenaidi—Islamic Networks Group founder

2.Farhana Khera—Muslim Advocates founding president and executive director

3.Linda Sarsour—Women’s March cochair; MPower Change cofounder

Politicians

1.Keith Ellison—Minnesota attorney general

2.Ilhan Omar—Minnesota congressional representative

3.Rashida Tlaib—Michigan congressional representative

4.Atif Qarni—Former Virginia Secretary of Education

5.Abrar Omeish—Fairfax County, VA, School Board member

MuslimMatters

This is a website established by the founders of AlMaghrib Institute, which promotes the hard-line interpretation of Islam called Salafism.

1.Yasir Qadhi a.k.a. ibn al Hyderabadee—AlMaghrib Institute and MuslimMatters cofounder

2.Amad Shaikh a.k.a. Amad—MuslimMatters cofounder

3.Amir Saheb a.k.a. Mujahideen Ryder, a.k.a. ibn Percy—Blogger

Preface

Born in Bombay, India, in the early summer of 1965 to a Muslim family, I am part of the first postcolonial generation of my family, following the end of almost a century of white British rule of the subcontinent’s brown and black people of color from 1858 to 1947. During that time, the British showcased the worst of colonialism, pillaging the treasures, people, and spirit of the land, while also offering a glimpse of British organizational acumen, building railroads, educating students, and managing civil services.

From his humble home office in the city of Wardha, India, my paternal grandfather was a court-appointed defense attorney for freedom fighters, usually young Indian men fighting against British rule, even in one case torching a police station. He lost most of his cases. The British exiled his clients across the black waters of the Indian Ocean off the nation’s southern coast to a prison in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

My father, Mohammad Zafar Alam Nomani, was born in June 1933 in British India. He climbed a banyan tree as a boy to cheer Mahatma Gandhi, an original architect of the nonviolent movement, as he marched for India’s freedom from British rule. My father survived the Bengal famine of 1943, standing in line for US food aid that came in the form of sorghum wheat meant for livestock. He still remembers the coarse scratch of the wheat as he swallowed every morsel he got from his mother.

My mother, Sajida Nomani, was born in British India in 1940, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, not far from my father’s ancestral village. When she was two years old, her father, also an attorney, suddenly died, leaving her mother a widow with nine children and no income. Growing up in the village of Jaigahan, my mother lived separate from the touch of British rule but remembers the curiosity she’d hear from some family members when they caught an occasional glimpse of a white woman, not as a symbol of oppression but rather a curiosity. Sent to live with family in the hill station of Panchgani, India, not far from Bombay, she studied as a day student at a British convent, St. Joseph’s High School, despite the protestations of a cousin who thought the family’s children should be educated at a Muslim school.

Months before Indians won freedom from British rule on August 14, 1947, my grandfather went to the state capital and turned over his British title, medal, and honors to the British leaders representing the queen of England.

On Independence Day 1947, my mother remembers the sweet taste of Cadbury that the kind white British nuns at her school handed out in celebration. Standing at the Wardha District court square, my father remembers watching a family friend, a government official, pull the Union Jack down from a flagpole as the Indian flag ascended. Joyful locals handed out sweets that those gathered, including my father, enjoyed, smiling widely at their new freedom.

After my parents married in 1962, my older brother, Mustafa, was born, and then I was born in the summer of 1965, less than two decades after India’s liberation. My father left for America as a PhD student at Rutgers University, with a scarce few dollars in his pocket. My mother left two years later, raising the money for my brother’s and my airfare on TWA, making fifty cents an hour babysitting other people’s children. When I arrived, I learned English as a second language and ate free breakfasts for children living in poverty. At home, when we woke up for water at night, we waited after turning on the light switch to give the cockroaches time to scamper under the cupboards. On weekends, we sold cotton kurtas, or tunics, at the local Englishtown Flea Market.

My father, eighty-eight, and my mother, eighty, oppose colonization. They oppose imperialism. They certainly oppose oppression, injustice, and systemic racism.

But they did not teach me to hate white people.

They did not teach me to blame white people for any setbacks I face.

They absolutely did not teach me to expect reparations, quotas, or handouts because of any grievances of systemic racism that my people have faced.

Rather, they intuitively understood one of America’s greatest gifts: the impulse of the country and its citizens to reward an easy acceptance to those willing to work hard and embrace the pluralistic values that make America a fundamentally decent and prosperous place to live.

That makes me an enemy of a dangerous, well-funded radical cult that is subverting fundamental American values of democracy, meritocracy, and progress with tainted, flawed philosophies about systemic racism, white privilege, and intersectionality packaged in an ideology of critical race theory that blames white supremacy and whiteness for the world’s racial injustices.

Growing up in Morgantown, West Virginia, reading the Qur’an and the girl detective mystery series, Nancy Drew, I embraced liberal American values of freedom, self-determination, and secular governance. The wind blows in my hair. I shake hands with men. I believe a Muslim woman can marry anyone she chooses. I brought into my home and family a puppy named Lily despite a religious edit that angels will not visit a home with a dog inside. When Lily died in January 2021, my family wept. I live by the positive values of honesty, integrity, and compassion that I learned from my parents. I also refuse to be blind to the wrongs committed in the name of Islam by those who interpret the religion to discriminate against girls and women, practice virulent anti-Semitism, and carry out violent jihad against the West while trying to bully and harass Muslims like me who disagree with their ideas of hate. And I am firmly against any religion in political governance.

As an immigrant and a journalist, I feel an allegiance to the pluralistic and secular country that has sheltered my family and given me the freedom to speak and write freely. Of course, America is imperfect. I’ve read the troubling parts of its history, and I am as dismayed as the next person about the fractious nature of contemporary politics. But I roundly reject the notions—widely promulgated in certain echo chambers these days—that America at its core is racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim.

My own experience tells me otherwise. Our family’s experience has shown that there is no conflict between being a Muslim and an American so long as we understand that respect and tolerance is a two-way street—that as we build and attend our mosques, we also embrace the concepts of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the live-and-let-live social attitude that has served America so well for so long. To ask this of all newcomers to America is hardly racist or oppressive. It’s a tried-and-true recipe for success, assimilation, and happiness.

I also believe in the value of owning up. A cadre of dedicated Muslim extremists carried out the 9/11 attacks. Muslim terrorists kidnapped and beheaded my colleague and friend, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in Pakistan in 2002. Then, they lay their prayer rugs upon the quickly washed bloodied floor and laid their heads in prayer in prostration to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The murderous thugs of ISIS carried out their rape and carnage in the name of a theocracy tied to fundamentalist Islam. Islamic terrorism does not define Islam. But it is real and cannot be denied away by exhortations of Islamophobia or racism.

Yet, while I believe my views fall well within the mainstream of the vast majority of ordinary Americans, they have gotten me pilloried by my coreligionists and their allies. Starting seventeen years ago in 2004, I have been viciously attacked as a Zionist media whore, racist, American apologist, and Islamophobe by a network of anonymous character assassins. I undertook a multiyear investigation to uncover the people behind these attacks, their network, their goals, and their funding, and this book is based on more than three hundred interviews with sources, twenty subpoenas, thousands of pages of documents, emails, texts, court filings, and transcripts, and hundreds of hours of video and audio. I contacted the individuals named in the book for comment, and I included their statements in the narrative when they responded and noted that they declined interviews when they did not. If they refused to comment, I attempted to incorporate public statements to fairly reflect their positions. When quoting written material, I have included the original text, including grammatical and spelling errors, because literary forensics—the science of identifying writing and word patterns—has been a critical part of my investigation.

My critics and those who continue to hound me might surprise you. They are politicians, academicians, and the officials of a powerful network that much of the media today characterizes as mainstream when, in fact, they are anything but. They grab headlines as representatives of organizations with an alphabet soup of names, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, MPower Change, Emgage, Muslim Advocates, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, Muslim Public Affairs Council, and many others. I call this loose coalition the Honor Brigade, for its members feel at every turn the need to defend the honor of Islam against any and all who would have the temerity to criticize it.

The Honor Brigade has embedded itself in America’s race conflict, promoting the flawed argument that Muslims are a race, and they are part of a new Woke Army.

After the tragic murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer, its intersection with groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists moved forward full steam ahead. The Muslim network I had been investigating is part of a radical ideological cult that subscribes to the thesis of critical race theory and is hell-bent on throwing America into a class and race war. Muslims have tried to do to me what radical activists are now attempting to do to so many Americans: shaming to silence.

This dangerous cult is woke in sheep’s clothing because it purports to stand for the admirable and commonly shared principles of racial justice and equality, but under the soft wooly surface lurks a wolf—a wolf that seeks power by humbling the United States by branding as racist its institutions, its history, and its people—a wolf that is willing to savagely attack anything and anybody that stands between it and its goals.

I wrote this book to give you a primer on how this dangerous network works and arm you with the intellectual and psychological tools to protect and inoculate yourself, your family, your community, and your country from its diabolical plot.

This is some of what I learned: for the Woke Army, no slight must go unchallenged while the most heinous crimes are explained away as devoid of any connection to the cause. Those who make the obvious connection between the cult and violence are branded racist. To be clear, the ideologues in this cult have as much right to speak freely as you and I do and to criticize their critics. But their tactics are often not the tactics of those of us who value free speech. Borrowing from the playbook of identity politics, they use social media mobs, anonymous trolls, and other forms of intimidation to attempt to silence those who oppose them in a classic disinformation campaign of subterfuge, suppression, and manipulation. They get away with this because much of America’s mainstream media—loathe to be seen as politically incorrect—gives cover to their phony moderate and activist labels.

Clinical neuropsychologist Orli Peter, who specializes in the assessment and treatment of trauma survivors, explains how the Woke Army exploits empathy through its manipulation of the narrative and storytelling to essentially hijack the parts of our brain that process emotions, limiting cognitive, rational, logical processing in the prefrontal cortex. They create a phenomenon of suicidal empathy, shaming people to subsume themselves to their own destruction, says Peter. If you resist, they set out to destroy you because you stand in the way of their campaign of manipulation.

I know this firsthand. This network has waged a relentless and often vicious character assassination campaign against Muslim reformers and others with similar viewpoints. Their goal: to discredit and silence those who have the gall to question their narrative that all the ails of our society can be reduced to racism, or in the case of Muslims, Islamophobia. Their tactics are the tactics of bullies and authoritarians, not democrats. Their Twitter mobs and blog posts are staffed by tenured, high-placed academics at prestigious universities, activists at civil rights and social justice organizations, and writers at mainstream media outlets, all the while many of them also hiding behind pseudonyms to hound their targets on social media.

I have used forensic cyber-investigative measures, a civil lawsuit, subpoenas, and old-fashioned gumshoe reporting to unmask them. Using my experience as a former Wall Street Journal reporter, my hunt to unmask anonymous trolls harassing Muslim reformers for our calls for women’s rights and tolerance within my Muslim community led me to uncover a wider network of ideologues hijacking good intentions and empathy to usurp our nation’s democratic ideals.

It has led to one organization: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as CAIR. It poses as the Muslim version of the NAACP, claiming to be a civil rights group dedicated solely to protecting the rights of Muslim Americans. But my multiyear investigation into this network is a probe I undertook to get a better understanding of the group that was clearly helping to organize my critics, and the results of my probe suggest far more sinister goals. At its core, this network is anti-Semitic and has contempt for secular American values. It supports a dangerous worldview that Islam ought to be at the center of politics, setting laws, public policy, and regulatory rules. Substitute the word Islam with Christian, and a Christian theocracy that espoused these ideas would be just as disturbing (and five hundred years ago it was), and yet its members enjoy legitimacy in the wider network of the Woke Army. This network sponsors campaigns to help political movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, to win control of Muslim countries, with draconian laws that criminalize women, girls, and gay and transgender men and women. Its sympathies for purveyors of Islamic terrorism are more than theoretical. Members of the CAIR network have been working to bring ISIS brides back to America, free Guantanamo Bay detainees, free al-Qaeda prisoners in US jails, and destroy Israel even by violent means.

All the while, the real needs of disadvantaged minority groups in America to psychologically progress suffers while being forced into a backseat by the bizarre politics of the Woke Army, and the youth suffer because of the failures of this network of community leaders and their hijinks. This network’s reputation as mainstream among much of the American media is baffling to anyone who has seriously looked behind its often slick and well-funded public relations façade. When this network and its fellow travelers decided to go after me and just recently also tried to topple my son’s magnet high school in Northern Virginia for lack of diversity, even though its ranks are filled with mostly Asian immigrant families of color—I decided to look into them.

This book is a guide to the Woke Army—an unholy alliance of Muslim radicals with mostly radicalized elites from the professoriate and professional classes, indoctrinated college kids, anarchy-inclined Antifa thugs, and perpetual race-baiters. They mean business, and their business is a radical transformation of America in which noble-sounding ideas like social justice, income equality, equity, and protections against hate speech are code for upending the very pillars of American democracy with principles of censorship, racial division, polarization, and Islamism, or Islamic governance. They would do away with the First Amendment, the concept of equal treatment under the law, and the concept of your ability to confront your accuser. How do we know this? You need only to look to the college campuses for a preview: the draconian speech codes, the sexual harassment kangaroo courts, and the mobbing and cancelling of speakers whose views they despise. Look at K-12 indoctrination to see how the Woke Army is racializing every issue and turning classrooms into ideological indoctrination centers, and faculty and staff training into struggle sessions, akin to the Cultural Revolution of Communist China.

And now they’re coming for you—your schools, your city councils, your police departments, your employers. Do we really want the people who are sowing chaos and ruining the livability of cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, and New York City in charge of the bedrock institutions of our country? Do we want superintendents and school boards changing curriculum so that they indoctrinate rather than educate our children? Do we want a new hierarchy of human value that replaces old racism with new racism?

With the 2020 defeat of Donald J. Trump as US president, the arrival of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 elections looming before us, and years of battles to come, this book offers you a blueprint to the power brokers, their battle plan and tactics.

What follows is my journey of investigation into the shadowy world that this network and its supporters would rather you not know…

CHAPTer 1

Establishing Legitimacy in the Resistance

In early November 2016, as Donald J. Trump claimed victory, an Egyptian American in Southern California took to Twitter to issue a battle cry to overthrow the democratically elected president of the United States of America.

Hussam Ayloush, a leader at the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim organization known as CAIR, wrote: "Repeat after me: Al-Shaab yureed isqat al-nizaam (Arab Spring chant)."

The translation was potent: The people want to overthrow the regime.

Protesters had shouted the chant at Tahrir Square in Cairo to remove Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak from power. Ayloush had supported the rise of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood political party to power and its leader, Mohamed Morsi, to the presidency. The Muslim Brotherhood and its expression of Islamism, or political Islam, preaches an ideology of Muslim supremacy, arguing that Islam should be the center of political governance and Islam should be the heart of a nation’s legal system.

Over the next weeks, Ayloush worked closely to activate a network of like-minded Islamist sympathizers in his Muslim community, all of them motivated to wield political power with one objective in mind: the destruction of Israel. They traded emails and rushed phone calls. They knew that they had the opportunity of a lifetime. Then, over the next four years, they would join forces with politically liberal activists over a common enemy—Donald Trump—using a little-known ideology called critical race theory like a Trojan horse to racialize their Islamist issues and backdoor their religious priorities to the top of the Democratic agenda.

A little over four years later, in mid-January 2021 with the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States, Ayloush convened a victorious video call with some of his great allies in the struggle—Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, CAIR cofounder Nihad Awad, CAIR leader Zahra Billoo, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and others—to celebrate their victories and assail the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

In a moment of political irony, Ayloush lashed out at the attackers on the Capitol, the image of an empty meeting room behind him, CAIR California emblazoned across the wall. What we witnessed ten days ago was not merely a riot or a violent assault, he declared. "This was an attempted coup on our democracy. The terrorists who led the insurrection in our country’s capital were aiming to spark a massacre or probably a deadly conflict that could lead into a civil war, maybe martial law, or a military coup, a military coup similar to the many ones our CIA has orchestrated around the world, but, anyway, they were hoping possibly for a coup that would have prevented the peaceful and democratic transition of power in our country. Thank God, alhamdulillah, they failed, at least for now."

From his perch, where he has pressed frequently for ideas of Muslim nationalism and Muslim supremacy, overlooking the bigotry of his own ideology, he said, The violent actions of the past two weeks are rooted in the long history of white nationalism and white supremacy in our country and not merely something to do with…being unhappy with the results of an election. He continued, Also, second, the assault on the US Capitol was not an isolated act. It is actually the culmination—the culmination—of an expected result of many years of fueling and normalizing bigotry, promoting conspiracy theories, fostering divisiveness, and undermining our democratic process by President Trump.

Their allies in liberal communities liked and shared the video.

How had these Muslim activists managed to forge this unholy alliance between Islamism, the ideology of the Islam’s radical religious right, and Wokeism, the ideology of America’s extreme political left?

The answer: they had waged their own years-long disinformation campaign, fueling and normalizing bigotry promoting conspiracy theories, fostering divisiveness, and undermining our democratic process.

As CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush issued his battle cry, activist Linda Sarsour rallied her followers to march the next day in Manhattan as part of a new campaign organized around a hashtag, #Resistance, admonishing them: BE THERE!

She sent the call out to her friends in the American left. The next day, hundreds of disgruntled folks filled the streets of Columbus Circle in Manhattan in one of many anti-Trump rallies to sweep the country over the next days, and Sarsour shouted at them, If you’re not ready to give it all to the movement, get the hell out of our way.

The day after, in San Francisco, Farhana Khera, executive director of nonprofit Muslim Advocates, told other nonprofit leaders in a nationwide conference call that Muslim children were worried, fearful and some even crying, asking if they have a place in Trump’s America. Later, she told a Politico reporter that the appointment of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security advisor was an extension of the bigoted and divisive rhetoric of the Trump campaign.

Over the next days, a former CAIR official, Zainab Chaudary, senior media associate of the Security and Rights Collaborative at ReThink Media, a Berkeley, California–based media machine with offices outside Washington, DC, that had created a literal echo chamber for far-left causes. Chaudary shared anti-Trump article after article on social media, one of the articles calling on President Barack Obama to shut down the National Security Agency’s surveillance program before it fell into Trump’s hands.

At Duke University in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, Omid Safi, professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, huddled with friends, including Luke Powery, dean of the Duke Chapel, and William Bill Hart, whom he had once described as my critical race theory professor. As a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina Greensboro, Hart called himself a critical theorist of religion, teaching race was a euphemism for white supremacy.

This is not just about Trump, Safi wrote. This is what racism in America has been like. What is new about it is that it is now merged with the state apparatus at the highest level.

Significantly, much like many conservative groups are funded by donors, this network’s national security influence was funded by a common donor: Hungarian American billionaire George Soros. It’s counterintuitive that Soros, who survived the Holocaust as a teen born into a Jewish family in Hungary, was financing a great deal of this network, most of them anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. But during the last chapter of the Bush administration, the executive director of Muslim Advocates had convinced the billionaire’s Open Society leaders that counterterror policies disproportionately impact Muslims. And it paid well. With Soros’s support, revenue at Muslim Advocates jumped from about $78,000 in 2006 to almost $500,000 in 2007, according to the organization’s IRS 990 tax forms. By 2019, its revenue had increased to $1.7 million.

While pro–Hillary Clinton and pro–President Obama groups might have been expected to oppose a Trump administration, the intersection of illiberal Muslim special-interest groups with liberal activist organizations, like the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center, to create an anti-Trump resistance was important for another reason. Illiberal Muslims had enjoyed an incredible influence during eight years of the Obama administration, in a strategic, orchestrated campaign, impacting national security policy from issues of surveillance to the silencing of any discussion on the Islam in Islamic extremism, acting like an Honor Brigade, defending perceived offenses against the dignity of Muslims as Islamophobia.

Now that they weren’t going to enjoy front-door access to the White House, they had to figure out another way to backdoor their influence on America.

The answer came thousands of miles away in Hawaii.

There, retired attorney Teresa Shook unwittingly set the stage for the rise of not only Sarsour but also CAIR in liberal Democratic politics. Commiserating with friends over Facebook, she tapped five words on her keyboard, I think we should march. She created a Facebook event page, inviting friends to a Million Woman March on Washington, DC, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

A wave of women from across the country shared the event. One woman in Brooklyn, Mari Lynn Foulger, a clothing manufacturer, created another event page. Foulger was a heterosexual woman, married to her high school boyfriend and pregnant, but, confusingly, she used the name Bob Bland professionally.

Shook connected with Foulger on Facebook Messenger, and they agreed to work together. But at one point, when Shook tried to open her page, she was shocked to see it had disappeared. Foulger nonchalantly told her that she had deleted the page and created a new one where she was the administrator.

Why? Shook asked.

I didn’t think you’d mind, Foulger responded.

In Brooklyn, a website editor, Vanessa Wruble, messaged Foulger to offer her help. Some black women were calling the Million Women March a white woman’s march that had usurped the name of the Million Man March, held on October 16, 1995, by the Nation of Islam for black men. Wruble, a white Jewish woman, was the founder of a website, OkayAfrica, publishing news from Africa, and she reached out to contacts to find leaders who were women of color. She suggested they rename the protest Women’s March on Washington, to avoid the criticism of cultural appropriation.

Unbeknownst to the others, Foulger bought www.womensmarch.com and www.womensmarch.org. Wruble reached out to a contact, Michael Skolnik, political director for black rap mogul Russell Simmons. Skolnik suggested Carmen Perez, a Mexican American activist, and Tamika Mallory, a black activist and executive director of the National Action Network, a local nonprofit established by shock activist Al Sharpton. Skolnik was chairman of the board of a nonprofit organization, The Gathering for Justice, where Perez was the executive director and Mallory was a board member.

Wruble contacted the two women, and they said yes, but they wouldn’t do it without their pal Linda Sarsour, who had marched with them the summer before on the twentieth anniversary of the Million Man March. Wruble agreed, having never heard of Sarsour.

The women met the next day, Saturday, at 2:30 p.m. at the Chelsea Market, in New York City, a busy tourist destination. They found a spot nearby at a luxury hotel, the Gansevoort Meatpacking NYC, and sat in the upstairs bar.

The women shared their stories about what inspired their sense of social justice. Perez, born in Oxnard, California, had grown up around gang culture. She told the group her sister had been killed in a car crash, with her funeral on Perez’s seventeenth birthday, and her son’s father had been shot