Summary
Political movements can strategically borrow the vocabulary of audiences they hope to persuade while leaving their underlying objectives unchanged. Historical communist propaganda and Islamist political strategy illustrate how externally appealing concepts such as peace, democracy, civil rights, and human rights can be used for broader ideological purposes. Contemporary anti-interventionist rhetoric creates unusual overlap among democratic socialists, Islamist-aligned activists, and parts of the populist right, especially regarding U.S. support for Israel and Egypt. This convergence warrants examining both the interests behind political messaging and whether its accompanying fiscal claims withstand scrutiny.
Key Takeaways
- Political language can function as strategic rebranding. Movements may adopt popular terms such as “America First,” anti-war rhetoric, civil rights, or human rights while retaining ideological objectives that differ substantially from those suggested by the language.
- Populist left, Islamist, and populist right rhetoric can converge without ideological agreement. Opposition to foreign military aid and intervention can produce overlapping messages among groups with very different motivations, particularly concerning Israel, Egypt, and American power abroad.
- Domestic spending arguments require fiscal scrutiny. Claims that cutting foreign military commitments would directly solve problems such as inadequate school funding oversimplify how U.S. education is financed, since most K-12 revenue comes from state and local governments.
In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, conservative journalist Saagar Enjeti, who spent a year of high school at the American School of Doha in Qatar, offered an unwitting admission. Discussing Abdul El-Sayed, the DSA-aligned Michigan Senate candidate, Enjeti noted that El-Sayed’s campaign has become “almost Trumpian”: American flags, warnings against foreign wars, promises that voters’ tax dollars will stop flowing “abroad.” Carlson agreed it was “literally Trumpian.” As Carlson disparaged El-Sayed’s opposition, neither he nor Enjeti, both self-identified conservatives, seemed pleased that a hard-left, Israel-hostile candidate had learned to speak the language of the American right, while still being associated with socialism and the Muslim Brotherhood. Enjeti called it an “ideological evolution.”
El-Sayed’s method, though, is not evolution. It is rebranding and repackaging.
In 1961, Stefan Possony’s U.S. Senate Judiciary study, Wordsmanship: Semantics as a Communist Weapon, identified how communist movements maintained two vocabularies: a harsh internal lexicon among believers, and an “Aesopian” external lexicon borrowed from the target audience’s own moral language — “peace,” “democracy,” “liberation,” “human rights.” The vocabulary was deployed to non-Communists to disarm resistance while the underlying program stayed fixed. The words changed; the objective did not.
The Muslim Brotherhood operates on the identical principle, and says so in its own documents. The 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, describes Brotherhood work in the West as a “settlement” and “civilization-jihadist process,” to be advanced by the movement’s own hands until the target society is transformed from within while, in the near term, its public-facing organizations speak the vocabulary of civil rights, pluralism, and anti-discrimination. MB strategists, including Yusuf al-Qaradawi, distinguished a “phase of weakness,” where preaching and institution-building take precedence over open confrontation, from a future phase of strength. The doctrinal core remains; only the presentation changes.
The Aesopian technique Possony documented in Soviet propaganda — human-rights language wrapping a fixed political objective — is the same technique visible in Hamas’s 2017 “Document of General Principles,” which invokes “human rights and international law” to demand a “right of return” that would mean Israel’s demographic dissolution, while calling armed “resistance” a right guaranteed by international norms.
The convergence between the “Red” DSA and the “Green” Muslim Brotherhood, now joined by a “Brown,” antisemitism-tolerant “woke left,” resembles what was once described in France as the Red-Green-Brown alliance. Radical Marxists supply moral cover, campus networks, and “oppressor/oppressed” framing to reach mass constituencies; Islamist organizing, including advocacy groups like Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change, supplies disciplined bloc voters, organizational infrastructure, and now electoral candidates. Each side borrows the other’s vocabulary, and even wardrobe, opportunistically: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in hijab at Bronx Eid al-Adha prayers alongside Mayor Mamdani; Kathy Hochul in a headscarf touring an Islamic cultural center weeks before 9/11’s 25th anniversary; and Minnesota Lieutenant Governor and Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan — Catholic, like Hochul — in hijab at Minneapolis’s Karmel Somali Market while defending the Somali community amid a state fraud scandal. None of the three is Muslim; each called it solidarity. Critics called it what it plainly is: pandering to a bloc the party needs.
DSA’s own platform calls for slashing the “bloated militarized budget” and redirecting funds from “imperial dominance” to domestic needs; DSA-aligned Muslim organizers explicitly fuse Islamic tradition with anti-militarism and anti-imperialism. When Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Zohran Mamdani, and El-Sayed converge on the same script — stop funding foreign militaries, especially Israel’s, redirect the money to housing, healthcare, and schools — and segments of the “America First” right applaud, that convergence deserves scrutiny, not praise. Increasingly, “woke right” commentators echo arguments that are, at bottom, anti-Western: they question the same foundational commitments — to the defense of allies, the protection of U.S. interests abroad, and the credible projection of American power — that both movements have separate reasons to want weakened.
El-Sayed’s formula targets two specific relationships. On Egypt, his family’s country of origin, he promotes ending “foreign military funding,” which would mean withdrawing support from the Sisi government that violently suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood after 2013, precisely the outcome MB-aligned networks in the West have incentive to want, dressed as anti-militarism. On Israel, the same formula — El-Sayed has called military aid to Israel the “worst use of our tax dollars,” framing it as enabling “genocide” against Gaza’s children — would degrade the one regional security partner capable of constraining Iranian proxies, Hamas, and Hezbollah, with knock-on effects for every U.S. Arab partner counting on Israeli deterrence. “No more foreign wars,” applied selectively to Cairo and Jerusalem, is not non-interventionism; it is a policy outcome that happens to match Islamist strategic interests, delivered in the vocabulary of the American right.
El-Sayed and others round out the pitch with a domestic argument: that ending “foreign wars” funding would fix American schools. It doesn’t survive contact with the budget. Federal dollars account for roughly 11–13% of K-12 school revenue; the remainder comes from state (~45%) and local (~43%) sources, mainly property and state taxes. Public education is a state and local responsibility by design; defense and education draw from different fiscal streams and are not in a tight zero-sum relationship. The claim is itself a small-scale demonstration of Possony’s rule: the persuasive power of words outruns their factual content.
