THE LONG GAME

Why CAIR Wants You Gone

They know you will resist what they are trying to do in America. They know because your people did it before.

Last week the Southern Legal Resource Center named the organizations working to erase Confederate history and heritage in America. Number two on that list was CAIR.¹

CAIR. The Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Ask yourself why.

Then ask yourself why nobody is asking why.

They have no ancestors at Shiloh. No grandmothers who waited for letters that never came. No great-grandfathers buried in rows at Marietta or Franklin or Cold Harbor. No fathers who came home from Petersburg hollow-eyed and silent, who picked up the pieces of burned farms and gutted courthouses and tried to make something from nothing under the heel of Reconstruction. Neither the Blue nor the Gray is their history. Neither the plantation nor the contraband camp. None of it. They were not here.

So why are they at the front of the line demanding that your monuments come down?

Because this was never about monuments.

WHO THEY ARE

The Council on American-Islamic Relations was founded in Washington in 1994. It presents itself as the nation's largest Muslim civil rights organization. Civil liberties. Justice. Advocacy. The standard language of any pressure group looking to be taken seriously in the halls of power.²

The problem is what is behind the presentation.

In the largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history, the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, the Department of Justice identified a documented relationship between CAIR, its individual founders, and the Palestine Committee. The Palestine Committee was a fundraising and propaganda arm for Hamas operating inside the United States. Hamas is a designated foreign terrorist organization. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.³

The FBI suspended all formal contact with CAIR. Not over rumors. Not over politics. An FBI assistant director put it in writing to Congress: until the Bureau could resolve whether a connection between CAIR and Hamas continued to exist, there would be no communication outside of a criminal investigation.⁴

CAIR has never been convicted of any crime. They deny every connection. But the FBI does not break off contact with organizations over hurt feelings. The Department of Justice does not repeat and defend co-conspirator designations over speculation. The record exists in federal court archives.

Go read it.

THE DOCUMENT THEY NEVER MEANT FOR YOU TO SEE

To understand what CAIR is doing and why Confederate Americans are in their crosshairs, you have to go back to 1991.

In May of that year, a Muslim Brotherhood operative named Mohamed Akram drafted an 18-page internal memorandum for the Brotherhood's North American leadership. He titled it "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America." He wrote it in Arabic. He did not write it for American eyes.⁵

The FBI found it in 2004 in a hidden sub-basement of a Brotherhood suspect's home in Virginia, buried among more than 80 banker boxes of Brotherhood archives. It was entered into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial. It is a primary source. You can read it.

Here is what it says.

The Brotherhood's mission in America is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process." Not armed conflict. Not terrorism in the conventional sense. Something more patient, more dangerous, and more difficult to fight because most people will not believe it is happening until it already has. The memorandum describes the work as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its house by their hands.⁶

By their hands. The hands of the civilization being destroyed.

The strategy does not require a single shot fired. It requires institutions. Mosques. Schools. Student groups. Advocacy organizations. Legal pressure groups. Each one working within existing American law, advancing the same long-term agenda, chipping away at the cultural and institutional foundations that make Western resistance possible. Exerting influence over media, education, and government policy until the environment itself becomes favorable to the movement's goals.⁷

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a primary source document in a federal court record. Don't take my word for it. Read it.

THE RED/GREEN ALLIANCE

CAIR does not operate alone. Understanding why a Muslim Brotherhood-linked advocacy organization ends up on the same list as progressive academic institutions, media organizations, and political action groups requires understanding a phenomenon that scholars and national security analysts have been documenting for more than twenty years.

It is called the Red/Green Alliance.

Red: the revolutionary left. Marxist in orientation, post-Soviet in its American expression, organized around the systematic deconstruction of Western identity, Western history, and Western cultural cohesion. The people who brought you the 1619 Project, critical race theory in the classroom, and the organized campaign to rename every military base, pull down every monument, and burn the thread connecting Americans to their own past.⁸

Green: political Islam. Organized around the Civilization-Jihadist objective laid out in the 1991 Memorandum. Patient. Institutional. Operating through advocacy organizations, student groups, legal pressure campaigns, and coalition politics. CAIR is the most visible American face of the Green.

They do not share the same end goal. The revolutionary left has no interest in sharia law. Political Islam has no interest in Marxist economics. But they share a common enemy: the traditional, rooted, faith-based, historically grounded American. The kind of American who knows where his great-grandfather is buried and why he matters. The kind of American who reads the primary sources and does not need a television network to tell him what to think about his own history.

And they share a common method: the systematic destruction of the cultural memory that makes resistance possible.

This is why CAIR issues press releases about Confederate monuments. This is why hard-left academic organizations and Islamist advocacy groups appear on the same coalition lists, sign the same open letters, and celebrate the same removals. They are not confused about their differences. They are perfectly clear about their shared short-term objective.

Tear down the load-bearing walls. Worry about what comes after once the house has fallen.

Confederate Americans are one of the most prominent load-bearing walls in the American cultural structure. We connect the founding to the present. We are the living memory of what it costs when a centralized federal government decides it knows better than the people it was built to serve. We remember the Morrill Tariff and the naval blockade and the burned towns and the military occupation and the poverty that lasted three generations. We remember because we kept the stories. We told them to our children and our grandchildren and they told them to theirs.⁹

We are, to both the Red and the Green, the people most likely to stand up and say no.

So they moved on us first.

WHY US

Of all the targets available to an alliance running a decades-long strategy to hollow out American civilization from within, why Confederate Americans? Why our monuments? Why our holidays, our flags, our ancestors' names on courthouse walls and school buildings and military bases?

Because we are the ones standing in their way.

Think about what we are. We are a people who have been told for decades that our history is treason, our heritage is hate, and our ancestors deserve nothing but contempt. We watched them rename Fort Bragg. We watched them pull the Arlington Confederate Memorial down when Congress was on Christmas recess and there was no one in DC who could stop them. We watched them strip Nathan Bedford Forrest's name off a Tennessee state building in the middle of a pandemic when no one was looking. We watched them gut VMI's curriculum and erase the name of Stonewall Jackson from the hall where he taught Sunday school to Black children in Lexington.¹⁰

We have been subjected to a campaign of cultural erasure that has no parallel in American life. And we are still here. Still organized. Still in courtrooms. Still publishing. Still presenting at SCV camps and filing legislative testimony and training the next generation to read the primary sources and push back.

The 1991 Memorandum is explicit about what the long game requires. It requires weakening the host culture's capacity to resist. That means targeting identity. Targeting memory. Targeting the shared history that gives a people the will to say no.

You cannot do that to a people who know who they are.

And no people in America know who they are with more documentation, more organization, and more ferocity than we do. We have the Sons of Confederate Veterans, chartered in 1896, still meeting in camps from Virginia to Texas. We have the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, still marking graves and preserving archives. We have lawyers who have spent decades in federal courts arguing our right to exist as a recognized people under the national origin clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We have historians and writers and camp commanders and legislative contacts and a publishing infrastructure that was not here twenty years ago and is growing.¹¹

We are, in the language of the Memorandum, the hardest house to sabotage.

So they had to start with us. And they had to convince the rest of America that we are the bad guys.

WHAT THEY HAVE DONE

This is not theoretical. Go to CAIR's own website and read their press releases.

In 2017, after Charlottesville, CAIR's national executive director urged state and local governments to erase every symbol and every vestige of Confederate history immediately. Every monument. Every marker. Every name.¹²

They have welcomed votes to remove Confederate monuments in Virginia, Alabama, and Tennessee. They issued statements praising the removal of Maryland's last Confederate statue on public land. They welcomed the congressional review of more than 750 Department of Defense items connected to the Confederacy. They celebrated when Secretary Austin approved the renaming of nine Army installations. They condemned a Virginia county when it dared to relocate rather than destroy two Confederate monuments, declaring that the move allowed for the continued reverence of white supremacy.¹³

As recently as January 2026, CAIR's Alabama chapter condemned a Florence city council vote that refused to add a critical interpretive plaque to a Confederate monument, calling the vote an attempt to suppress the truth of our nation's past.¹⁴

But this had nothing to do with Islamic relations?

They are not bystanders applauding from a distance. They are active, documented participants in a coordinated campaign that spans two ideological movements and serves one strategic objective. And the Southern Legal Resource Center has now named them publicly for exactly what they are.

WHAT IT COSTS AMERICA

Here is the piece that most people miss, even people on our side.

The erasure of Confederate memory is not about Confederate heritage. It is about erasing America as we know it. And it harms everyone.

America is not held together by a single ethnicity or a state religion. It is held together by competing, overlapping identity communities that check and balance one another. Southerners check coastal consolidation. People of faith check secular materialism. Communities with deep roots and long memories check the constant pressure toward centralized control. That is not an accident of American life. It is the architecture of American liberty.

That tension is not our liability. It is our strength. And the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR identified it even before we saw it in ourselves.

The 1991 Memorandum is explicit about its objective. It aims to present Islam as a civilization alternative and to support the global Islamic state. That requires not just building Muslim institutions. It requires weakening the counterweights. It requires a host culture too fragmented, too demoralized, too ashamed of its own history to mount any organized resistance.

What culture in America is more resistant to that than the rural South? The culture that kept its Bible when they burned its courthouses. The culture that kept its stories when they rewrote its textbooks. The culture that kept its dead when they tried to unmake the cemeteries. The culture whose people still name their children after ancestors who stood at Chickamauga and survived the March, who came home to nothing and built something anyway, whose great-grandchildren are still here, still reading the documents, still saying: this is who we are.

We are not on that list by accident. We are on that list because we are the answer to the question the Memorandum is trying to solve.

THE BOTTOM LINE

My grandfather Edward Wilcoxen taught me one thing above everything else. Follow the documents. Draw no conclusions you cannot source.

The documents here are not hidden. The 1991 Memorandum is in evidence in federal court. CAIR's press releases are on their own website. The FBI's letter to Congress is public record. The SLRC report is in circulation. The trail connects, and it connects cleanly.

When CAIR demands that your monument come down, they are not settling a historical grievance. They have no historical grievance with the Confederacy. They are clearing a field. Because a people stripped of their monuments, their flags, their ancestors' names, their history rewritten as treason and shame, is a people who cannot organize. Who cannot resist. Who have lost the thread back to who they are.

The monument is not the target.

We are.

They come for the marble and bronze because behind it stands a people who have not forgotten, who have not surrendered, and who are the most likely people in America to stand up and say: not this time. A people with the documents to prove who they are. A people with the history to know what is at stake. A people with the memory of what it costs to lose.

That is why CAIR is on that list.

That is why it matters that someone finally named them.

ABOUT THE SOUTHERN LEGAL RESOURCE CENTER

The Southern Legal Resource Center is the only organization in America devoted solely to the legal defense of CSA Americans. Headquartered in Black Mountain, North Carolina, the SLRC has fought heritage violation cases in federal courts across the South for thirty years, defending the First Amendment rights of students, workers, and citizens whose Confederate heritage has been used as grounds for discrimination and punishment.

The SLRC was the first legal organization to argue that Confederate Southern Americans constitute a protected class under the national origin clause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an argument with significant implications for every one of us who has ever been penalized for who we are and where we come from. They have defended students suspended for wearing Confederate symbols to school. They have gone to bat for workers fired for Confederate heritage displays in the workplace. They have stood in courtrooms where no one else was willing to stand.

The SLRC is the organization that named names. They put CAIR on that list. They are doing the work that makes essays like this one possible.

They are a small nonprofit running on donations. They need your support.

You can donate online at slrc-csa.org or send a check to:

Southern Legal Resource Center

Post Office Box 1235

Black Mountain, North Carolina 28711

(828) 669-5189

Your contribution is tax deductible. It is your South. Help defend it.

By Mindy Esposito/ May 13, 2026/ Nashville, Tennessee

Mindy Esposito is a founding director of the Southern Independence Association and the creator of the H.K. Edgerton Equal Protection Initiative. She has been researching 19th and 20th century American history through primary sources for more than twenty years. She publishes at mespo2006.substack.com.

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FOOTNOTES

1. Southern Legal Resource Center, organizational report, 2026.

Available at slrc-csa.org.

2. Council on American-Islamic Relations, organizational history. cair.com.

3. U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, No. 3:04-CR-240-G (N.D. Tex. 2008). Government trial exhibits establishing relationship between CAIR, the Palestine Committee, and Hamas.

4. Letter from Richard C. Powers, Assistant Director, FBI Office of Congressional Affairs, to Members of Congress, 2009. Reproduced at investigativeproject.org.

5. Mohamed Akram, "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America," May 22, 1991. Entered into evidence, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation. English translation available at investigativeproject.org.

6. Akram, "Explanatory Memorandum," Section 4: "The Process of Settlement." The memorandum states: "The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

7. Akram, "Explanatory Memorandum," Sections 5 and 6. The document lists 29 affiliated organizations in North America as of 1991, including the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students Association, and the Islamic Association for Palestine.

8. David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006). See also Trevor Loudon, The Enemies Within (Las Vegas: Pacific Freedom Foundation, 2013), documenting the organizational networks connecting the radical left and Islamist advocacy movements in the United States.

9. The Morrill Tariff of 1861 (12 Stat. 49) imposed duties averaging 47 percent on imported goods, directly threatening the Southern export economy. For the Confederate perspective on constitutional grievances, see Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), Vol. 1, Chapters 1 through 5.

10. The Arlington Confederate Memorial was removed by the Army Corps of Engineers in December 2023 following litigation. Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, was renamed in June 2023 per Congressional mandate. Tennessee removed the Forrest bust from the State Capitol in July 2021.

11. Sons of Confederate Veterans, organizational history. scv.org. United Daughters of the Confederacy, organizational history. hqudc.org. For the legal framework of Confederate national origin protection, see Kirk Lyons, SLRC Chief Trial Counsel, and the legal theory developed in connection with Castorina v. Madison County School Board, 246 F.3d 536 (6th Cir. 2001).

12. Nihad Awad, CAIR National Executive Director, statement issued August 14, 2017, calling for removal of all Confederate monuments. Reproduced at cair.com.

13. CAIR press releases: "CAIR Welcomes Vote to Remove Virginia Confederate Monuments," November 10, 2021; "CAIR Condemns Decision to Relocate Virginia Confederate Monuments," December 15, 2021; "CAIR Welcomes Congressional Review of 750+ DOD Items Honoring Confederacy," March 30, 2022; "CAIR Welcomes Approval of Plan to Drop Confederate References from Military Installations," October 7, 2022. All available at cair.com.

14. CAIR-Alabama press release, January 21, 2026. Available at cair.com.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Akram, Mohamed. "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America." May 22, 1991. Entered into evidence, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, No. 3:04-CR-240-G (N.D. Tex. 2008). English translation available at investigativeproject.org.

• Castorina v. Madison County School Board, 246 F.3d 536 (6th Cir. 2001).

• Council on American-Islamic Relations. Press releases, 2017 to 2026. Available at cair.com.

• Davis, Jefferson. The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881.

• Horowitz, David, and Richard Poe. The Shadow Party. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006.

• Letter from Richard C. Powers, Assistant Director, FBI Office of Congressional Affairs, to Members of Congress, 2009. Reproduced at investigativeproject.org.

• Letter from Ronald Weich, Assistant Attorney General, to Members of Congress, 2010. Documenting Department of Justice position on CAIR co-conspirator designation. Available at investigativeproject.org.

• Loudon, Trevor. The Enemies Within. Las Vegas: Pacific Freedom Foundation, 2013.

• Morrill Tariff Act of 1861. 12 Stat. 49.

• Sons of Confederate Veterans. Organizational history and founding records. scv.org.

• Southern Legal Resource Center. Organizational mission and case history. slrc-csa.org.

• Southern Legal Resource Center. Report on organizations engaged in the erasure of Confederate history and heritage. 2026.

• United Daughters of the Confederacy. Organizational history and archives. hqudc.org.

• U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, No. 3:04-CR-240-G (N.D. Tex. 2008). Trial transcripts and exhibits.