In November 2025, Texas designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as terrorist organizations, with Texas Governor Greg Abbott declaring them “not welcome.” The designation carries no federal authority, no strategy for what comes next; it was just a press release, not a policy.
In January 2026, Washington designated three Brotherhood branches: one as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, all three as Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Real sanctions, real teeth.
However, there is still no answer for a 19- year-old scrolling the internet for meaning.
For Europe, the results are in.
France passed a sweeping law against “Islamist separatism” in 2021. It shuttered organizations and closed mosques. By the year 2025, the Brotherhood had adapted, expanding local ecosystems that “frame the life of a Muslim from birth to death,” and shifting recruitment to a new generation of digital preachers.
Germany built NetzDG to police extremist content online. The Brotherhood, in turn, learned coded language. The algorithm catches the word. It cannot catch the meaning.
European governments mistakenly ignored demand
Britain created Prevent to flag individuals at risk, but could not offer a different lifestyle. Every European government fought the supply side. None competed on the demand side. America is about to repeat the same mistake.
Lorenzo Vidino’s July 2025 report documents a Brotherhood network active in the US since the late 1950s, whose presence has been “substantial and well-organized.”
In January 2026, Vidino and Sergio Altuna revealed a post-2013 wave: Egyptian Brotherhood members who built “a decentralized, yet tightly interconnected ecosystem.”
This is not a conspiracy. It is a consumer product. The Brotherhood does not need to radicalize anyone. It needs to be more useful than the alternative. It has none.
The Brotherhood has never been a firewall against violent extremism. It is becoming worse than what the West thinks it is fighting. The French report warns of a new generation of preachers undergoing “hybridization with Salafism,” spreading Islamism through social media.
The standard recommendations write themselves: fund moderate content, build community centers, and compete for the same young audience. However, the competition is digital, largely closed, and the West is not in it.
The Brotherhood’s center of gravity is no longer the mosque. It is the TikTok feed where a new generation of preachers reaches millions, and the closed Telegram group where recruitment is finalized, funding coordinated, and narratives tested before they reach the mainstream.
Western democracies operate in the same digital spaces. The legal frameworks exist, but against the Brotherhood, they are not deployed because they are not classified as the same category of threat.
This is an analytical failure, not a legal one.
A serious strategy separates collection from influence. Monitoring closed digital spaces can be lawful under existing law. But government infiltration that gets exposed hands the adversary its greatest recruiting tool: every exposure confirms the conspiracy the Brotherhood has always alleged.
The constitutionally sound alternative is not another government program. It is an open competition: amplifying voices that already exist but are silenced, marginalized, or outspent.
The most effective counter-narrative is one that doesn’t know it’s a counter-narrative. The voices that win are not the ones fighting the Brotherhood. They are the ones making it irrelevant.
The Brotherhood’s most effective weapon is not ideology. It is the word ‘Islamophobia,’ deployed to reframe any scrutiny as bigotry against Muslims as a whole. The accusation neutralizes governments, researchers, and journalists. It cannot neutralize independent Muslim voices with no government affiliation, which is exactly why they are the only ones who can compete.
Even imperfect tools are gone. The Global Engagement Center was shuttered in December 2024. Its successor lasted four months. Alhurra, America’s only Arabic-language broadcast network, went dark in April 2025. Washington is not failing to compete. It is withdrawing from the field.
Europe tried to ban. It failed. Israel tried to explain. It failed. America is trying to designate. The pattern is clear.
Those voices exist. Moderate imams, independent Muslim journalists, and young Muslim Europeans are building a different identity. They are scattered, underfunded, and marginalized by the Brotherhood’s monopoly on communal representation.
The Brotherhood operates as a transnational network. The response cannot be national. An imam in Berlin, a journalist in London, a content creator in Casablanca can reach the same young Muslim in Lyon, if they have a platform that crosses borders as effectively as the Brotherhood’s own. Not a government megaphone. A network.
Some of that competition happens in the open. Some must reach into the closed spaces themselves: not through government agents, but through credible voices operating where the Brotherhood currently speaks unchallenged.
Everything proposed here is already practiced against comparable threats: counter-messaging against ISIS, influence operations against Russian disinformation, and disruption of white-supremacist networks. The missing element is the decision to apply it to an adversary misclassified for two decades.
Somewhere in America, a 19-year-old is scrolling for meaning. The Brotherhood has an answer for him. Washington finally has the sanctions. It still doesn’t have the idea.
The author is vice president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and a specialist in influence operations and strategic communications.