Iran’s Regime Isn’t Antimperialist, It’s Authoritarian Power

A regime can use ballots, slogans, and revolutionary language and still build a cage. We dig into why the Islamic Republic of Iran stands out as a totalitarian theocracy that fuses modern surveillance and bureaucracy with claims of divine rule, turning dissent into “blasphemy” and private life into a policing project. If you want to understand the morality police, censorship, persecution of minorities, and the legal machinery that makes the supreme leader untouchable, we connect the dots in plain terms.

We also revisit the 1979 Islamic Revolution with clear eyes: overthrowing the Shah did not guarantee freedom, and the coalition that sought self-determination was systematically betrayed as Khomeini’s clerical faction consolidated power. From there, we test the regime’s favorite talking point, “anti-imperialism,” against what it actually exports: proxy power. We walk through how Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran-backed militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen reflect a repeatable model that undermines sovereignty and deepens humanitarian crises, even when packaged as “resistance.”

Then we tackle the hardest questions: the Iran nuclear program, the West’s temptation to treat an ideological theocracy like a normal negotiating partner, and why nuclear weapons capability could raise the odds of regional proliferation and reckless proxy escalation. We also address the regime’s antisemitism and fixation on Israel as ideology rather than mere policy, and we end where the stakes are most human: the Iranian people. From the Green Movement to Women Life Freedom after Mahsa Amini, we highlight the courage of protest and the brutality of repression, and we ask what real solidarity should look like. If this conversation sharpens how you see Iran, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review. What’s the most dangerous myth you still hear about the Iranian regime?

Transcript

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You know, there are certain regimes in the modern world that combine in themselves all the features that make tyranny particularly nauseating, particularly comprehensive in its assault on human dignity, particularly comprehensive in its assault on human dignity. And the Islamic Republic of Iran is perhaps the most perfect specimen of this kind of totalitarian theocracy that we have the misfortune to witness in our time. It manages to be simultaneously medieval and modern, to deploy the technologies and the bureaucratic apparatus of the 20th and 21st centuries in service of an ideology that would have been perfectly at home in the seventh, to combine the worst features of fascism, the cult of leadership, the militarism, the antisemitism, the suppression of all independent thought with the worst features of religious authority, the claim to divine

Why This Regime Is Unique

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sanction, the treatment of dissent as blasphemy, the comprehensive regulation of private life, according to theological diktat. And what makes it particularly revolting, what makes it a special case even among the rogue scalery of authoritarian states, is that it came to power through a genuine revolution, through the overthrow of a genuinely despotic monarchy, the Shah's regime, which was itself utterly indefensible, and that it transformed what might have been a moment of liberation into something far worse than what it replaced, demonstrated with perfect clarity that replacing one form of tyranny with a Kirokatic alternative is not progress, but regression is not revolution, but reaction of the most comprehensive kind. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not, as its apologists and the Western left like to pretend, and in some cases still pretend, an anti-imperialist uprising of the oppressed against foreign domination and domestic exploitation. It was a counter-revolution, a deliberate rejection of modernity and secularism and individual freedom in favor of a totalizing religious ideology that claimed authority over every aspect of human life from the most public political questions to the most intimate personal choices. The revolution that overthrew the Shah included many elements, included secular democrats and leftists and nationalists who wanted genuine freedom and genuine self-determination. But these elements were systematically betrayed and destroyed by the clerical faction led by Khomeini, who understood from

1979 And The Revolution Hijacked

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the beginning that the revolution could be hijacked in the name of Islamic purity, that the language of anti-imperialism and third worldism could be deployed as a cover for the establishment of a theocratic dictatorship, and that once power was consolidated, the facade of revolutionary legitimacy could be maintained while the reality was the imposition of religious law enforced by revolutionary guards and religious police and a judiciary that answered to clerical authority rather than to any recognizable standard of justice or human rights. And what was the result of this glorious Islamic revolution? What did it produce for the people of Iran? It produced a constitution that makes the supreme leader a religious figure answerable to no democratic institution and removable by no vote, the ultimate authority over all aspects of government. It produced a system where candidates for elected office must be approved by religious authorities, where women are legally inferior to men, where apostasy from Islam is punishable by death, where homosexual is a capital crime, where political dissent is treated as war against God, where the morality police patrol the streets, enforcing dress codes and behavioral codes derived from seventh century Arabian tribal customs, where the press is censored, where the internet is monitored and filtered, where independent civil society is crushed, where trade unions are banned or co-opted, where religious minorities are systematically persecuted, where the Baha'i are denied education and employment, where Jews are subject to constant suspicion and harassment, despite having lived in Persia for 2,500 years, where artists and writers and filmmakers must submit their work for religious approval or face imprisonment or worse. This is the liberating anti-imperialist revolution that the apologists want us to respect. But let's examine this question of imperialism because it's central to understanding both the regime's self-justification and the apologetics of its Western defenders. The Islamic Republic claims to be an anti-imperialist force, positions itself as a bulwark against American and Israeli domination of the Middle East, presents its foreign policy as a defense of the oppressed and the downtrodden against the arrogance of global powers. And there's a kind of superficial plausibility to this self-presentation. If you don't examine it too closely, if you accept at face value the regime's rhetoric about supporting Palestinian rights and resisting Zionism and defending Islamic solidarity against Western aggression, but examine it even slightly, and the whole edifice collapses because what the regime actually does as opposed to what it says it does, as opposed

The Anti-Imperialism Claim Tested

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to what it says it does, is to export its own brutal theoretic model to whatever parts of the Middle East it can reach to support proxy militias, Hezbollah in Lebanon, various Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, that replicate its combination of religious authority and military power to fund and arm movements that are not liberationist or progressive in any meaningful sense, but rather are committed to the same totalitarian religious ideology that characterizes the regime itself, and to pursue regional dominance, not in the name of any universal principle of justice or human rights, but purely in the service of Shia Islamic power and Persian nationalism dressed up in religious garb. And consider what this anti-imperialism means in practice, what it actually produces for the people living under the authority of Iran's proxies. Hezbollah has turned Lebanon into a failed state, has subordinated Lebanese sovereignty to Iranian strategic interests, has provoked conflicts with Israel that have devastated Lebanese infrastructure and Lebanese civilian populations, while Hezbollah's own forces hide among civilians and use them as human shields. The Iraqi militias backed by Iran have contributed to the comprehensive destruction of whatever possibility existed for Iraq to become a stable multisektarian democracy, have carried out sectarian massacres, have carried out sectarian massacres, have intimidated and murdered political opponents, have turned parts of Iraq into Iranian satellites, where Iranian influence is more decisive than the wishes of Iraqi citizens. The Hufis in Yemen have prolonged a civil war that has produced one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of our time, have fired missiles at Saudi Arabia and at international shipping, have imposed their own brutal rule on the territory's test of I control. This is the record of Iranian anti-imperialism. This is what liberation looks like when the Islamic Republic is doing the liberating. Not freedom, not democracy, not human rights, not prosperity, but rather the same theocratic brutality that characterizes the regime at Hanuman, exported wherever Iranian power can reach. And we need to talk about the nuclear program, because this is where the regime's ambitions and the world's failure to adequately respond to them come into sharpest focus. The Islamic Republic has been pursuing nuclear weapons capability for decades, has lied systematically about this pursuit, has hidden facilities and deceived inspectors and violated agreements, and has done all of this while proclaiming peaceful intentions and crying victimhood when challenged. And the Western response has been a masterclass in appeasement actor that will respond to incentives and that can be brought into some kind of stable accommodation with the international order through sufficient concessions and sufficient willingness to ignore its behavior in other domains. This assumption is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong because it misunderstands what the regime is and what it wants, because it

Nuclear Ambition And Western Appeasement

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treats a messianic theocratic state as if it were a normal nation state pursuing normal strategic interests, because it imagines that leaders who believe they're implementing God's will and preparing for the return of the hidden Imam can be managed through the same tools of diplomacy and deterrence that worked with the Soviet Union. Let me be very clear about what I think would happen if the Islamic Republic acquired nuclear weapons, because the consequences are too serious to be left unstated or softened by diplomatic language. A nuclear-armed Iran would not become more cautious or man, more responsible, or more amenable to international norms. It would become more aggressive, more willing to support its proxies in adventurism against Israel and against Sunni Arab states, more able to intimidate its neighbors and to pursue regional dominance while hiding behind the deterrent of nuclear weapons. It would create a situation where Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies operated with the backing of a nuclear power, where conflicts that are currently contained by the possibility of direct retaliation against Iran would become far more dangerous because retaliation would risk nuclear escalation. It would almost certainly trigger nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East, would lead Saudi Arabia and possibly Turkey and Egypt to pursue their own nuclear capabilities, but create a region bristling with nuclear weapons controlled by states and movements, many of which are hostile to each other, and none of which have the mature command and control systems or the decades of experience with nuclear deterrence that prevented the Cold War from turning hot. And most immediately and most certainly it would create an existential threat to Israel that no Israeli government could accept, that would make military action to prevent Iranian nuclear capability not an option among others, but an absolute necessity. And this brings us to the question of Israel, to the regime's obsessive anti-Semitism, to its repeated calls for Israel's destruction, to its Holocaust denial and its Holocaust Tatine contests and its constant deployment of the most vile anti-Semitic tropes dressed up as anti-Zionism. The Islamic Republic's position on Israel is not a policy that could be modified or a grievance that could be addressed through territorial compromise or political compromise or political negotiation. It is a theological commitment to the elimination of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. Is an absolute rejection of the idea that Jews have a right to national self-determination is built on the same logic that has characterized Islamic attitudes toward Jews throughout history, which is that Jews may

Israel And Ideological Antisemitism

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be tolerated as dimmi as second-class subjects living under Islamic authority, but cannot be accepted as equals and certainly cannot be accepted as sovereigns. The chance of death to Israel are not metaphorical. The statements that Israel must be wiped off the map are not rhetorical excess. The funding of Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic jihad is not merely a strategic alliance against a regional rival. These are all expressions of a genuine ideological commitment to destroying the Jewish state and treating them as anything less than genuine is a failure of moral seriousness and a failure of basic attention to what the regime itself says. Now let's talk about what happens inside Iran to the Iranian people themselves, because while the regime's foreign policy and regional ambitions deserve condemnation, the primary victims of the Islamic Republic, Aryans are the people who have lived under this feocratic tyranny for more than four decades, who have seen their country's enormous potential squandered, who have suffered the consequences of international isolation and economic mismanagement, and the prioritization of ideological purity and regional adventurism over the welfare of Iranian citizens. The Iranian people are not the Islamic Republic. The regime does not represent them except in the sense that any dictatorship represents the people it rules. And one of the great crimes of the regime and of its Western apologists is the way they've conflated the two, the way they've treated criticism of the regime,

Life Under Clerical Rule

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as criticism of Iran or of Iranians, or of Persian culture, the way they've made it difficult to oppose the government without being accused of hostility toward Tavot e-Nation. And the Iranian people have resisted, have risen up repeatedly against the regime, have demonstrated extraordinary courage in the face of systematic brutality. The Green Movement of 2009, the protests of 2017 and 2018, the uprising of 2019, the women life freedom movement that erupted after the murder of Mah Samini by the Morality police. These are not minor incidents. These are genuine mass movements against the Fiorachi rule, genuine demands for freedom and dignity and an end to clerical dictatorship. And they've been met every time with savage repression, with mass arrests and torture and execution, with internet shutdowns and the deployment of the revolutionary guards against unarmed protesters with systematic brutality designed to terrorize the population into submission. And the protesters have faced this brutality with extraordinary bravery, have continued to demonstrate despite knowing what happens to protesters in the Islamic Republic, have chanted death to the dictator in the streets despite the certainty that these words could cost them their lives or their freedom, have burned their hijabs and danced in public, and torn down pictures of Khamenei in direct defiance of laws that could send them to prison or worse. The regime's response to these protests tells you everything you need to know about its actual character, about the gap between its revolutionary rhetoric and its reactionaryality. A government that had genuine popular support, that represented the will of the Iranian people as it claims to do, would not need to arrest thousands of protesters, would not need to torture confessions, would not need to torture confessions, would not need to execute people for the crime of demonstrating against it, would not need to shut down the internet to prevent the world from seeing what it's doing to its own people. A government that believed in its own legitimacy, would welcome dissent, would be confident enough in its support to allow challenges to its authority, would respond to protests with argument rather than bullets. The Islamic Republic does none of these things because it has no legitimate support beyond the hardcore ideologies and the people whose power and wealth depend on the regime's continuation, because it understands that if free elections were held tomorrow, the clerics would be swept away, because it knows that it survives not through popular consent but through force and fear and the systematic suppression of every challenge to its authority. And I want to address directly the Western apologists for this regime, the people who treat the Islamic Republic as just another government that the West should deal with pragmatically, who argue that Iran has legitimate security interests that should be respected, who claim that the regime represents an authentic expression of Iranian or Islamic culture that outsiders have no right to judge, who suggest that the real problem is American or Israeli or Western hostility rather than the nature of the regime itself. These apologists, whether they're foreign policy realists who simply want to cut deals regardless of the regime's character or leftists who see the Islamic Republic as an anti-imperialist force to be supported, are engaged in a form of moral bankruptcy that deserves nothing but contempt, are essentially arguing that we should accept the brutal oppression

The Case Against Western Apologists

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of millions of people because opposing it would be inconvenient, or because the oppressors position themselves as enemies of America or Israel. They wouldn't accept this argument applied to any other dictatorship. They wouldn't say that we had to respect the Nazi regime's security interests, or that Stalin's Soviet Union represented an authentic expression of Russian culture that outsiders had no right to judge, or that criticizing apartheid South Africa was cultural imperialism. But somehow, when it comes to the Islamic Republic, when it comes to a theocratic dictatorship that hangs gay people from cranes and stones women and arrests people for dancing, we're supposed to be understanding and accommodating and respectful of sovereignty and cultural difference. The truth about the Islamic Republic is simple and should be stated plainly. It is an illegitimate tyranny that maintains itself through violence and fear, that oppresses its own people systematically, that pursues regional domination through proxy warfare, that is committed to Israel's destruction, that seeks nuclear weapons that it would use to further destabilize the region and threaten its neighbors. And that represents nothing noble or authentic or worthy of respect, but rather represents the comprehensive betrayal of the 1979 revolution's promise, the triumph of the most reactionary elements of Shia Islam over the possibility of genuine freedom and genuine democracy. It deserves opposition, not accommodation, deserves to be challenged rather than appeased, deserves to be undermined rather than stabilized. And the Iranian people who have repeatedly demonstrated their desire for freedom deserve the full support of anyone who claims to care about human rights and human dignity and the possibility of people governing themselves rather than being governed by clerical dictators claiming to speak for God. And when the Islamic Republic finally falls, as it will fall, as all such regimes eventually fall because tyranny is ultimately unsustainable, and because the human desire for freedom is more powerful than any apparatus of repression, the question will be what role the rest of the world played in either hastening or delaying that moment, in either supporting the Iranian people's struggle for freedom, or in treating their oppressors as legitimate

What Opposition Should Look Like

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interlocutors, deserving of respect and concessions. And I know what side I'm on in that question, what side any decent person should be on, which is the side of the protesters in the streets, the side of the women burning their hijabs, the side of the students and workers and artists and writers who risk everything to challenge clerical rule, the side of those who refuse to accept that Iran must be ruled by Ayatollahs claiming divine authority, and emphatically not the side of the regime or its apologists or those who cancel accommodation and patience and understanding in the face of comprehensive tyranny. The Islamic Republic is an obscenity, is a standing refutation of the idea that religious government can be anything other than tyrannical, is a demonstration of what happens when theological certainty is given political power, and recognizing this truth and acting on it is not imperialism or cultural arrogance, but rather basic moral honesty and basic solidarity with people who want what everyone should want, which is freedom from dictatorship and the right to govern themselves rather than being governed by men who claim to know the will of God.