Jeff Sessions will likely go up for a confirmation vote this week to become the next US attorney general. Much has been written about the Alabama senator’s racist history, including his hostility to the Voting Rights Act and his disturbing remarks about the Ku Klux Klan, which in 1986 led to his rejection for a federal judgeship.

Less is known about Sessions’s close ties to the well-funded bloc of extremist anti-Muslim activists that author Nathan Lean has called the “Islamophobia industry.”

The Islamophobia industry refers to the network of extremist anti-Muslim alarmists and fearmongers who warn of things like “creeping Sharia law” and “Islamofascism.” Leans calls them “a right-wing cadre of intellectual hucksters, bloggers, politicians, pundits, and religious leaders” who for years “have labored behind the scenes to convince their compatriots that Muslims are the enemy, exhuming the ghosts of 9/11 and dangling them before the eyes of horrified populations for great fortune and fame.”