RNA - A small group of committed anti-Islam conspiracy theorists in the United States view the Muslim Brotherhood as an enormously powerful, coordinated, and nefarious institution that has successfully infiltrated all levels of American government and society, particularly under the administration of Barack Obama.
In the worldview of Gaffney and his acolytes, the Muslim Brotherhood has several front groups in the United States, most prominently the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a civil rights organization with chapters across the country. Experts outside the anti-Islam lobby say that these claims, by and large, are false.
Whether those claims are true or not is, of course, beside the point. If Frank Gaffney's hate group becomes the primary architect of Trump’s anti-Muslim actions, the mere assertion that this or that group is a secret front for terrorism will likely be enough to sway newly white nationalist-enabled Republican majorities to demonize those groups, regardless of truth. If Trump were to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, for example, it would:
open any US persons or organizations accused of having an association with the Muslim Brotherhood to investigations, asset seizures, and other state actions.
Think of the fraudulent tapes used to accuse Planned Parenthood and ACORN of crimes. Both were exonerated, but in ACORN's case the exoneration didn't matter. If a Trump administration were to "seize" the assets of Muslim groups for the purposes of an "investigation" (or voting rights groups, or pro-immigrant groups—the people who supported Trump have a lot of enemies), the viability of each group would be dictated by administration whim.
Trump's advisers have been contemplating equally radical action against individual Muslims in America.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped write tough immigration laws in Arizona and elsewhere, said in an interview that Trump's policy advisers had also discussed drafting a proposal for his consideration to reinstate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.
NSEERS was abandoned in 2011 after it was deemed redundant by the Department of Homeland Security and criticized by civil rights groups for unfairly targeting immigrants from Muslim-majority nations.
It may be futile and trample civil rights, but Kobach and Gaffney have been aboard both those trains for quite some time. The civil rights of all Americans depend on dedication to those rights in the Justice Department and on Supreme Court.
Trump now controls the fate of both.
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