QAA - Pilled Iranian Monarchists feat. Josef Burton (E371)
Aired: 2026-05-06
Duration: 01:42:27


=== Ancientness and Continuity (06:34) ===

[00:00:33]  well done.
[00:00:34]  You've found a way to connect to the internet.
[00:00:36]  Welcome to the QAA Podcast, episode 371, Pailed Iranian Monarchists, featuring Joseph Burton.
[00:00:44]  As always, we are your hosts, Liv Agar, Julian Field, and Travis View.
[00:00:49]  Finally, we got a chance to talk about Iran, but since I'm a product of both the American public education system and California public schools, the politics of any other country kind of confuses and frightens me.
[00:01:02]  So we brought in a real expert, Joseph Burton.
[00:01:06]  He's a former American diplomat.
[00:01:08]  He worked on Iranian Afghan immigration issues during the first Trump administration, and we are delighted to have him on.
[00:01:16]  Yes, great to finally be on.
[00:01:17]  I've been a fan for a while, including when I was in government trying to figure out what the hell people at the top were talking about.
[00:01:24]  And I just love the kind of more reflective and almost at times kind of scholarly approach to the most insane people we can find on the internet.
[00:01:32]  And if you've been logged on for the past six or eight months, you've probably encountered the Lion and Son crowd and are probably wondering, like, what's Kind of going on there.
[00:01:42]  So it's great to share this and then immediately go back into hiding so one of them doesn't find me.
[00:01:48]  Yeah, these people are vicious online, much like QAnon people, apparently.
[00:01:52]  They really believe in the power of being nasty and posting.
[00:01:56]  Yeah.
[00:01:57]  I just would never expect this from monarchists.
[00:01:59]  I don't know.
[00:02:00]  My heart is broken.
[00:02:01]  Famously the most ideologically normal people.
[00:02:04]  Yeah.
[00:02:05]  People who are like, King, please, again.
[00:02:07]  Also, being from Vancouver, I've also encountered them in real life quite a bit.
[00:02:11]  Yeah, Vancouver comes up in this episode in a pretty.
[00:02:16]  A pretty gnarly way.
[00:02:18]  So, yeah, it's around.
[00:02:20]  I was just across.
[00:02:21]  I spent a lot of time and actually kind of delved the deepest into like, you know, big Iranian communities when I was studying at the University of Washington, Seattle.
[00:02:28]  I was, of course, studying Farsi, among other things.
[00:02:30]  And yeah, the back and forth from Vancouver.
[00:02:33]  I say Vancouver puts on a better party when it comes to like Persian dance nights and stuff, but they do seem to kind of be a little bit loonier up there.
[00:02:41]  And we'll get into that and maybe into why.
[00:02:43]  Oh, Liv, I'm so sorry for ever intimating that it's a sleepy town.
[00:02:48]  I hear.
[00:02:48]  It sounds like you're besieged by enemies.
[00:02:50]  Yes, lots of large monarchist rallies happening around where I live.
[00:02:56]  So, yeah, in this episode, I kind of want to talk through the history of Pahlavism as a distinct movement and argue why I think the diaspora supporters of Iran's deposed royal family are careening towards a sort of a QAnon moment.
[00:03:09]  Not because, though, of any mysterious foreign cultural reasons or something like because they're Persian or whatever, but for reasons that are actually pretty familiar to us in North America.
[00:03:20]  A heavily astroturfed right populist movement that has found its own supporters in a self radicalization spiral just as the whole thing collapses.
[00:03:28]  And I guess I want to be here and talk about this because, you know, the Iranian monarchists love to, I mean, unless there's a secret Iranian here, like none of us are Iranian in any capacity.
[00:03:39]  I don't know who your ancestors were dueling.
[00:03:41]  I think it was mostly Turks, but no Persians.
[00:03:43]  No Persians.
[00:03:47]  But these are people who like to talk about themselves in like very essentialist terms and to be like, we are fully representing what.
[00:03:54]  Being Iranian is.
[00:03:56]  And there's a really interesting kind of woke 1.0 standpoint epistemology of how dare you as a non Iranian speak about this?
[00:04:04]  You know, nothing of blah, blah, blah.
[00:04:05]  And I kind of want to take this back down to, you know, this is something that's happening in large part in the United States, in Canada, in Western Europe.
[00:04:13]  And it's a playbook that I think as we go in and talk about Pahlavism, this podcast in particular is going to find it very familiar.
[00:04:20]  So, what is Iran exactly?
[00:04:21]  What's this Iran thing everyone's talking about?
[00:04:24]  Iran's a country in West Asia between Turkey and Iraq in the West and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the East.
[00:04:29]  It's been in the news as a country the US is bombing that's actually quite capable of shooting back, which seems to be something of a novelty that no one in power seems to have accounted for.
[00:04:39]  Iran is old.
[00:04:40]  It's a really ancient, continuous civilization.
[00:04:42]  And as late as the 18th century, it used to be the center of a whole sphere of cultural influence that stretched from Bosnia to Bangladesh.
[00:04:49]  And it's been home to empires and royal dynasties going back over 5,000 years.
[00:04:54]  Kind of mythologizing, you know, uncle with his cigarettes and coffee at the card table kind of myth making.
[00:05:01]  Not quite, because one of the things about the way I think a lot of Iranian people talk about that country that's important is this ancientness and continuity.
[00:05:10]  But this isn't really a story about Iran or essential Iranian ness or ancient history or even really recent history before the 2020s.
[00:05:17]  This is about one particular political movement that in the past four or five years seems to be developing in a way very reminiscent of QAnon.
[00:05:25]  They might dox me for this one.
[00:05:26]  But we gotta talk about the pilled Pahlavis.
[00:05:29]  Now, remember how I said Iran had a series of royal dynasties going back thousands of years?
[00:05:33]  This is a story about some people who really, really, really love the most recent and final one of those dynasties, the Pahlavis.
[00:05:41]  So, who are they?
[00:05:42]  At the dawn of the 20th century, Iran was firmly in its flop era.
[00:05:45]  Gone were the days of invading Greece, ruling over the entire Middle East from Egypt to India, the days when the Roman Emperor Valerian groveled before the victorious Iranian King Shapur the Great.
[00:05:55]  The Qajar dynasty, which had ruled since the 1700s, was corrupt.
[00:05:58]  Falling apart and couldn't stop Iran from becoming a battleground between Russian and British influence to the colossal detriment of Iran's people who suffered famine and humiliating foreign concessions, which meant Iranians had to like pay money for all their tobacco to the British government directly.
[00:06:14]  It was a quasi colonial situation, even though Iran was never colonized.
[00:06:18]  Boy, that sounds awful.
[00:06:19]  Living in an era of a former great empire in its decline sounds awfully humiliating.
[00:06:25]  I know.
[00:06:26]  It means that you'd accept kind of anyone.
[00:06:29]  Who came in and wanted to change things?
[00:06:31]  I mean, giving the British like 40% or 60% of your tobacco profits, you know, is not exactly what's about to happen in the United States, but yeah.
[00:06:40]  They might get in on it.
[00:06:41]  I don't know.
[00:06:42]  That'd be so funny.
[00:06:44]  If we got bullied by the British, I would actually respect them again.
[00:06:47]  I would.
[00:06:48]  I think there would be like, you know, not the great Iranian tobacco riots, but like the great American vape juice riots of the 2040s when we reawaken as a nation.
[00:06:57]  Could you imagine the populist state elect if you had to pay like 40% of a tax to China to get vapes?
[00:07:04]  Yeah, it would be calamitous.
[00:07:06]  And we might live to see it.

=== Pre-Islamic Civilizations (15:26) ===

[00:07:07]  Who knows?
[00:07:08]  Yeah, it's possible.
[00:07:09]  So enter some guy, literally just a guy.
[00:07:14]  Reza Shah, later Reza Shah Pahlebi, was an army officer in the Iranian Cossacks, which was a Russian style cavalry unit in the Iranian army that was actually commanded by Russian officers until a few years before he took over.
[00:07:26]  He didn't come from an aristocratic family or have any special characteristics.
[00:07:29]  I've heard various things about if he was even able to read, but he was, with the go ahead of the British.
[00:07:35]  Able to shoot his way onto the throne and deposed the Qajars in 1925.
[00:07:39]  He took the dynasty name Pahlavi, which is actually the name of one of the old pre Islamic Persian alphabets.
[00:07:45]  This is the start of a long trend of the Pahlavis associating themselves with pre Islamic Iranian civilization, which sort of makes sense because you want to associate yourself with ancientness to counteract the fact that you declared yourself king for no reason and your ruling dynasty is younger than like jazz music and traffic lights.
[00:08:02]  Reza Shah passes the throne to his son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi.
[00:08:05]  This is around the time Iran starts becoming a major oil producer, and the Pahlavi dynasty bets on two things that becoming close to America is a way to escape British influence, Britain owns Iranian state oil company, and that oil money can be used to paper over any social conflict.
[00:08:21]  So, what's the Iranian Revolution?
[00:08:22]  Mohamed Mosaddegh, who I am sure most Americans are aware of.
[00:08:27]  So, this is the guy from the Alexis de Tocqueville, which I'm sure most Americans have read meme.
[00:08:32]  Yeah, it's Khatami, the former leader of Iran, in an interview with CNN where he just casually is like, Well, you know, I'm sure like all Americans know Alexis de Tocqueville.
[00:08:44]  He's casually, he's like trying to be relatable to an American audience.
[00:08:48]  This was during his open day.
[00:08:49]  He was a reformist leader, and the likes of him, they'd never let someone like him get elected again.
[00:08:54]  But he really tried to lead with openness and intercivilizational understanding.
[00:08:59]  He was an Iranian bleeding heart, but he got on American TV and he was like, I know how to get through to the average American.
[00:09:05]  You surely have read your nation's great philosophers and have all memorized them.
[00:09:10]  And there's a whole tangential side story about I got this book of documents that were shredded from the old U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
[00:09:17]  And there's a whole side note about how Khatami got this copy of De Tocqueville's Democracy in America in the 70s.
[00:09:23]  But that's another story.
[00:09:24]  They should have given him SpongeBob.
[00:09:26]  I should have given him SpongeBob.
[00:09:28]  They've learned a lot.
[00:09:28]  Now they just try to communicate to Americans through AI Lego videos and don't cite Enlightenment philosophers that much.
[00:09:34]  Which I think has proven much more effective.
[00:09:36]  Yeah.
[00:09:36]  It's much more effective.
[00:09:37]  They're like, I think someone sat them down and were like, okay, so Americans love burger and they love gas prices and they understand Legos.
[00:09:46]  So you've got to stop citing like Jeffersonian idealism in your efforts to reach out to the American people.
[00:09:52]  But who most Americans are talking about when they talk about the Shah was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
[00:09:58]  And he rules as a young constitutional monarch until the 1950s when Iranians democratically elect a prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who asks, Hey, wait a minute, why is our oil being drilled by a foreign country?
[00:10:09]  Mossadegh is head of a broad coalition that includes and is close to the left wing Tudeh party as he implements land reform, levies taxes on landlords, and he nationalizes Iran's oil resources and seizes the assets of the Anglo Iranian oil company to direct oil profits to the people.
[00:10:24]  And I'm sure you can guess what happens next.
[00:10:26]  Yeah, yeah, CIA coup?
[00:10:28]  CIA coup.
[00:10:29]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:30]  I didn't even have to say it.
[00:10:31]  I can get prefaced to say it.
[00:10:33]  It's so common.
[00:10:35]  The CIA and MI6 coup that overthrows Mossadegh puts the Shah back in indirect power.
[00:10:40]  I want to take a note here of how people talk about conspiracy theory when we talk about politics in the Middle East.
[00:10:45]  You know, earlier I talked about the kind of figure of the Middle Eastern uncle who tells you how it all really happens.
[00:10:50]  And there's a cliche in a lot of reporting and writing that sort of exoticizes the idea of this type of guy or just Middle Eastern cab driver who espouses all sorts of outlandish conspiracy theories that are behind everything, right?
[00:11:02]  I've spent a lot of my life living in the region, and it happens all the time.
[00:11:06]  You know, I was serving in Turkey during the first Trump administration, and the first taxicab question is like, you know, like who directs Trump?
[00:11:15]  Who's behind him?
[00:11:16]  And then they were really crestfallen when I was like, I kind of don't think anybody, man.
[00:11:19]  I kind of think this is on autopilot.
[00:11:21]  But, you know, this is a real guy, and I know that guy.
[00:11:23]  But an important thing to kind of underline when we're talking about a part of the world or a country or a culture and political phenomenon that involve it.
[00:11:32]  Is, you know, what happened to Mossadegh isn't a conspiracy theory.
[00:11:36]  It was just an actual, like, IRL conspiracy that the West did to Iran.
[00:11:41]  When the contemporary monarchist movement is rife with conspiracy theories, we have to acknowledge that real conspiracies abound.
[00:11:48]  And, you know, this is a part of the world where the most pilled possible thing has derailed entire societies at the behest of Western interests.
[00:11:56]  So, what happens with the Pahlavi dynasty after Mossadegh is also pretty predictable.
[00:12:01]  There were attempts at reform.
[00:12:02]  During the Shah's White Revolution, which was basically throwing oil money at social programs to head off communist guerrilla movements and Islamist unrest.
[00:12:10]  But none of this could really fix the staggering inequality in Iranian society, which was an authoritarian monarchist dictatorship.
[00:12:19]  It was a place with palaces, champagne, and Cadillacs for a few, and we'll talk about that image later, but it was pretty miserable for most Iranians.
[00:12:27]  The Shah created Savak, which was the CIA and Mossad trained secret police force, which cracked down on dissidents, students, intellectuals, and activist clergy using brutal torture and murder.
[00:12:38]  The Shah went nuts buying high tech Western weapons and basically floated the Western arms industry through the FOSS Vietnam spending slump.
[00:12:44]  He coronated himself in an elaborate ceremony which featured a little prince, his heir Reza Pathavi, who we will talk about soon.
[00:12:51]  And I put in the doc, there's a little picture of young Reza Pathavi barely sitting on his coronation throne in his little uniform.
[00:12:57]  I mean, this doesn't inspire confidence when you have pre-pubescence and just absolute regalia on a golden throne.
[00:13:05]  It makes one skeptical of leadership, for me.
[00:13:10]  It was a lot of sashes, a lot of aviator sunglasses.
[00:13:13]  It was a lot of self-coronation.
[00:13:16]  It was kind of like a cartoon-level gilded dictatorship.
[00:13:20]  And even at the time, I think people like to talk about.
[00:13:22]  How close the USA was to the Shah.
[00:13:25]  But even at the time, people in Washington were pretty uncomfortable with the human rights record.
[00:13:29]  It was a big issue for Jimmy Carter, especially of basically like, we want to keep selling you these fighter jets, but you're going to have to cool it with torturing dissidents to death.
[00:13:38]  And so, you know, there's a lot in the news about the Islamic Republic carrying out crackdowns, which it is and has.
[00:13:45]  That's not like unique to that form of government.
[00:13:47]  Mohammed Pahlavi and the Shah's dynasty was absolutely doing very, very similar stuff.
[00:13:52]  So, Iran in the 1970s was an oil state.
[00:13:55]  With F14s, with a sub 40% literacy rate and staggering levels of poverty.
[00:14:00]  Above it all, the Shah combined a superficial glazing of pre Islamic Iranian history and empires with an, in reality, obsession with the West and being seen as Western.
[00:14:10]  This becomes a pronounced trend during the Shah's monarchy, and it's actually one of the big accusations that Khomeini and the Islamic Republic kind of levy against the entire regime they say it's which means you have been struck by the West.
[00:14:23]  You are Western, confused, and sort of enamored with a foreign culture.
[00:14:28]  In 1971, in the ancient city of Persepolis, the Shah spent millions of dollars on a huge celebration of 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy in a purpose built tent city which normal Iranians were excluded from.
[00:14:40]  European royalty, though, were invited, and he flew wine in from Europe on the Concorde.
[00:14:45]  The Shah even imported 50,000 songbirds from Europe because apparently Iranian birds weren't cutting it in that region of Iran and they needed to have special bird song in all the trees he had planted.
[00:14:56]  Dear God, can you imagine?
[00:14:58]  50,000 songbirds released in your local bird population, just what that does to like the native balance.
[00:15:04]  That's so crazy.
[00:15:06]  I'm sorry to fixate on that.
[00:15:07]  No, it's the cocoa and the wine.
[00:15:12]  It stuck with me because this is just like the most like mad king thing that I think someone could do.
[00:15:18]  And, you know, I've had this event especially mentioned to me by like Iranians who lived through the generation of the revolution as basically like being so offended.
[00:15:26]  Like, were our birds not good enough?
[00:15:28]  Like, they even like people go back and look at the menu and there's like, there's not even a Any Iranian food on this thing?
[00:15:33]  Like, this is like filet mignon.
[00:15:35]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:15:35]  Like, are you not even showing this country off that you have to, like, I don't know how they flew in the birds.
[00:15:40]  I don't think the birds got the Concorde, but it's just one of the wildest things.
[00:15:43]  He was Louis XIV pilled.
[00:15:44]  This is extremely Louis XIV.
[00:15:47]  And what's coming next is a very Louis XIV conclusion to this story.
[00:15:52]  So I'm sure you can guess what happens next in pretty short order.
[00:15:55]  I'm not going to recount the entire 1979 revolution here, but a coalition of leftists, liberals, nationalists, and Islamists of different types eventually send the shop hacking into exile.
[00:16:05]  In the aftermath, the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini outmaneuver everyone else.
[00:16:09]  Iran is declared to be an Islamic republic operating under the Viliyat i Fakhi, or the government of the jurisprudent, basically, ruled by clerics.
[00:16:17]  And every other faction gets purged to various degrees, ranging from either getting co opted into the new system, to getting booted out of parliament, to at the other end, mass execution.
[00:16:27]  It really is a 1789 Louis XIV style full social revolution, complete with the terror.
[00:16:34]  An important thing I want to remember and kind of underline, though, for talking about what's going to come next in terms of the monarchist movement.
[00:16:41]  Is that there was really nasty street fighting between revolutionaries, the Shah's army, and Savak.
[00:16:46]  It wasn't really a full blown civil war because most of the army defected.
[00:16:51]  Even Western governments and most Iranian military leadership were really trying to manage a transition to another form of government rather than try to save the Shah.
[00:17:01]  Nobody liked this guy in 1979.
[00:17:03]  The most fucked position ever.
[00:17:05]  You love the West so much, and they're like, well, what are options this side of you?
[00:17:09]  Damn, damn, that's crazy.
[00:17:12]  The U.S.
[00:17:12]  The US wouldn't even give him asylum.
[00:17:15]  So he had to kick around and went into exile in Costa Rica for a little bit.
[00:17:21]  And then I think maybe Panama.
[00:17:23]  And then it was when he was in Central America that there was kind of like a left government that made a Marxist professor his bodyguard, who just like while he was guarding the Shah in exile would just like berate him about how he failed to develop the country.
[00:17:38]  And yeah, like just like he is, he kind of goes down as a pretty weak guy, but it's really grim.
[00:17:47]  Not the most cucked member of the Pahlavi dynasty, but we will get to that.
[00:17:51]  During your exile, Travis, I will be assigned to you.
[00:17:55]  So the Shah goes into exile with his wife and son and a lot of stolen money and succumbs to the cancer he'd been battling in the last few years of his reign.
[00:18:02]  He's buried in Cairo in a mosque, which is kind of prickly for a lot of very, very anti Islam Iranian exiles.
[00:18:09]  And his family settles in America, and the family are not the only ones.
[00:18:14]  After the 1979 revolution, Iran has something new.
[00:18:17]  Iran has a diaspora.
[00:18:19]  Ever since the 1960s, California was the biggest destination for Iranian students, and after the revolution and subsequent brutal invasion by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, these students were joined by refugees, political exiles, and members of the Shah's former ruling elite.
[00:18:32]  Although Iran and America were now mortal enemies, America became the country with the most Iranians living in it outside of Iran.
[00:18:39]  It's a community that exists largely because of the Iranian Revolution, and it's important to kind of understand that while that's a formative experience, for many of that community, 1979 is also a formative trauma.
[00:18:50]  And I want to distinguish here between exile and diaspora politics.
[00:18:54]  Exile politics are when a country's own internal politics happen abroad because of upheaval or war.
[00:19:00]  That's quite a lot when it comes to Iranian groups.
[00:19:03]  The pro Mossadegh Tudeh Party actually operated in exile in East Germany after the 1950s.
[00:19:09]  Iranian Kurdish groups set up shop in Kurdish regions of Iraq.
[00:19:12]  And members of the Iranian provisional government that lost out to Khomeini frequently wound up getting assassinated in like Paris or London, right?
[00:19:19]  So it's when a country's politics happen elsewhere.
[00:19:21]  And there have been assassination attempts.
[00:19:23]  There have been political figures in exile.
[00:19:25]  That's not quite the same thing as a diaspora movement.
[00:19:29]  I don't know if it's like the most helpful thing, but I think it's an important heuristic to remember when we're talking about Pahlavism, because this isn't like a guy in exile who's just continuing to do politics in exile.
[00:19:39]  It's like a new thing that's grown up outside of the country organically among like a multi generation population of people who don't live there, right?
[00:19:49]  It's just worth keeping in mind as a framework for what Iranian monarchism turns into after the revolution, because for Decades, it wasn't really present in these kinds of like exile politics, right?
[00:20:00]  So in the 80s and 90s, it's not like there were monarchists running around a lot.
[00:20:05]  I mean, there were some, but they weren't the biggest or most important group that opposed the Islamic Republic outside the country.
[00:20:11]  Right.
[00:20:12]  I guess because everyone hates the monarchy, even the people who live in the country.
[00:20:15]  Yeah.
[00:20:15]  I mean, they were like, there was just a revolution and no one wanted to touch them with a 10 foot pole.
[00:20:20]  If anything, in the 80s among Iranian exile groups, the feeling was, you're the guys who got us into this mess, right?
[00:20:26]  You're the reason I live in Frankfurt now, dipshit.
[00:20:29]  Like, nobody wants you back.
[00:20:31]  Everyone remembers your loser dad.
[00:20:33]  Yeah.
[00:20:33]  I mean, if you're a member of the two day party, First of all, you're probably the closest to being a communist that you're going to get in Iranian politics.
[00:20:42]  And your support of Mossadegh was always qualified because Mossadegh was just a constitutional monarchist.
[00:20:49]  He just believed that the Shah should be ceremonial.
[00:20:51]  He didn't even oppose the existence of the Shah.
[00:20:54]  He wanted it.
[00:20:55]  He believed that that was part of law, essentially, a pretty holy law, essentially.
[00:21:01]  So it's really funny if you're in exile like that.
[00:21:03]  You're definitely not about to become a monarchist.
[00:21:06]  Oh, no.
[00:21:07]  And the two day guys, for Fought against the monarchy.
[00:21:09]  The other group I'm going to kind of sidebar here is Mojahideen Echalk, which was a guerrilla organization.
[00:21:15]  And it's also like, yeah, that's an important point.
[00:21:18]  Like, Mossadegh was kind of a lib, right?
[00:21:20]  I mean, he's not just kind of, he was like a liberal, self professed constitutional monarchist.
[00:21:30]  Yeah.
[00:21:30]  And that doesn't translate to the experience of monarchism in the diaspora as it emerges and the way we're going to talk about it.
[00:21:37]  No one's like, I would like to have a constitutional monarch.
[00:21:40]  There's a little changing the guard ceremony at Golistan Palace, and otherwise it's a democracy, right?
[00:21:45]  No, they don't want the British system.
[00:21:46]  They want the periods where the Shah actually ruled brutally.
[00:21:49]  Yeah, actually, like they want the lion and son to.
[00:21:54]  I don't even know if they really know what they want.
[00:21:57]  Activate.
[00:21:57]  Activate.
[00:21:58]  Go super science.
[00:21:59]  To go super science and stop using the Arabic alphabet and ban Islam and develop a nuke, but fire it at anyone who doesn't like Israel.
[00:22:11]  I don't like it.
[00:22:12]  Yeah, it's a whole thing, but I think the other thing is there is a big.
[00:22:15]  Kind of missing middle of like you don't see a lot of constitutional monarchs or liberals because the politics in the home country, like all those people wound up dying or like in exile.
[00:22:24]  And one of the opposition groups that stood against the Islamic Republic early on, I'm going to talk about here, is an interesting, I'm not going to say parallel, but it goes through, let's say, a development arc.

=== The Missing Middle (11:47) ===

[00:22:34]  It might be tempting to draw parallels between supporters of the Shah and one of the most major Iranian exile groups, the Mojahideen al Khalkh or MEK.
[00:22:41]  But although there are parallels between them, they're very different movements that operate in really different ways.
[00:22:47]  So the MEK was a group that Fused political Islam and socialism, and they operated as a guerrilla force in Iran.
[00:22:53]  And they actually blew away a lot of American advisors and diplomats in the 70s and participated in the Iranian Revolution as like armed fighters.
[00:23:01]  Like they were duking it out with Sadak industry with assault rifles.
[00:23:05]  But they got outmaneuvered in the post revolution struggles.
[00:23:09]  But when Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980, the group committed the unforgivable sin of supporting a foreign invasion and lost support inside Iran.
[00:23:17]  They were branded traitors because they Like, we were traitors.
[00:23:21]  And the group fled to Iraq, where, under the leadership of Massoud Rajabi, and then after he mysteriously disappeared in a way that no one's ever solved or asked, and his body's never been found, his wife Mariam, they fought on the side of Saddam.
[00:23:33]  Like many far left organizations, and I think even a couple you've covered on the show, the MEK degenerated into a bizarre sex cult inside their heavily fortified Iraqi base.
[00:23:42]  The only left wing political cult, though, to ever operate a large tank force.
[00:23:47]  So they were this, like, armed to the teeth.
[00:23:49]  Kind of weird, hey, buy my newspaper leftist group that attempted to invade Iran on their own after the Iran Iraq war ended and were completely slaughtered on the battlefield.
[00:24:00]  Their remaining supporters inside Iran were all executed in mass hangings, and that is kind of a blow, both the MEK's betrayal of the country and then the execution of its supporters.
[00:24:10]  It's kind of a blow that the Iranian socialist left has never really recovered from those purges after the end of the Iran Iraq war.
[00:24:17]  The MEK stayed in Iraq, going totally mental inside Camp Ashraf until the 2003 American invasion.
[00:24:23]  But here's a kind of interesting parallel also.
[00:24:26]  Having become increasingly close to Israel and the United States as mutual enemies of the Iranian government, the U.S. forcibly disarmed the group.
[00:24:32]  And flew them all to Albania, where courtesy of the CIA, they operate in a big compound where their members can't leave and they're all forced to post online against the Iranian government all day long.
[00:24:43]  Oh, no.
[00:24:44]  Mandatory posts.
[00:24:44]  They're internet soldiers.
[00:24:46]  No, they are internet soldiers in a giant cult compound in mountainous northern Albania where they have their bank accounts taken away and they're just made to manage these bot networks to post anti Islamic Republic tweets all day long.
[00:25:01]  And they have to do weird wife swapping stuff with the leaders.
[00:25:05]  Rudy Giuliani, if you'll notice, came out against the Shah pretty early.
[00:25:10]  He was like, this Pahlavi guy is a loser.
[00:25:12]  That's because Rudy Giuliani is completely in the tank for MEK, and way more American politicians than you would think are mobbed up with the MEK.
[00:25:20]  MEK are the only major group that's managed to lobby their way into being undesignated as a terrorist organization because up until Trump won, they were because of all the American officials that they assassinated in the 70s, but they fell into this kind of Regime change, war lobby, kind of neocon space, and have carved out, you know, a pretty good kind of arena for themselves.
[00:25:44]  What you're basically saying is that the Trotskyist and neocon pipeline, like they invented it from first principles, basically.
[00:25:52]  Yeah, yeah, no, this is the full, this is the full, like every, oh my God, I've never actually thought about it that way, but yeah, it's the trot to neocon pipeline of like at one moment you're waging people's guerrilla struggle, and the next you're like hanging out with Rudy Giuliani, and or he's hanging out with You.
[00:26:09]  No, it absolutely is.
[00:26:10]  And I think that's a really good point because this is not like, although they're a pretty wingnut kind of a group, this is a pattern that you can see kind of anywhere in the world with groups under these sorts of pressures.
[00:26:21]  So, you know, while this is a story of an Iranian dissident group going crazy in exile, it's also not structurally similar to Pahlavism at all.
[00:26:30]  And I do want to talk about Pahlavism structurally, right?
[00:26:32]  And Pahlavism is a movement of parts of the right wing Iranian diaspora that emerges because of.
[00:26:38]  Of diaspora identity and AstroTurf TV channels, it's not like a Khmer Rouge style example of radicalization under conditions of armed struggle, right?
[00:26:46]  Pahlavism is not like an exile group going nuts, it's a diaspora group getting really chutted.
[00:26:52]  In the years after the revolution, nostalgia for the Shah was just that.
[00:26:55]  It was nostalgia, if anyone even felt it at all.
[00:26:57]  It wasn't an organized or armed political movement.
[00:27:00]  There were plenty of former Shah regime officials that came to the U.S. and built lives.
[00:27:04]  For example, a former, like, deputy chief of Savak was recently exposed because he was.
[00:27:08]  Going to pro monarchist protests in Los Angeles.
[00:27:11]  And he was this like legend.
[00:27:13]  I've linked to a story about it.
[00:27:14]  He was this like legendary torturer who people thought had disappeared, but it turned out he had just been living in Los Angeles ever since '79.
[00:27:20]  And, you know, these aren't people who are like plotting covert schemes.
[00:27:24]  They're just like, yeah, you know, I own a car dealership in Glendale and like I used to rip out students' fingernails for a living.
[00:27:31]  That's kind of how this works, right?
[00:27:33]  So, you know, it doesn't really exist for a long time after the revolution.
[00:27:37]  Like the Constitutionalist Party of Iran, which is like the Monarchist sort of political party was founded in Los Angeles by former Pahlavi officials in like the 90s.
[00:27:46]  And Pahlavism only reemerges years later.
[00:27:50]  So when we're talking about Pahlavism or Iranian monarchism, the Shah's dead.
[00:27:54]  Who are we talking about?
[00:27:56]  Like, who is this Reza Pahlavi guy?
[00:27:59]  Right.
[00:28:00]  And I, maybe this is surprising, but I'm kind of fascinated by the guy.
[00:28:05]  And to an extent, I kind of feel for him.
[00:28:08]  He really kind of feels like a Coen Brothers character to me.
[00:28:12]  As you go through his life, it is one of just like vainglorious self assertion, but also unceasing humiliation in essentially everything he ever tries to do in his life.
[00:28:24]  And I think the biography is pretty interesting, even though he himself is not a particularly like engaging or interesting guy.
[00:28:31]  So, Crown Prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was a 19 year old cadet in the Imperial Iranian Air Force, and he was training at a U.S. Air Force base in Texas when the revolution happened.
[00:28:40]  He leaves the program early, he joins his family in exile in Egypt, and his father dies of cancer, and then he becomes the Crown Prince and the heir to the throne in exile.
[00:28:49]  When Iraq invades Iran, Pahlavi, who remember he was a trained military pilot, he joins other purged former Iranian Air Force pilots, guys who were pro Shah but usually imprisoned.
[00:29:00]  They offered to defend the country.
[00:29:03]  Even though the Islamic Republic was the regime that overthrew them, when Iran was invaded from outside, they said, We can't stand this.
[00:29:11]  And from prison, they said, If you need us, we'll fight.
[00:29:15]  Other formerly monarchist pilots got to climb into the American made jets and duke it out with Saddam's Air Force and became like national heroes, right?
[00:29:23]  Guys who volunteered from prison that, like, we will fight for this regime because it's our country at the end of the day, become like fighter aces.
[00:29:31]  They're shooting down MiGs.
[00:29:33]  Folk heroes.
[00:29:34]  There's even like an Iranian style Top Gun movie made about one of these guys.
[00:29:38]  It's actually really good.
[00:29:39]  It's called The Pilot.
[00:29:40]  But the answer to Reza Pahlavi is no, go away.
[00:29:45]  So everyone else has this like noble moment of national heroism volunteering from a prison cell.
[00:29:50]  And they're just like, no, not you though.
[00:29:53]  You stay in America.
[00:29:54]  Get like, we don't want you here.
[00:29:55]  It's probably smart politically.
[00:29:57]  It's probably smart.
[00:29:58]  It's probably smart for them.
[00:29:59]  They're like, yeah, we're not going to let the crown prince fly around and become a war hero.
[00:30:04]  Like, absolutely not.
[00:30:05]  He's, you know, Reza Pahlavi is involved in a couple half assed CIA and Mossad instigated coup attempts that never turn into anything immediately after the revolution.
[00:30:14]  He does a correspondence degree in poli sci from USC, and he eventually winds up in the DC suburbs by the early 80s.
[00:30:20]  And he's kind of moving in a tiny closed circle of former employees of his dad, and he's never in his life had anything resembling like a job.
[00:30:29]  So it's just kind of him hanging out with the guys who ran his father's business and just sort of Going from exile event to exile event, and everyone's like, Yay, they're the king.
[00:30:40]  And he's just like hanging out in a mansion in Maryland with no discernible job or qualification.
[00:30:46]  Nice work if you can get it.
[00:30:48]  So he describes himself as an advocate for a free Iran, but he's historically actually been, even he's been pretty ambivalent about advocating for becoming the leader of Iran, mostly because it seems like he doesn't really want to be the Shah.
[00:31:02]  Like he's kind of said, it's not clear what citizenship he holds or like if he has a US passport.
[00:31:08]  But he's said in the past, like, maybe I could be like a part time transitional leader for Iran.
[00:31:15]  Like, maybe I could spend like half the year in Maryland and then like half in Tehran if the government changes.
[00:31:21]  So, this is not a guy who is going around nursing a blood feud, demanding to be like, I am the king and it is my birthright, right?
[00:31:30]  Reza Pahlavi has always insisted that his means of financial support is his family's wealth.
[00:31:34]  And while they did take a lot of money out of the country with them, he doesn't really know about his own finances.
[00:31:39]  Which I mean, you kind of wonder why this dynasty got overthrown.
[00:31:42]  This guy was just like, I don't look at the books, I don't know how much money I have.
[00:31:46]  Let's import more songbirds to Maryland.
[00:31:48]  Are you telling me that little guy who was sitting on a throne in his regalia turned into a fail son?
[00:31:54]  Yeah, it's incredible how when you're nine and you're already wearing a general's uniform, it doesn't really set you up for success.
[00:32:01]  So Reza Pahlavi and his financial advisor wind up firing reciprocal lawsuits at each other in the 90s, which doesn't really answer the question of where he gets all of his money.
[00:32:10]  And the whole thing ends with Pahlavi basically declaring in court that he doesn't know how much money he has or where it comes from or how it's spent.
[00:32:17]  But he does then go on to accuse his financial advisor of being an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps agent and keep that one in your pocket because a big part of Pahlavi politics is accusing anyone you don't like of being a regime agent.
[00:32:30]  There's obviously rumors that this jobless and well heeled lifestyle has been heavily subsidized by the CIA and Mossad, who have been keeping him on retainer until the day that they need a figurehead for a regime change war, which, uh, eh, nah.
[00:32:44]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:45]  Should have gone a little bit better.
[00:32:47]  He should have gone a little bit better.
[00:32:48]  But also, Trump, like, doesn't know anything about Pahlavi and doesn't give a fuck about him, which is very funny.
[00:32:53]  No, he doesn't care at all.
[00:32:55]  And I think it's also because, like, You know, the closer someone gets to you, the more you are, the better you are at like spotting a poser or like a, you know, you're not really about that life.
[00:33:06]  It's like, I see your tacky, entirely gilded house.
[00:33:09]  I see your like, I mean, like Reza Patov is a pretty shlubby guy.
[00:33:13]  I have it on secondhand authority that like any moment he is not in a media appearance, he's just wearing tracksuits all the time.
[00:33:20]  And like Trump knows this kind of like dipshit guy who's just kind of pottering his, along with his dad's business and in a, you know, in a mansion somewhere.
[00:33:27]  And he does not respect him like at all.
[00:33:30]  At all.
[00:33:31]  So Reza Pahlavi enters the 2010s as a Maryland grill dad with a passion for wildlife bird photography.
[00:33:36]  He's got a whole separate Instagram account just for his nature photography, which actually, going back to the songbirds, maybe there is a family fixation with birds.
[00:33:44]  I don't know what's going on with that.
[00:33:46]  But he's hanging out in Maryland.
[00:33:47]  He's ignoring the fact that his wife, Yasmeen, is flagrantly cheating on him with her French yoga instructor.
[00:33:55]  Photos in there.
[00:33:56]  When I said his dad was not the most cucked Iranian monarch, I'm sorry if your wife has photos like this floating around.
[00:34:02]  With your yoga teacher.
[00:34:04]  It's over, dude.
[00:34:06]  French yoga teacher is the most like GTA French yoga teacher.
[00:34:10]  I mean, she's having a great time.
[00:34:13]  She's having a great time.
[00:34:15]  He kind of has a Matthew McConaughey thing going on.
[00:34:18]  Yeah, he's got the feathered hair.
[00:34:20]  They're like backpacking in Thailand.

=== Pahlavism Meets MAGA (10:50) ===

[00:34:22]  They're like, you know, they're, what?
[00:34:24]  She likes yoga.
[00:34:25]  I mean, what?
[00:34:26]  I get older.
[00:34:27]  The Iranian queens remain the same age.
[00:34:32]  The Iranian princesses.
[00:34:33]  I mean, in this case, I think she's actually a little bit older, which is, ooh.
[00:34:37]  But yeah, so, I mean, you know, this guy can only drive into the district and go to Moby Dick's House of Kebab.
[00:34:43]  By the way, shout out Moby Dick's House of Kebab, amazing Iranian chain in DC.
[00:34:47]  I do not know about their politics.
[00:34:49]  I have not followed who they are backing in the current crisis.
[00:34:52]  I do not want to know.
[00:34:53]  I just want the memories of their lunch deal.
[00:34:55]  So, like I said before, I personally find Reza Pallavi to almost be like a Cohen's brother kind of a figure, a reasonably pleasant man who affects this self serious dignity while.
[00:35:05]  Constantly living in the shadow of his father, a guy who seems thrust into world events not entirely of his own will, although he could have stopped all of this if he had really put his foot down, but he never has.
[00:35:16]  And every time he tries to do something, he's constantly humiliated.
[00:35:19]  He's almost a kept man, and in the 2010s, the bill for this lifestyle comes due.
[00:35:23]  The post 9 11 global war on terror era is a feeding frenzy for anyone who wants to overthrow a Middle Eastern government, and Iran was no exception.
[00:35:32]  American hawks like Lindsey Graham were long interested in overthrowing the Iranian regime and glommed onto the cause.
[00:35:38]  Both neocons and the Israel lobby were all hopeful that they could get away with doing Iraq and Iran.
[00:35:43]  The Israel backed Turbohawk Foundation for Defense of Democracies was founded in 2001, straight up as like a Hebrew named pro Israel organization that later rebranded.
[00:35:53]  And they pretty quickly staffed up with a number of pro regime and pro Pahlavi Iran experts.
[00:35:59]  In 2003, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, or NUFTI, is founded.
[00:36:05]  This is the closest thing to a Pahlavist think tank that exists.
[00:36:09]  Like whatever policy documents or attempts to actually act like a government they have, this is them.
[00:36:15]  It's also a structural backbone by which Israeli and also Gulf state money gets funneled into the Pahlavi movement.
[00:36:21]  It's a whole elite ecosystem that's the result of a synergy of Saudi, Emirati, Israeli, and neocon money.
[00:36:28]  And so, where a lot of the funding for this gets very muddled, this is something that actually reminds me of a lot of like Tea Party or Q stuff where you can't just say, oh, it's the Adelsons, it's this person, it's this mega donor.
[00:36:41]  You can't just directly point at Pahlavism and say it's all the Israel lobby.
[00:36:45]  You can't say it's all.
[00:36:47]  Rich right wing Persians in Los Angeles.
[00:36:49]  You can't say that it's all, you know, the Israel lobby or neocons.
[00:36:53]  There's enough of that floating around where these institutional positions kind of get floated on it.
[00:36:59]  But notice, not a party, not a mass movement, a think tank, right?
[00:37:03]  I do want to underline this amazing article in Jadalia, which is an article that personally got my ass and called me out by Negar Azavi, which is called The Problem of Iran Expertise in Washington.
[00:37:14]  And it's about this type of hawkish Iran expert who's just Some guy they find and deem an expert because they have a veneer of authority and say the things that they want, right?
[00:37:24]  For a long time, if you wanted to be a pro Iran regime change person, you could just be that person, irrespective of if you actually know anything about Iran or have the background.
[00:37:37]  One of the most notable hawkish think tank experts is actually a guy who's a scholar of 16th century documents or something like that.
[00:37:44]  He's a classicist, he's not a foreign policy guy.
[00:37:47]  So there's this whole ecosystem that comes around Iran regime change, and a lot of people made a living on it for a long time.
[00:37:52]  I put the link in the doc.
[00:37:53]  It's a great piece in Jadalia if you ever wanted to know about people like me who know all the Persian spots in DC and studied Farsi when they got a master's degree and have a foundation for regime exploding, you know, a resident fellow position or something like that.
[00:38:09]  It's good, but it's damning.
[00:38:11]  I think this is an overlap with stuff that you've also talked about, but you get these figures like Claire Lopez, who's a CIA veteran and anti Islam conspiracy theorist who gets involved with regime change stuff.
[00:38:21]  She's really deeply mopped up with like the Clarion Institute, which I think I've heard you mention before, and is.
[00:38:27]  Kind of the first person I can point to that is a bridge between the Pahlavi's and the Pahlavis movement and Trump world, right?
[00:38:35]  So these people, this kind of soup is floating around since the early 2000s.
[00:38:41]  I did see them like at CPAC, the CPAC following the Trump victory.
[00:38:45]  I saw all these like Iranians for Israel and they were also talking about reinstating the Shah.
[00:38:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:38:53]  They're really big at CPAC and they're really big with this kind of like Gen 1 Trump world type of person.
[00:39:00]  Right?
[00:39:00]  And they really latch on to that.
[00:39:03]  You know, up until now, we've talked a lot about Iranian history and the ways that the story is unique and special and the specificities of that place.
[00:39:11]  But I kind of want to shift gears now, you know, with this like mention of CPAC and Claire Lopez and these people and talk about how this is actually a pretty globally universal and common story.
[00:39:20]  This is where Pahlavism starts to resemble MAGA.
[00:39:23]  And just like MAGA and its freakier fringes, it all comes together in the 2010s.
[00:39:28]  You know, it's like the Bolsonaro movement.
[00:39:30]  It's like queer dankers, or who I only know about because of QAA, or like the Canadian trucker convoys.
[00:39:36]  Like, Pahlavism starts to emerge from this ecosystem, really in like post 2010.
[00:39:43]  So, I want to underscore that despite all the history and background and context, this is all like a really recent thing.
[00:39:49]  Yeah, part of a global wave of reactionaries losing their fucking minds.
[00:39:54]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:39:54]  Reactionaries getting what they want and losing their minds and burning quite a lot of elite money to do it and then breaking containment.
[00:40:03]  The ground zero for Pahlavism, or what some people, even inside the Pahlavist movement, are calling neo Pahlavism, is not like the moment it becomes not just a set of hawkish think tanks, the moment it really kind of breaks containment is because of a TV channel, or rather, two TV channels.
[00:40:19]  For a long time, you got to understand that Iranian state TV was boring as shit.
[00:40:24]  IRIB or Press TV, which is their kind of English language, like foreign propaganda of the Iranian government, was just guys with no ties and women in chadors talking directly at the camera.
[00:40:34]  Low production values, lots of clumsy propaganda, nothing fun or cool.
[00:40:39]  The censors won't allow it, right?
[00:40:40]  So, if you are interested in watching a Farsi language news channel, for a long time you didn't have a lot of options.
[00:40:48]  The whole thing about these internet savvy Iranian government groups creating the funny AI Lego videos and the rap songs about how Pete Hegzeth is a drunk loser, that's a totally new development in Iranian messaging.
[00:40:59]  And I didn't believe they had it in them.
[00:41:01]  You know, the supporters of the Islamic Republic to make a catchy Lego rap song about Epstein.
[00:41:06]  You know, for a long time, it was at most relatable a guy talking about Alexis de Tocqueville to try to message to Americans.
[00:41:13]  So, a lot of people inside and outside Iran would watch The Voice of America in Persian or BBC Farsi.
[00:41:20]  And they've always been sources of Persian language news.
[00:41:22]  They've also always been sources of anti regime and opposition Persian language news, right?
[00:41:27]  Voice of America and BBC Farsi are, you know, like dissident organizations that are against the Iranian government.
[00:41:34]  But it was always a very liberal kind of opposition.
[00:41:36]  Human rights activists, feminists, filmmakers who've been censored, artists.
[00:41:41]  You know, Voice of America and BBC Farsi also had a commitment to one degree or another to making a case against the Iranian government by modeling like openness and liberalism and reform.
[00:41:52]  So they would report on how sanctions made life hard in Iran or about Western abuses in the region so they could build credibility.
[00:41:59]  That was the exile kind of news media environment in Persian.
[00:42:03]  Very PBS coded, right?
[00:42:05]  Where they kind of kept the, hey, maybe the Islamic Republic isn't very.
[00:42:08]  Good, a bit on the down low as part of a bigger kind of liberal message.
[00:42:13]  But in the 2010s, you have two networks that come out of nowhere, Manoto and Iran International.
[00:42:20]  And they kind of bring like a Fox News and even kind of an OANN turbo chud, always on yelling broadcast TV in Farsi to an Iranian audience.
[00:42:31]  And Manoto starts broadcasting in 2010.
[00:42:34]  And it is unironically, I think it is the reason for all of the Iran before the Islamic Revolution memes.
[00:42:40]  Like the reason that people are like putting photos of like, you know, a black and white photo of Charlie Kirk and it's like, haha, like Charlie Kirk before the Iranian Revolution or like pictures of Freddie Mercury and it's like Iranian men hanging out before the Islamic Revolution or like you slap that on any bikini photo and it's like a meme is because of Manito and like the amount of nostalgia programming that they do for that time.
[00:43:02]  Manito is based in London and its origins are a bit murkier than the clearly Saudi backed Iran International, but Manito has very high production values and it does a lot of cultural programming.
[00:43:13]  So they like, Kugush, who's like the legendary Iranian singer, her music is so good, all bangers.
[00:43:20]  She's been around forever, like since the 70s, but she hosted a version of The Voice on Manoto.
[00:43:24]  There's cooking programs so you can like make all of the absurdly delicious, like finely crafted pilavs and stuff like that.
[00:43:31]  Like, there's all of this stuff that's very relatable to a maybe less highbrow, less politically engaged, like cultural interest stuff for Farsi speakers.
[00:43:41]  But there's also this vision of a totally whitewashed nostalgia for pre revolution Iran with lots of women in bikinis and scenes of glamour and palaces and luxury, which, like, to be clear, like, that did exist if you were like.
[00:43:55]  Close to the Shah.
[00:43:56]  I mean, it's really kind of the this is what they took for you conservative return trad thing where they look at like a cola ad and they're like, this is what white men don't get anymore, right?
[00:44:06]  And they'll be like, they'll show, you know, people at a beach resort in the Caspian drinking martinis, you know, driving around in Cadillacs.
[00:44:13]  And it's like, well, yeah, that, I mean, that existed for some people before 1979, certainly not most, right?
[00:44:20]  Yeah.
[00:44:20]  I mean, yeah, we see the same thing online all the time where it's like, it's like, why can't we have like, you know, parties like this anymore?
[00:44:26]  And it's like a late night.
[00:44:27]  19th century southern large plantation, like a ball or something.
[00:44:32]  It's like, well, yeah, because even if you weren't invited to those things, even if you were, you don't exist in that time.
[00:44:38]  It's like those are like, you know, they like the top 1% of white people at the time.
[00:44:43]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:44:44]  And so a lot of this, you know, it's basically like a nostalgia for the Shah that looks at maybe some of the more cultural openness.
[00:44:52]  And I wouldn't even say openness, just like kind of cult, like the shit rich people always get up to.
[00:44:58]  And completely overlooks the underlying economics system, where it's like, well, you're saying that Iran was like a feminist paradise because a handful of literal princesses got to wear Chanel bathing suits, whereas like most women didn't finish grade school, right?

=== Retrotopia and Coherence (03:18) ===

[00:45:12]  And, you know, for anything else you can say about the Islamic Republic, it's taken things like literacy and education very seriously.
[00:45:19]  Like in Iran today, more women graduate from university than men to the extent that men are given like affirmative action in university admissions now because not enough of them like make it in.
[00:45:29]  You know, it's the same kind of right wing nostalgia you see everywhere.
[00:45:34]  You know, the idea of like a man used to be able to provide for his family in his picture of like Don Draper, like you weren't that guy, and neither were you invited to any of this, right?
[00:45:42]  Now that's Manoto, right?
[00:45:44]  But Iran International, the other big network, is much more of a latecomer.
[00:45:48]  It comes on in like 2017, and it is a hard news channel, very Fox style, that is just straight up bomb Iran now, war now, attack Iran, the regime will collapse, the people will rise up, we have to do it now.
[00:46:02]  Please blow up Iran, like invade.
[00:46:04]  We need regime change.
[00:46:05]  This isn't propaganda or lobbying directed at foreigners either.
[00:46:09]  It's not saying to like Americans, hey, America, you should attack this evil country that hates America.
[00:46:15]  This is like to an Iranian audience saying a precondition for anything changing or getting better in Iran is war, right?
[00:46:22]  Not that it might be regrettable or not be necessary or that we want the government to change.
[00:46:26]  It's not even arguing that, like, well, we want there to be a different system of government.
[00:46:31]  It's we want there to be a war so there will be a different system of government, right?
[00:46:36]  Iran International is probably responsible for a lot more of the radicalization.
[00:46:41]  Like when you read Iranian American accounts of like families breaking down after the war and estrangement and things like that, people talk about Iran International the way you would talk about Fox, right?
[00:46:51]  But I think it's important to take it together with Manitoba as a package, even though they're different organizations that probably have different benefactors.
[00:46:59]  And the story of like people getting Iran International pilled is really familiar to this podcast and the movements like it, right?
[00:47:07]  Shout out to the Iranian American novelist Porakhista Khakhpur.
[00:47:10]  She goes on Instagram Live a lot and she's been very open talking about what's happened in her family and the kind of things that have taken place as a lot of her immediate family has become ardently Pahlavist by basically just having Iran International on all the time.
[00:47:26]  It just kind of sucks everything out of the room.
[00:47:29]  My beloved Umfi, Kevan Gosorhi, wrote a great piece in The Nation that talks about how the Pahlavi movement engages in and cultivates this idea of what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called retrotopia.
[00:47:41]  This oneness, however, is less an expression of shared present conditions than a projection of a selectively remembered past.
[00:47:47]  It can be more productively understood through what the late sociologist Sigmund Baumann called retrotopia, a backward looking orientation that locates political possibility in an imagined and idealized historical coherence.
[00:47:59]  In this formulation, Iran was perfect before the Islamic revolution, culturally cohesive, economically prosperous, and fundamentally unified.
[00:48:08]  But this utopic nostalgia, or retrotopia, to use Baumann's language, seeks that which does not exist.
[00:48:13]  Nostalgia, as a structure of feeling, does not recover the past so much as reorganizes it to soothe a pained yearning.
[00:48:20]  In doing so, nostalgic representations also smooth over contradictions, suppress conflicts, and promote an image of coherence that obscures the heterogeneity of lived experience.

=== Flattening Contradictions (15:21) ===

[00:48:30]  Because of media outlets like Manoto and Iran International, being pro American and pro Israeli military intervention to overthrow the Islamic Republic creates a sense of being a hegemonic idea when it really isn't one.
[00:48:42]  And that's the point.
[00:48:43]  Do we know the kind of like general historical background of?
[00:48:47]  So, like, are they more likely to have been wealthy before they left Iran?
[00:48:52]  That's a super interesting question.
[00:48:54]  There's actually a really great article that just came out in the New York Review that kind of delves a little bit into the way that it isn't.
[00:49:01]  In the same way that like MAGA or QAnon can actually be more cross class than you'd think, it's not as directly correlation.
[00:49:09]  Like, there's a lot of people who were rich under the Shah that stayed rich under the Islamic Republic, and even a lot of people who got rich under the Islamic Republic.
[00:49:16]  You know, one left wing criticism that's Leveled against the Iranian government is really that they're not particularly anti capitalist, right?
[00:49:24]  So, this is it's very MAGA style in that this is a conflict that's kind of pure culture and cultural orientation rather than a clear like rich people broke this way and poor people broke this way.
[00:49:35]  I mean, you can find people who are like auto mechanics that are Pahlavists.
[00:49:40]  You can find people in the diaspora that are millionaires who aren't.
[00:49:44]  Inside of Iran and Pahlavism inside of Iran is different.
[00:49:47]  That's more recent.
[00:49:48]  And I that's really something more for like.
[00:49:50]  Someone who's been in Iran recently, because in the last wave of protests, which we'll talk about in a bit, this is like a phenomenon which has introduced itself back into the mother country from the diaspora.
[00:50:00]  And the Pallavas, the neo Pallavas inside of Iran, are very much like a kind of lump in lower middle class, right wing, street fighting group of guys who are like very right wing, very racial, very misogynist, and very kind of very Latin America coded to me in a sense of like toughs who are ready to go out there and fight anyone.
[00:50:22]  And are guys with no economic prospects or hope, you know?
[00:50:27]  Right.
[00:50:27]  I guess it's like the secularism in that context is like an insertion of ethnic Persian identity as opposed to like Islam as a foreign thing.
[00:50:36]  Is there some of that going on?
[00:50:37]  I would say they believe both those things at the same time.
[00:50:40]  So there is a big ethnic component to this, and there's a lot of like weird 1930s Iranian racial nationalists who are getting resurrected and their books are being reread by young people.
[00:50:49]  In a lot of these contexts, the Islamophobia and the anti Islam thing is also an ethnic thing, right?
[00:50:55]  Where they're basically saying this is a I know people in my life who have said stuff to this, and it was always kind of like I mean, they're not Pahlavists, but it's pretty widely held that Islam is fundamentally an Arab religion that's foreign to our country, and we don't want to hear.
[00:51:08]  Now, that's a whole other can of worms.
[00:51:10]  It's not, I don't really have a dog in that fight.
[00:51:12]  It's a whole thing.
[00:51:13]  But a lot of the emphasis on Zoroastrianism, the looking at Islam as something foreign, there is an ethnic component to that of like, why did these people come out of the desert and conquer this civilization and make us believe this stuff?
[00:51:26]  Now, the fact that most Iran, like Iran, is a very religiously Muslim country, irrespective of it was under the Shah, it is now, doesn't really seem to factor into that.
[00:51:34]  But in the same way that MAGA does, a lot of really discordant, incoherent things kind of get flattened together inside of this movement, right?
[00:51:43]  Yeah, it's interesting.
[00:51:44]  I feel like originally I thought of it more as like a Russian emigre situation of like people who are mad about the Bolsheviks upsetting their position in Russian society.
[00:51:52]  But this seems like it's, yeah, it's more of a return imagined history for a lot of the Pavlovists than it is actual grievances about like, you know, like anyone who was formerly rich in like a communist country, like my family in Yugoslavia had their wealth taken away.
[00:52:06]  And like their people were like, oh, you took away my factory or whatever.
[00:52:10]  Yeah.
[00:52:10]  This seems to be maybe less driven by that sort of grievance.
[00:52:13]  Yeah.
[00:52:13]  My dad owned all the eggs in China, that famous tweet, right?
[00:52:16]  Like they had their wealth taken away.
[00:52:17]  Now, What's interesting though is the Iranian government has just now, like in the last month, announced that they are going to start seizing the assets of Iranians abroad who are anti regime.
[00:52:29]  Right.
[00:52:29]  But up until this war, they never touched that.
[00:52:33]  Like if you had problems accessing your money back in Iran, it was because of American financial sanctions, not because of the actions of the government.
[00:52:41]  So there's not a clear class component to this moment.
[00:52:44]  And that's why I really wanted to distinguish between an exile movement and a diaspora movement.
[00:52:49]  Because it is like that is the classic thing, like the embittered Croatian nationalist being like, and they can you believe the communists sent my father to prison simply for being a Nustasha colonel?
[00:53:01]  This is not exactly that.
[00:53:02]  No, those people are there, like the Savak deputy director who was protesting in Los Angeles, but it's not all or most of them.
[00:53:10]  So Iran has had a series of protest waves that have been escalating since 2019, and most of them were driven by economic dissatisfaction with Iran's sanctioned and collapsing economy.
[00:53:21]  Iran is next to Cuba, one of the most sanctioned and embargoed countries in the world.
[00:53:25]  It is almost impossible to do anything there.
[00:53:28]  It is almost impossible to send money, to have anything.
[00:53:31]  And so their economy is underperforming and collapsing, mostly due to sanctions, but you also have to put some blame on mismanagement.
[00:53:38]  Now, this includes the Women Life Freedom Movement, big employment protests.
[00:53:42]  There's a lot of government crackdowns.
[00:53:44]  Hundreds of people die.
[00:53:45]  It's grim, and things are heading towards a precipice simply because the economy is not working for most people, and conditions inside the country become unlivable.
[00:53:54]  But in January 2026, Reza Pahlavi kind of hijacks the narrative around a round of economic protests and declares that this is a.
[00:54:04]  I'm really glossing over a lot of things here, but he basically says that this is the time to rise up against the Islamic government.
[00:54:11]  I have the backing of America and Israel.
[00:54:13]  I am your king.
[00:54:14]  Go out there, overthrow the government, right?
[00:54:17]  As it starts heading towards a crackdown, he basically says, like, do it.
[00:54:20]  Now is the time.
[00:54:21]  Help is with you.
[00:54:23]  I don't have to get conspiracy brained against this.
[00:54:25]  American and Israeli leaders have both said, Yeah, we had agents on the ground there.
[00:54:30]  I don't know the degree of it.
[00:54:32]  It's just like all the going back and forth on the body count, people saying, this is how many people, this was a genocide that was worth a Gaza, only this many people died.
[00:54:41]  No, you're a liar.
[00:54:41]  No, you're a regime of Baldur's.
[00:54:43]  No, you're a foreign agent.
[00:54:44]  Look, he goes out there and he says, go out there, fight the cops.
[00:54:49]  Help is coming.
[00:54:50]  Burn down your local mosque.
[00:54:52]  I am your king.
[00:54:53]  Overthrow the government.
[00:54:54]  And the Islamic Republic calls his bluff by just shooting people.
[00:55:00]  That's kind of the political dynamic that matters for Podlovism here.
[00:55:04]  Pahlavism reinterjects itself in this call towards a basically unsupported, unorganized, unprepared kind of revolution thing that ends in, by the Iranian government's own admission, them shooting thousands of people.
[00:55:18]  Because the argument the Islamic Republic always deployed against even the most innocuous protest is that you are a foreign agent of America and Israel who wants to overthrow the government, right?
[00:55:30]  You say, we don't like mandatory hijab.
[00:55:32]  You're told you're a foreign agent.
[00:55:33]  You want the Shah back.
[00:55:34]  You love America and Israel.
[00:55:36]  You want to overthrow the government.
[00:55:37]  You say, why is my movie censored?
[00:55:39]  They give that same answer.
[00:55:40]  You say, why can't I afford rent?
[00:55:42]  They give that same answer.
[00:55:43]  Well, what did you think was going to happen when you walk out into the street and then loudly declare, I am an agent of America and Israel and I want to overthrow the government, right?
[00:55:51]  You know, I don't know a government on earth that would not react to a serious attempt to overthrow it in this way.
[00:55:57]  I mean, I think about January 6th, like push came to shove.
[00:56:00]  The Capitol Police did shoot an old, not an old, shot a young blonde white lady in the face because she was trying to overthrow the government.
[00:56:07]  It's a massacre.
[00:56:08]  But this coming to a boil had actually been building for a while.
[00:56:12]  So, there's a great piece in Politico from 2023 called I'll Burn You Alive, which is about how hostile and threatening the Iranian diaspora environment had become in the wake of the women life freedom protest movement.
[00:56:24]  And there were these coordinated sexual assault and death threats sent to anyone in the Iranian exile or diaspora community who supported a diplomatic solution to the Western impasse with Iran at that time.
[00:56:38]  Pro Pahlavi groups and associations, both formal and informal, have engaged in sustained and engineered attempts to shout down any dissenting voices.
[00:56:47]  They really wanted to make it come to the point of mass protest and massacre, right?
[00:56:52]  This is a movement that kind of exists to shut off other possibilities, both for Western relations with Iran and also for, bluntly, they don't want other avenues of change inside of Iran to happen, right?
[00:57:05]  And they don't like anyone who's advocating for a path that's not theirs.
[00:57:09]  A lot of these threat campaigns were aided by huge online bot networks and doxing that seemed to take place with the level of state resources.
[00:57:18]  And it was kind of an astroturfed movement that really only after 2022 starts coming into prominence.
[00:57:25]  You know, there was an attempt to create an official united Iranian opposition, kind of a government in exile around the time of the women's life freedom protests that totally fell apart organizationally.
[00:57:36]  But even during that time, Reza Pahlavi was seen as a very divisive and fringe problematic figure, even among the Iranian exiles.
[00:57:43]  You know, wasn't even sure, like, is he even on the team when you're talking about organized dissent on against the Iranian government?
[00:57:50]  And is there more like other groups that maybe were more organized to have been doing more actual on the ground political work or something like that?
[00:57:59]  So, one thing I want to underline when we talk about Pahlavism and how visible they've become and how many people kind of take them to be fully representative of what the Iranian diaspora is, this has only become like a hegemonic point of view since like 2022, right?
[00:58:13]  Yeah, I feel like the only like even like pro Israel, pro America.
[00:58:17]  Iranian diaspora people I knew around this period were like, Pavlovy is washed.
[00:58:21]  He's kind of sucks.
[00:58:22]  Yeah.
[00:58:22]  Yeah.
[00:58:22]  Absolutely.
[00:58:23]  I mean, he barely wants it.
[00:58:24]  That's the funny part is like gathering around a figure who barely wants to be there actually kind of reminds me of like Donald Trump.
[00:58:33]  It is one of the most Trumpist things.
[00:58:35]  And as we start kind of talking about how this starts to resemble not just MAGA, but also Q, I think Pavlovy's relationship to his own followers is this kind of weird bemusement of like, you know, like whenever Trump gets religious and he kind of Comes in and holds up a Bible and is like, wow, you love this, don't you?
[00:58:52]  Look at you go.
[00:58:53]  It's very similar.
[00:58:53]  Like he's washed.
[00:58:55]  And even the more kind of thoughtful pro regime change Iranians will basically say that Reza Pahlavi is just the last man standing.
[00:59:04]  He's the least bad option.
[00:59:05]  Or they will say, like, well, he'd be a transitional figure for now.
[00:59:09]  Like, he's chopped and everyone knows it, right?
[00:59:13]  But things after 22 start becoming increasingly contentious.
[00:59:17]  There's threats of violence, and at times, even before this war, it crosses into actual violence.
[00:59:22]  Masoud Masoudi was an incredibly litigious Simon Fraser University professor who was actively involved in non Pahlavi Iranian dissident movements, and he just loved to sue people.
[00:59:34]  And so he was.
[00:59:35]  Actively suing Reza Pahlavi for defamation and had repeatedly accused the Pahlavist movement of being infiltrated by the IRGC and Iranian government and being used as a controlled opposition.
[00:59:47]  Which, to be fair, if I was the Iranian government and wanted the opposition to be figureheaded by the most off putting and insane people, I would probably have done everything that the Pahlavists have done.
[01:00:02]  But Masjudi was one of these guys in a smaller non Pahlavist anti Iranian regime.
[01:00:09]  Organization whose body was found in rural Vancouver and a ardently pro Pahlavi, very strange Iranian Canadian couple has been charged with his murder.
[01:00:20]  I'm not even personally convinced that this was like an organized hit or something that would be pure political violence.
[01:00:26]  They like followed each other on Twitter.
[01:00:29]  They all had massive Twitter drama on Farsi Twitter with each other.
[01:00:32]  The couple was really weird and doing like public play and also, well, not nothing against that, but they were just like, they had a weird right wing swinger kind of vibe and like.
[01:00:42]  We're super duper pro Pahlavi and really into getting into huge fights on Farsi Twitter.
[01:00:48]  And now they're charged with murder.
[01:00:49]  So, like, putting a note in this, this is the first act of coordinated murder related to the Pahlavi movement in North America that I know.
[01:00:58]  Lots of swinging in this episode, specifically anti Iranian regime.
[01:01:03]  Yeah.
[01:01:04]  I mean, there is something, and I think some Iranian American influencers have pointed out kind of like how sexually charged a lot of Pahlavism is.
[01:01:11]  And I can't really.
[01:01:12]  I don't know.
[01:01:12]  Like, I don't come from the religious theocracy society.
[01:01:16]  I can't really speak as to what that does.
[01:01:18]  I don't know.
[01:01:18]  I don't know.
[01:01:19]  I don't have a dog in that fight, but you will notice, especially in some of the videos I've linked later, how kind of very, like, very sexy the Pahlavists tried to portray themselves as, as, you know, maybe a way to express themselves, but I don't know what's going on there.
[01:01:33]  So, like, an appropriation of the, like, unveiling the Muslim woman kind of discourse?
[01:01:38]  I don't even think appropriation, an explicit full throated endorsement.
[01:01:41]  The idea of, like, I'm stripping down and I'm going to do a twerk off to thank Trump against the Islamic Republic.
[01:01:46]  Republic.
[01:01:47]  And because everything is polarized identity politics, they're just like, well, if you say I can't do this, I'm going to do it, by God.
[01:01:56]  But, you know, the Pallavas, if anyone hasn't been watching the news, they are the dog that caught the car now.
[01:02:01]  They got the regime change war that they've been dreaming for for years.
[01:02:04]  And almost immediately everything fell apart.
[01:02:07]  The Islamic Republic does have, you know, about a 20% of the population core base of support.
[01:02:12]  That's about how many people in every Iranian election vote for the most conservative parties, the principalists.
[01:02:17]  You know, they're the real regimes, like the true believers, right?
[01:02:21]  But the thing is, you know, despite many of the Pahlavists or figures in the diaspora saying no Iranian supports this regime, many people would take issue with the fact that I would even peg the social support for the Islamic Republic at 20%.
[01:02:34]  I think a lot of people would be offended and say, like, no, nobody wants this regime at all.
[01:02:38]  They purely follow it for cynical reasons.
[01:02:40]  You know, the way this war unfolded in exactly the way the Pahlavists begged for, it's really meant that the central question isn't, do you like the Islamic Republic?
[01:02:48]  It was like, Do you like foreign countries sneak attacking you while you are negotiating with them?
[01:02:53]  Do you like hundreds of little girls being blown up by cruise missiles?
[01:02:57]  Do you like a bomb being dropped in your own neighborhood?
[01:03:00]  So, even though lots of people, even inside of Iran, were like, oh, yay, this is it.
[01:03:04]  This is the regime change war.
[01:03:06]  The regime's going to fall.
[01:03:07]  Pretty much immediately, the way the US and Israel have behaved has meant that this is not a question about the regime, right?
[01:03:12]  They like to paraphrase Cat Williams, you know, we're not at war with their army, we're at war with them.
[01:03:18]  Civilian infrastructure like oil refineries, cultural treasures like Golistan Palace came under attack almost immediately.
[01:03:24]  And Trump went out of his way to say, like, we're going to destroy your civilization.
[01:03:27]  Like, this is whatever legitimacy the Pallavas have has cratered because of this war.
[01:03:32]  You know, in the end, the regime didn't collapse.
[01:03:35]  But Pahlavism did.
[01:03:36]  Even two weeks into the war, there's a statement from Reza Pahlavi's own mother that's very cagey and conditional.
[01:03:43]  She's talking a lot about how the future of Iran shouldn't be decided with war and outside its own borders, and the Iranian people should decide their own leader.

=== Trump's Subliminals (06:24) ===

[01:03:52]  Like, this is his mom in an interview with France 24, basically kind of slow rolling, I don't think you're the guy.
[01:04:00]  And I just like, imagine reading that and like your wife's at yoga class again, and you're like sitting with your dad's old business buddies and like the Open floor plan kitchen in your Maryland mansion.
[01:04:12]  And just like, it's so weird for me to feel bad for this guy, but I do.
[01:04:17]  Trump pretty quickly starts calling him the loser prince and says, You're not the guy.
[01:04:22]  Everyone pretty much from like week one of this conflict knows that even though all these people went out into the street in Iran shouting his name and were gunned down, even though all these people are rallying for him, this is not the guy.
[01:04:36]  But that doesn't mean that his followers are giving up.
[01:04:39]  So you have, we're going to start talking about influencers now.
[01:04:41]  This is Mune Rahimi.
[01:04:43]  She's an Iranian monarchist influencer who created the Trump dance on the first day of the war, celebrating the attack on Iran.
[01:04:49]  I have a picture here short shorts, cowboy boots.
[01:04:51]  She's dancing with Trump's little two hand thing to YMCA, saying, All Iranians right now are dancing around to YMCA.
[01:05:00]  This is day one when the school in Manab got blown up, which, of course, everyone on this side, this kind of type of person was like, Oh, well, that's fake.
[01:05:08]  The regime did it.
[01:05:10]  But the thing about Mune Rahimi is that it's not like she's just about this one thing, she's hella chutted.
[01:05:17]  She does baddie dance videos.
[01:05:19]  She's also RTing Elon Musk.
[01:05:21]  And she insists that this is not a war, it's a rescue mission to save Iranians from the mullahs and Islam.
[01:05:28]  You could be like, girl, what are you talking about?
[01:05:31]  They're blowing up your own country.
[01:05:33]  And then that happens to her.
[01:05:35]  Two weeks into the war, she posts this on Twitter and states that her cousin has been killed in either an American or Israeli airstrike in the war.
[01:05:44]  And if you thought that this might involve a moment of self reflection, Or maybe even opening up to more universal statements of human grief.
[01:05:54]  No, she doubles down.
[01:05:56]  She places blame 100% with the Islamic Republic for being there, and it redoubles her faith in Pahlavism and regime change.
[01:06:03]  She is tweeting every day.
[01:06:05]  She is still out there.
[01:06:06]  She has this post here where she basically says, I blame the world and the IRGC, certainly not the thing that I advocated for and celebrated.
[01:06:17]  It's really sad, but I think for this podcast, especially seeing the way that The kind of when you're not just MAGA, once you're marching down that kind of cue path, this kind of psychological mechanism starts just coming out all over the time.
[01:06:28]  Yeah.
[01:06:29]  When the U.S. eventually agreed to a ceasefire with Iran, because Iran didn't collapse and in fact started shooting at every single American regional ally and closed the strait where 20% of the world's oil goes through, Reza Pahlavi reacted to the ceasefire by unfollowing both Trump and Netanyahu on Instagram.
[01:06:45]  Oh, God.
[01:06:46]  Yeah, no, that's how you know it's like very serious.
[01:06:48]  Yeah.
[01:06:49]  Friendship over.
[01:06:50]  Yeah.
[01:06:50]  Yeah.
[01:06:51]  Friendship is end.
[01:06:52]  It's very Drake kind of thing.
[01:06:53]  Yeah, he's going to post a message he sends to Trump on Instagram.
[01:06:59]  We're about eight weeks out from a Reza Pallavi notes app apology that he's going to screenshot and do a statement of harm that he did a no growth.
[01:07:09]  He did a regime change.
[01:07:11]  Everyone's going to be like, how the fuck did he get it to working with Comic Sans?
[01:07:17]  So, you know, the monarchists were able to cope that not enough Iranians sided with them, that the regime didn't collapse, but they haven't really been able to process being cut loose by this elaborate network of.
[01:07:27]  Benefactor organizations that kind of created Pahlavism.
[01:07:30]  Goldie Gahmari is also another pretty perfect example of a hardcore and politicized Pahlavist, not just a cultural person who dances around, but someone who's an ideologue.
[01:07:39]  She's super pro Trump, super MAGA internet personality.
[01:07:43]  She goes on OANN sometimes.
[01:07:45]  She talks about how much she loves Trump, Israel, and the U.S., despite being Canadian, which is also another classic kind of QAnon move.
[01:07:52]  She's a disbarred or at least non practicing lawyer, and she loves being on these panel discussions on Iran International or other networks and kind of like vaguely threatening.
[01:08:01]  Threatening anti war Iranians directly, saying right before the war, she had some appearance where she was like, Once we're in charge again, like you just wait.
[01:08:07]  Like we're making lists.
[01:08:08]  You know, basically explicitly saying we can't wait to bring back Sabak and arrest everyone.
[01:08:13]  I've screenshotted a tweet here.
[01:08:15]  This was nine hours ago today.
[01:08:17]  She said, Mr. Trump, please finish the job.
[01:08:19]  Rekindle the friendship and allyship that existed between Iranians and Americans before the terrorist Muslim Nazis occupied Iran in 1979.
[01:08:27]  Begging for a restart of the war, not backing down even a bit.
[01:08:31]  But this tweet actually kind of set off me sending the DM that led to this episode because if we'll click and watch it here, it's not just that she's right wing, it's not just that she's a lackey, it's that she's starting to bake.
[01:08:44]  And I think we should watch this tweet and play the audio.
[01:08:46]  She says, Hello, friends.
[01:08:51]  I heard some of you are concerned with President Trump because he didn't mention or show the prince in the video he posted last night.
[01:09:00]  First of all, that's not President Trump's job.
[01:09:02]  Okay, it's not President Trump's responsibility to tell the world who the leader of Iran's revolution, the lion and sun, is.
[01:09:11]  That's our duty as Iranians.
[01:09:14]  We need to tell the world, we need to show the world who we want.
[01:09:19]  That's not the Americans' job.
[01:09:20]  That's our job.
[01:09:21]  That's point number one.
[01:09:23]  And for those who want to complain that there's no trace of the prints in President Trump's video, let's look at Section 11 of President Trump's video together.
[01:09:34]  And she points to a picture here.
[01:09:36]  What's this picture?
[01:09:37]  Presumably, that's the Shah.
[01:09:38]  Yeah.
[01:09:39]  It's a picture of in the corner of the frame at a pro war Iranian rally.
[01:09:45]  There is a corner of a poster with a picture of Reza Pahlavi being held up by one guy.
[01:09:50]  Okay.
[01:09:51]  Trump is sending subliminals that that's who he wants.
[01:09:53]  So she's like, don't worry.
[01:09:55]  There's secret messages at section 11 of a corner of a poster that prove that Trump hasn't given up and he knows who the leader of Iran should be.
[01:10:02]  And then she, yeah, she stares into the camera and kind of like blinks, like, see, see.
[01:10:07]  Waves her hand, saying, That's clearly evidence.
[01:10:10]  She says, What more do you want President Trump to say?
[01:10:13]  How else should he prove he's heard your voice?

=== Weeding Out Traitors (02:22) ===

[01:10:17]  We just need to keep going.
[01:10:18]  Continue our path.
[01:10:20]  Continue listening to the prince's words and guidance.
[01:10:23]  It's so funny.
[01:10:24]  Listen to his words and guidance.
[01:10:25]  It's like a guy who doesn't even want to be there.
[01:10:29]  Yeah.
[01:10:29]  Yeah.
[01:10:29]  He doesn't really have a message.
[01:10:31]  So, this is where kind of the meat and potatoes, or I guess the fragrant saffron rice of this episode is.
[01:10:39]  The structural comparison to what I see as a developing kind of QAnon structural comparison.
[01:10:44]  And what do we have here?
[01:10:46]  There's a populist and right wing movement.
[01:10:48]  It is very online to the point of maybe even mostly existing online.
[01:10:54]  It's posting as political action, an emphasis on being a voice, speaking out, sharing information.
[01:11:01]  It's cross class.
[01:11:02]  There's not one clear demographic of person socioeconomically who falls into this.
[01:11:07]  And it's very focused on retribution, right?
[01:11:10]  Payback against the people who've been against us, the malignant bodies in our own society, the people who don't embrace it.
[01:11:17]  And one of the things about Q and MAGA that I've kind of learned from this show is how much of their time is spent kind of weeding out traitors, right?
[01:11:25]  And also, very, very MAGA and very Q is that the leadership of this movement seems to be pretty ambivalent about its own followers.
[01:11:33]  But what really does set Pathavism apart from QAnon is there's an element of non LARP.
[01:11:37]  While the social base and true believers are absolutely baking and they're LARPing the movement, its leadership actually do have real connections to intelligence communities and are part of, or at least a component of, a big and powerful international movement.
[01:11:51]  So, you know, when they're tweeting out things like Mossad agents are alongside you, it's not a Q drop, it's a real thing.
[01:11:57]  But they're also treating it like a Q drop.
[01:12:00]  So there is a conspiracy here, and it's been the long US Gulf state Israeli alliance against Iran.
[01:12:05]  Reza Pahlavi absolutely does hang out with secret agents and is doing all the things for real that QAnon followers thought Q was doing.
[01:12:12]  The delusion isn't that the storm is coming, these people got their version of the storm.
[01:12:16]  All the people the Pahlavists hated in Iran actually did get vaporized by stealth fighters and drones.
[01:12:23]  The Israeli Air Force blew up the Supreme Leader.
[01:12:25]  All the top IRGC commanders are dead now.
[01:12:28]  The regime change war the Path of You movement wanted actually took place.
[01:12:32]  So, this is like if Q people got the storm even after they got Trump and still it all fell apart.

=== Alienating Street Theater (15:07) ===

[01:12:39]  Yeah.
[01:12:40]  Yeah.
[01:12:40]  It's like if they killed Hillary Clinton and then like Joe Biden got elected anyways.
[01:12:45]  Yeah.
[01:12:45]  Yeah.
[01:12:45]  Exactly.
[01:12:46]  It's like we had the eight days of no internet and then there was a military tribunal where we did execute Hillary Clinton for eating a baby.
[01:12:54]  And then at the end of it, Joe was just like, come on, man.
[01:12:56]  And then just won.
[01:12:58]  Right.
[01:12:58]  Like, it.
[01:12:59]  This is absolutely that, where like the Israeli bombs started dropping, the people were told to rise up, there were all these rumors of like, you know, we're getting ready to send exiles in, and then just none of it materialized.
[01:13:11]  And also materialized so fast, like in very, very quickly, I think once the Iranian government kind of, you know, rallied and started shooting back, anyone in a position of power just went, oh yeah, this is not happening, right?
[01:13:23]  Except for these people who have for years or maybe decades built their identity around it happening.
[01:13:29]  So, You know, the LARP here was pretending that the Pahlavi movement had any agency in the process or that Reza Pahlavi is really a leader or has any input into what happens, right?
[01:13:39]  They're kind of realizing now that they've been passengers, that they're not the ones kind of driving history.
[01:13:45]  And I think it's breaking a lot of their brains.
[01:13:47]  So what does this look like?
[01:13:49]  Pahlavists have always loved street theater, but after the war started, their protests are getting substantially stranger.
[01:13:56]  Yeah.
[01:13:57]  Yeah.
[01:13:58]  In Canada, there was a, in Toronto, there was this strange reenactment of the Pahlavi.
[01:14:02]  Coronation ceremony where people just kind of had a big papier mache crown and just kind of paraded it down the street in like a just walking around with it.
[01:14:11]  There's a lot of unusual stuff I was seeing in Vancouver as well.
[01:14:14]  Like around the art gallery downtown, there's always just like a really big, like they have these really big Israeli flags and then it's like a sign with the Pavlovy monarch.
[01:14:23]  My favorite is like a lot of them have American flags and they're like, like the day after the war started, there was this really, really large march downtown and like there's a lot of American flags in there, which like I was thinking about the association there of like being in Canada.
[01:14:36]  During Trump's invasion threat, and being like, Yes, we love Canada and we also love America.
[01:14:41]  I do wonder if that offended anyone.
[01:14:42]  I mean, that's actually like, that's a really good point of like, yeah, they're not going around like they're in Germany with American flags.
[01:14:49]  They're in Canada with American flags.
[01:14:51]  And there's actually, it's the next video.
[01:14:54]  I don't know if we want to read it off on the pod or not, but there's a video of a pro Iranian opposition guy at a rally who has the Lion and Sun flag, but he just asks other guys at the rally, why do you have so many American flags?
[01:15:07]  Aren't we Iranian?
[01:15:08]  And they start threatening him.
[01:15:10]  It's pretty wild.
[01:15:11]  I mean, is this stuff a lot of like, I know that QAnon sometimes is like, A lot of their activism, especially when they do things IRL, is limited to attention getting.
[01:15:20]  This is why they wear like Q shirts at like Trump rallies and stuff.
[01:15:24]  And they think that, well, like if we get attention, if we get people talking about us, we're winning somehow.
[01:15:30]  And that's like they didn't think past the attention getting state.
[01:15:33]  Is that kind of like that kind of like online brain where things like attention equals support or attention equals winning?
[01:15:40]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:15:41]  There's a huge emphasis on like being your voice and speaking out.
[01:15:44]  And even most of the demands and things that they threaten are about.
[01:15:48]  Posting on the internet.
[01:15:49]  And there's this, I, there's not a commute, even really an attempt to like communicate a political platform at these things, right?
[01:15:56]  All of this is pointing to a single brutal truth, which is that the polyphemous movement doesn't really do politics.
[01:16:02]  It's all spectacle and posting.
[01:16:04]  They're not building institutions or organizations.
[01:16:06]  They're not interested in having outreach or like winning over people with compelling arguments.
[01:16:11]  It is really where it starts to look like QAnon, where you have this like alienating street theater or demands for absolute fealty or like, Waving the flag of a third country in Canada, which is already in a pretty prickly situation with the United States, it's tone deaf.
[01:16:27]  They're doing it kind of to troll people or to stand out, right?
[01:16:31]  Like at this point, I could, if some of that sweet Saudi money came my way, find like an anti Israel argument or something for Pahlavism if I cared about optics, but they don't care about optics.
[01:16:43]  They care about yelling at people and maintaining and asserting a kind of cultural hegemony, right?
[01:16:50]  So, there are orgs like this thing called I put orgs in quotation marks because it's not really an organization.
[01:16:55]  It's called like the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists or AAIRIA, which styles itself as like a think tank or a tracking org, but it's literally just like a group chat of Pahlavi that have a spreadsheet of logged on Iranians that they think are like pro regime or anti war.
[01:17:13]  And so, it is very cute in like getting attention, speaking out, sharing things, getting views on the Trump dance.
[01:17:22]  It's not that.
[01:17:23]  That is a way to get eyes on a political platform or even to focus how people feel.
[01:17:28]  Like the spectacle is it.
[01:17:30]  But paradoxically, that spectacle then leads to some, I think, has a potential to go to some darker places.
[01:17:36]  A lot of this doxing and stuff, unfortunately, we're at a time in the United States where Iranians, by virtue of their nationality or even just place of birth, are like actually subject to a huge amount of state terror right now in the United States.
[01:17:49]  You know, Muslim Band 2, which I've written about the first one, that was actually my.
[01:17:53]  First, big point of contact with the Iranian American community was the fact that I was a Muslim ban specialist when I was with the State Department.
[01:17:59]  Like, we sanctioned and banned people from being with their families for being Iranian.
[01:18:05]  Right now, the way it works in the United States is like, if you go to claim asylum as an Iranian, you will be denied simply because of your passport or place of birth.
[01:18:14]  You cannot have family come immigrate to join you.
[01:18:17]  You can't come to the United States under any circumstances.
[01:18:20]  And if ICE rounds you up, even if you are fleeing persecution by the Iranian government, they will deport you back to Iran.
[01:18:27]  So, what these Pahlavists are doing is they're just dimming out people they don't like to ICE in the United States.
[01:18:34]  And it's a situation where this internal kind of doxing or online trolling in an environment where all Iranians, regardless of political affiliation, are being subject to these racist immigration controls in the United States, it creates a very dangerous and toxic situation.
[01:18:50]  By the way, if you attempt to engage with the Pahlavist of like, hey, isn't this bad that all Iranians are getting banned and deported?
[01:18:56]  They will just say, it's the Islamic Republic's fault.
[01:18:59]  Once the regime changes, everything will be fine.
[01:19:01]  Like that was the source of the problem and not just baseline American racism, right?
[01:19:06]  You know, they've been kind of as a project as the war has fizzled out, really focused on doxing relatives of Iranian politicians who live and study in the United States.
[01:19:15]  And there's a lot of them too, like pro government people or people related to people in the government.
[01:19:20]  Up until very recently, Larajani, the late de facto leader of Iran who also got assassinated, his daughter was a university researcher in the United States up until like a couple weeks before the war.
[01:19:31]  They're reaching out to like Laura Loomer and kind of the pro Israel and Trumpist kind of deportation denunciation network and just getting people they don't like.
[01:19:40]  Like locked up.
[01:19:41]  So, like Laura Loomer was like, we found this woman who's like the niece of the assassinated IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, which even if she was, like that in itself is not a crime.
[01:19:52]  And they like detained this woman and put her in immigration detention and then finally realized that she just happens to be named Soleimani and there's actually no relation at all.
[01:20:00]  Oh my God.
[01:20:01]  So, there's just random people are being snatched up.
[01:20:04]  There was an Iranian student, a PhD student in the US who's getting deported now because he actually spoke up against the war and was dimeed out to ICE by Pahlavis.
[01:20:14]  To see as the ceasefire is engaged, kind of where people are at, this video is in English, and I think we might want to take a listen to see how the Pahlavists are coping.
[01:20:24]  I don't know who needs to hear this, but I just had to hop on here.
[01:20:28]  I haven't even changed out of my pajamas since this morning as I've been on the phone with people as they have lost hope.
[01:20:35]  They have lost everything.
[01:20:36]  They have lost family members.
[01:20:37]  They have seen family members being killed, being tortured.
[01:20:41]  They can't even find some of their family members.
[01:20:44]  But it's not because of that, it's because they're losing hope as there might be a deal.
[01:20:49]  Going on between US and Islamic Republic.
[01:20:53]  They have lost hope, and because of that, they have decided to kill themselves, to end it, because they can no longer understand a world that wants to make a deal with monsters, with the Islamic Republic.
[01:21:07]  Enough is enough.
[01:21:08]  We need to show up for the Iranian people.
[01:21:10]  I have received tons of messages that if this deal goes through, they are going to kill themselves, of schoolgirls.
[01:21:18]  And I'm going to post it here so you see that this is serious.
[01:21:22]  We do not want a deal with the Islamic Republic.
[01:21:26]  I don't know who needs to hear this, whether they're politicians, whether they're physicians, whether there's God that I don't even believe in anymore.
[01:21:33]  But we do not need a deal with the Islamic Republic.
[01:21:37]  Our youth are losing hope because they feel betrayed by the international community.
[01:21:44]  Please, please help us.
[01:21:46]  The youth feels betrayed by America because America is no longer bombing their schools.
[01:21:52]  It's really.
[01:21:54]  I mean, to outside of it, it seems like this is ludicrous.
[01:21:57]  This is the announcement of a peace deal.
[01:21:59]  You'd assume that the bomb's not falling anymore, even if you politically don't like the Iranian government, would be a good thing.
[01:22:06]  But you can also see the very real distress that this woman is in and the way that that kind of abjection is so heavily online mediated.
[01:22:16]  What she's saying, I'm getting messages.
[01:22:18]  We need to speak out.
[01:22:19]  There's no suggested course of action other than, I don't know, going to CENTCOM and getting Pete Hegsef to start shooting again.
[01:22:26]  Like, there's not an actual politics in here.
[01:22:28]  But there is a life or death stakes, the threat of suicide.
[01:22:32]  And like this happened in Iran, so I didn't really include it in the episode.
[01:22:34]  But there was a guy after the January protests who literally was like, Mr. Trump, don't deal with the Islamic Republic.
[01:22:41]  Don't do it.
[01:22:42]  And then he just gets up and hangs himself in the video.
[01:22:45]  It's really messed up.
[01:22:46]  So, like that one guy did it and he was an ardent Pahlavist.
[01:22:50]  And like that's become kind of a rhetorical tactic or tick of like, oh, well, we're going to kill ourselves if you don't do this.
[01:22:57]  It does betray this idea that they think that America actually gives a fuck about them.
[01:23:01]  Like Trump is like, sure, kill yourself.
[01:23:02]  I don't.
[01:23:03]  Who cares?
[01:23:04]  Yeah, I mean, what's it to us?
[01:23:06]  And there's almost a conscience or self conscious.
[01:23:09]  Oh, like millions of schoolgirls, like schoolgirls are ready to kill themselves.
[01:23:12]  I mean, there is a pile of dead schoolgirls in Iran.
[01:23:15]  And they didn't kill themselves, it was an American Tomahawk missile.
[01:23:18]  And so it is basically kind of a supremacist right wing movement that is realizing that the people in charge do not care about them.
[01:23:27]  And this is such a familiar kind of MAGA story that I've heard so many times of like, what the med beds aren't real.
[01:23:34]  He's not RVing the Dinar.
[01:23:35]  Don't you care about us, Trump?
[01:23:37]  My life still sucks.
[01:23:38]  And that's where things kind of take a much darker turn.
[01:23:41]  But it's not all grim.
[01:23:42]  We got to talk about ketchup.
[01:23:44]  On April 23rd, an Iranian guy threw ketchup on Reza Pahlavi at a rally in Germany.
[01:23:49]  This is actually a Farsi pun on Iranian internet humor that references how Reza Pahlavi kind of looks like the bear dispensers ketchup comes in in Iran.
[01:23:58]  It's called sauce khersi or like bear sauce.
[01:24:01]  But if you do a kind of double reading, like I guess it would, as a pun, kind of translate to like dipshit sauce or something like that.
[01:24:08]  And the ketchup attack was interesting because it was someone in the Iranian diaspora being like, You suck.
[01:24:15]  Nobody likes you.
[01:24:16]  I'm going to throw ketchup on you.
[01:24:18]  And the reaction from monarchists is kind of indicative of where they are right now.
[01:24:25]  And I would say, Watch two of these videos because, Liv, this goes back to something you mentioned, kind of about how weirdly sexual Pahlavism is becoming, more so for the second one.
[01:24:35]  I can translate this guy if you want.
[01:24:40]  So, I'm here today in our movement for our dear prince, our beloved king.
[01:24:45]  You are not alone.
[01:24:47]  Your pain is our pain.
[01:24:50]  And then this guy in a nice shiny suit starts spraying ketchup all over himself.
[01:24:56]  Yeah, my God.
[01:24:57]  What the fuck?
[01:24:58]  He's so serious.
[01:24:59]  And he says, Long live the Shah.
[01:25:01]  Long live the Shah.
[01:25:02]  As he stands in a very nice gray suit and a blue tie and sprays ketchup all over himself.
[01:25:08]  It's like.
[01:25:10]  This is, yeah, the contrast between the man's straight faced, well groomed, tailored suit, looking very, very deadly serious, and then doing like a Nickelodeon goo all over himself, like before the catch up.
[01:25:24]  It's very silly.
[01:25:24]  I don't understand what the audience is for this.
[01:25:29]  Like, I don't understand what kind of reaction this is supposed to elicit.
[01:25:33]  This checks out from Monarchist with like the kind of, you know, like, oh, I haven't even changed out of my pajamas, and like, Here, watch me squirt ketchup at a suit that if, like, I was the average Iranian, I would never, you know, endanger my nice suit.
[01:25:49]  Yeah, they're pretty sharp.
[01:25:51]  These guys are, these guys are like, ah, fuck.
[01:25:54]  I wear a new suit every morning.
[01:25:55]  I throw them out.
[01:25:56]  The second one is even weirder to the point where I didn't even feel comfortable retweeting this because it feels kind of not safe for work, even though it technically isn't.
[01:26:06]  Let's check this out.
[01:26:07]  Okay.
[01:26:09]  Oh.
[01:26:09]  Okay.
[01:26:11]  Oh.
[01:26:11]  How do you describe this?
[01:26:16]  So it's a woman, yeah, a woman draped in a flag holding some ketchup.
[01:26:24]  And the caption says, I caught the guy who threw tomato sauce at Shah Reza Pallavi.
[01:26:29]  And then she stands back to reveal a man in all black with a black hood over his face.
[01:26:36]  We don't know who he is.
[01:26:37]  He has his hands behind his back.
[01:26:39]  We assume he's restrained in some way.
[01:26:42]  And then she proceeds to pour the ketchup all over.
[01:26:45]  Yeah, it looks maybe like fetish content.
[01:26:49]  This looks like a video Jordan Peterson would retweet.
[01:26:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:26:52]  Yeah, this is like, this is fetish content, right?
[01:26:55]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:26:56]  He's like squirming as she's pouring the ketchup.
[01:27:00]  He starts conversing.
[01:27:02]  And she's wearing leather pants, and the ketchup is going everywhere.
[01:27:05]  And he's like, Yeah, he's like convulsing and he's wearing a hood.
[01:27:08]  And I'm just like, I don't care if this is intentionally horny or isn't.
[01:27:14]  And then she is having a great time.
[01:27:16]  Look, she is smiling and laughing as she's pouring this ketchup over this.
[01:27:19]  Yeah, I mean, come on, guys, whatever.
[01:27:21]  Let Shorty.
[01:27:22]  Yeah.
[01:27:23]  Ketchup me.
[01:27:26]  But it's so, it makes me feel very unstable to be like researching a movement where half the statements are someone who really sounds like they're on the verge of a panic attack.
[01:27:33]  Threatening mass suicide, and the other half are like, Oh no, oh, you've caught me, you're gonna put the ketchup on me.
[01:27:41]  And I like, and these things coexist, right?
[01:27:44]  Naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty.

=== Global MAGA Liabilities (12:26) ===

[01:27:47]  This is maybe, I don't know, maybe so many people want Savok back because they think this is what happened in those prisons, right?
[01:27:53]  Like, oh, there's mean women are gonna spray all sorts of condiments all over me if the Shah comes back into power.
[01:27:59]  I am just your black bagged french fry, please just squirt on me.
[01:28:03]  It's, uh, yeah, I don't even know what to make of that, but.
[01:28:06]  Like, this is the soup, right?
[01:28:07]  That whatever is going to develop is going to develop out of.
[01:28:10]  So, you know, the Make Iran Great Again crowd is going out of its way to enmesh itself in the global right wing and into American MAGA in particular.
[01:28:18]  But they're enmeshing themselves in the part of it that's dying, not where the global right is really going, but rather where it was or where it's departing from.
[01:28:28]  CPAC, even being on Instagram so heavily, winning over Lindsey Graham, even throwing your lot in with Israel and the Gulf lobbies.
[01:28:37]  That are high key sponsoring a lot of this is kind of going to be anathema to the global right inside of at least a generation and probably sooner.
[01:28:45]  So they're wedding themselves to these forces that are on the out.
[01:28:49]  You don't see these people hanging out on Rumble.
[01:28:51]  You don't see them with Nick Fuentes.
[01:28:53]  You don't see them.
[01:28:54]  None of them are based.
[01:28:55]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:28:57]  They're super mobilized.
[01:28:58]  Some of them are well off.
[01:28:59]  They're very committed.
[01:29:00]  But it's not clear that they have an arc beyond being boosters for a war most of the American right is against and loving Trump as a person who doesn't really seem to have a way to carry this forward.
[01:29:11]  So The lady who was baking is she's still going on OANN.
[01:29:16]  The Pahlavists are trying to be part of the global right.
[01:29:19]  But does the global right have a place for people who are basically neocon hawk conservatives who want regime change wars?
[01:29:26]  And what can the Pahlavists bring to the table to these movements other than running cover for, hey, we think Iranian people want this?
[01:29:33]  They don't really have organizations, they can't deliver many votes, and most of the money flows into them, not out of them.
[01:29:40]  I do wonder as well that the tension possibly with them being, like, I guess, ostensibly like secularists.
[01:29:46]  Seems to be pretty antithetical as well.
[01:29:49]  I wouldn't say secularist.
[01:29:50]  I would say anti Islam is maybe a big winning point, but a lot of them really do believe in a return to being Zoroastrian.
[01:30:00]  I see, yeah.
[01:30:01]  I lived in a city in India that has twice as many Zoroastrians in that city, in Mumbai, as there are in all of Iran.
[01:30:11]  And we have Zoroastrian friends, Parsis, and when you go to them and you're like, hey, did you know your religion is a huge nationalist symbol in Iran?
[01:30:19]  What?
[01:30:20]  Like, I have no.
[01:30:22]  What?
[01:30:22]  Because, like, even being Zoroastrian, like, you can't convert into the religion, which means it's actually kind of dying out.
[01:30:28]  So they fit in really well with the Islamophobic global right of like the early 2000s.
[01:30:34]  But when you start getting more like based, Andrew Tate, I'm trad, you know, the kind of right wing influencer who's like Islamophobically pro Islam.
[01:30:44]  Yeah.
[01:30:44]  Who's kind of like, they hate women and they like make sure that they're like trad and they don't like Jewish people.
[01:30:53]  And you know what?
[01:30:53]  I love those parts of what I think Islam is.
[01:30:56]  That's awesome.
[01:30:56]  I agree with it.
[01:30:57]  Like very much like the Andrew Tate style.
[01:30:59]  I don't think they have a lot of room for these guys exactly, but they don't have any lack of enthusiasm.
[01:31:07]  I do think mentioning other monarchists is helpful, and maybe there might be more fertile ground in the European far right for Pahlavis, ironically, despite there not being as big diasporas there.
[01:31:16]  There's a lot of slogans that they're using.
[01:31:19]  They are the only people in Germany who can get away with chanting, We are Aryans.
[01:31:25]  Because one of the official titles of the Shah was The Light of the Aryans.
[01:31:28]  And that is a weird European racial theory, but the Aryan historical peoples were from Iran.
[01:31:33]  You know, that's there.
[01:31:35]  But, like, what's the future?
[01:31:37]  Is it palling around with the Edward Habsburg guy on Twitter?
[01:31:40]  Like, they're not even that fun.
[01:31:42]  Like, these Pahlavists are not really that fun on Twitter.
[01:31:44]  They're very self serious.
[01:31:46]  Recently, another piece I'll plug is Will Alden wrote a great piece in the New York Review about hanging out with Pahlavists from the Iranian Constitutional Party.
[01:31:53]  And I think that this is kind of a nice note for this passage to end on about, like, what Pahlavism was.
[01:31:59]  And then I want to kind of go beyond that to think about where is it going, because I do not see people who have been this mobilized demobilizing.
[01:32:06]  And I don't see this kind of energy, at least with some people, and desire to suck all the conversation and air out of the room going away.
[01:32:15]  At the same time, I don't really know what that future looks like other than getting even more conspiratorial and pilled than they already are.
[01:32:22]  These diaspora monarchists have lately become a salient presence in Republican politics.
[01:32:26]  In March, a dedicated band descended on the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, in Texas, where they were, the only catalyst of any urgency, unquote, at an otherwise sleepy gathering.
[01:32:37]  Yet Trump's announcement of a temporary ceasefire deal in early April, just ten days after Pavlavi, in his CPAC speech, urged the president to stay the course, reflects the limits of the movement's power.
[01:32:47]  When we spoke in mid April, Trita Parsi, note Trita Parsi as a non Pavlavist and pro diplomacy policy expert, pointed out that the war for which the monarchists lobbied has not only failed to topple Iran's theocratic regime, but actually delivered probably the most radical and hawkish version of the Islamic Republic yet.
[01:33:04]  With Trump having publicly abandoned regime change as a goal, Pavlavi's supporters, Parsi fears, Will just become more and more radical and more cultish in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance of not only their failure, but their betrayal of Iran.
[01:33:17]  As he observed, they were dancing and celebrating while Iranian civilians were being killed.
[01:33:21]  So, where is this going?
[01:33:23]  Pallavas are going to stay mobilized even as their organizations fracture, even as the money goes away.
[01:33:29]  The Foundation for Defensive Democracies and Nufti, the Pallavas think tank, are not doing so hot right now.
[01:33:36]  And I think that these organizations are going to get hung out to dry structurally.
[01:33:39]  I don't think Israel or the Emirates are going to keep cutting checks when they've Kind of fulfilled their purpose and haven't delivered any of their side of the bargain.
[01:33:47]  But whatever global MAGA is, and I mean specifically MAGA, whatever that is, Pahlavas are part of it now.
[01:33:53]  And I think it also speaks to like a more ethnically diverse global MAGA that embraces a lot of standpoint epistemology and like woke 1.0 language.
[01:34:04]  So what you're going to see, and probably in the comments to this podcast, is like, well, how can you as a non Iranian invalidate my lived experience by speaking over POC voices in like your arrogant liberal whiteness to talk about Iran?
[01:34:18]  Like all these trends, Pallavism is kind of at the nexus of it, of like MAGA clearly running out of steam, but also other alternatives not quite forming.
[01:34:27]  Peak conspiracism also being there, just kind of impregnated into everything, and a readiness to take very dark and interpersonally violent directions is there.
[01:34:36]  And I think that might be an elevated risk.
[01:34:39]  You know, there's been one murder, there's a heightened likelihood of conspiratorial thinking, and I think that there's an immense potential for interpersonal or personally enacted violence in this movement.
[01:34:49]  And I don't want to put the flashlight under my face, but I think that all the conditions are there.
[01:34:54]  And it makes me really concerned for people in a community that has had a very hard year.
[01:35:01]  I think any Iranian or Iranian American or Iranian Canadian or whoever you know who has connections to that country has probably had a very stressed out, very frayed time.
[01:35:11]  And that might not get better, but I don't think that these people are necessarily going to get better.
[01:35:17]  I don't see a lot of mea culpa and I don't see a lot of.
[01:35:21]  Lack of cognitive dissonance right now.
[01:35:23]  So I don't know.
[01:35:24]  Y'all are the Q experts.
[01:35:25]  How pilled do you rate all this?
[01:35:27]  And what do you think the risk is for this kind of moving forward into something grimmer?
[01:35:32]  Well, I mean, it's interesting to ponder what a January 6th moment might be for these people because, you know, that's something that felt like kind of the event that sort of like QAnon culminated in because it seemed like a third of the people who stormed the Capitol that day were wearing some kind of like a Q merch.
[01:35:52]  Because they really believed so wholeheartedly, I mean, like, including the woman who was shot and killed, that they felt compelled to do obviously dangerous, unproductive activities in order to, you know, and to advance their bizarre fantasies.
[01:36:06]  Yeah, I do wonder whether this movement will be a liability to, like, any sort of American far right, like, non Trump, this ostensibly anti neocon movement, too.
[01:36:16]  That the Pavlavis will be like, our strategy of, like, trying to destroy the Islamic Republic is contingent upon, Like Trump style neocon stuff, and you guys getting away from it is like ruining the one path forward we still envision for our country.
[01:36:30]  I mean, that's a really good point.
[01:36:32]  Like, they show up at CPAC, and you know, even Trump, I think, got a lot of support by saying, I'm not for new wars.
[01:36:39]  And the fact that he has launched this war, it might sink him.
[01:36:42]  You know, I mean, I know, yeah, surely, surely Donnie can't get away from it this time, but he's always slipped out of the things that supposedly destroy him.
[01:36:51]  But this has been real bad, and it's a liability, especially for the people who came after him.
[01:36:55]  Like, I think JD Vance is going to.
[01:36:56]  Position himself as like, I was against this disastrous war.
[01:36:59]  But the problem is, he's also a lot closer to that kind of institutional conservatism in CPAC.
[01:37:04]  And as long as these debates are happening, the Pahlavists are going to keep showing up.
[01:37:08]  They're going to demand to be the center of attention and then loudly be like, No, we love regime change wars and you need to go back and finish the job.
[01:37:15]  And remember how gas prices spiked and America got humiliated?
[01:37:18]  That was cool.
[01:37:19]  We love it.
[01:37:19]  And also, we're associated with you.
[01:37:22]  And especially if they like, I don't know, go more insane, commit more murders, find a new condiment to spray all over themselves on social media.
[01:37:30]  Like, is this going to be like my question?
[01:37:33]  Kind of open ended at the end of this is like, are these people going to be liabilities or are they going to be assets for global MAGA?
[01:37:40]  Right.
[01:37:40]  Yeah.
[01:37:41]  And also, how, you know, because the reactions we're seeing is just a couple of weeks after the ceasefire.
[01:37:47]  I mean, what happens?
[01:37:48]  God willing, this all kind of peters out and there is a lasting ceasefire and the shooting war doesn't restart, which it's not looking so good today.
[01:37:55]  There's been some exchanges of missile fire.
[01:37:57]  But like, if this does settle down, what's going to happen then?
[01:38:01]  And what are the repercussions going to be?
[01:38:03]  Inside this movement and inside this community, especially if Reza Pahlavi has to go, has to actually get up there and be like, I'm not the guy, please let me go photograph birds.
[01:38:12]  Boy, yeah, I guess we'll find out with everyone else.
[01:38:17]  Diaspora for the win.
[01:38:20]  It's more and more.
[01:38:21]  And I think that's also a big part of how MAGA is changing.
[01:38:24]  I mean, I don't think in Trump 2, you can really make as many aspersions of it being necessarily a white supremacist movement, considering how ethnically diverse it is.
[01:38:33]  And also considering in Trump 2, I think how many other diaspora groups are going to shoot their shot in the way that the Pahlavists did.
[01:38:43]  You know, it's pretty open.
[01:38:44]  There's already people talking about, like, well, sure, Ron didn't go great, but.
[01:38:48]  We could invade Cuba.
[01:38:49]  You know, a lot of Venezuelan right wingers definitely felt like they were shooting their shot.
[01:38:54]  It didn't wind up very well for them either.
[01:38:55]  But one thing I've noticed about a lot of these diaspora lobbies is every single one is kind of like, no, I'm built different.
[01:39:01]  And America actually loves me.
[01:39:03]  And it's actually going to work out for me.
[01:39:04]  It's the Tobias Funke talking about open relationships.
[01:39:07]  Like, sure, it never worked for those people, but, you know, maybe for us.
[01:39:11]  Yeah.
[01:39:12]  So very strange, but also grim stuff, Joseph.
[01:39:15]  I know where you're about to go on social media lockdown.
[01:39:18]  Down to avoid the wrath of the monarchists who are about to go after you.
[01:39:23]  But where can people read more of your work?
[01:39:26]  You can read my work on Twitter.
[01:39:28]  I usually have a little link tree.
[01:39:29]  It goes to my articles.
[01:39:30]  I got some articles usually coming out every now and then about how things are going.
[01:39:34]  Honestly, most of the stuff that I've written about has been the U.S. immigration system and how that interplays with other things.
[01:39:40]  But, you know, with all of this and the sort of state apparatus going after, you know, Iranians, it's particularly leading to a war.
[01:39:48]  I'm kind of writing more broadly because.
[01:39:50]  One thing I would say is like, there's going to be the valid question.
[01:39:53]  Why couldn't you find an Iranian American to talk about this?
[01:39:56]  And the reason is a lot of them are like pretty scared to do so.
[01:39:58]  Like, I am going to go on social media lockdown.
[01:40:01]  I have some pieces coming out about unrelated things, about the history of passport regulation, and hopefully some other stuff.
[01:40:08]  But you can find me at Pinstripe Bungle on Twitter and see whatever I'm up to.

=== Tomato Juice Justice (02:14) ===

[01:40:13]  Okay.
[01:40:13]  We'll include the links in the show notes.
[01:40:16]  Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
[01:40:19]  If you haven't already, please go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month.
[01:40:25]  To get a second episode for every main one and access to our entire archive, you can also go to cursedmedia.net if you'd like miniseries, because there we have all of the episodes ready to binge of Spectral Voyager 2 Time Slip Radio, as well as all of the other miniseries that we've made in the past.
[01:40:43]  Joseph, would you like to do the listener until next week?
[01:40:45]  May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you?
[01:40:47]  Dear listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
[01:40:59]  We have all take heed content based on your preferences.
[01:41:03]  Bruh, somebody threw tomato juice all over Reza Pahlavi.
[01:41:07]  And just like collectively as a society, can we bring back throwing tomatoes at performers, politicians, whoever we don't like?
[01:41:14]  Because this is hilarious to me.
[01:41:16]  And truly, the reporting on this also is equally as funny.
[01:41:19]  Because what do you mean they attacked Reza Pahlavi with tomato juice?
[01:41:24]  Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Iranian prince, was attacked by tomato juice as he left.
[01:41:30]  Press conference in which he denounced the US Iran ceasefire.
[01:41:35]  Truthfully, if you're openly supporting the bombing of your own country, I think you deserve to get hit with a little bit more than tomato juice, but I'm kind of fine with this.
[01:41:43]  Police immediately seized and detained the person who threw the liquid.
[01:41:47]  It's not sulfuric acid, okay?
[01:41:50]  You put your spaghetti in that.
[01:41:52]  The article continues by saying that people on social media were questioning who is this man?
[01:41:57]  Why was he permitted to get so close to Mr. Pahlavi?
[01:42:00]  I'm sorry, the people just want to throw tomatoes.
[01:42:02]  The reporting on this is absolutely Insane because this is so funny, and they're treating it like it's like this major, incredible security incident and not tomato sauce.
[01:42:12]  I don't know, just enjoy this with me for a moment.
[01:42:23]  2026, we're all throwing tomatoes at politicians.
[01:42:26]  Please.