Woke Iran

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/woke-iran/ 

Woke Iran

April 1, 2026By Scott Greer

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The Islamic Republic loves to pump out AI propaganda showing their missiles wiping out their enemies and Americans worshipping Baal. Last week, one of its videos promised to destroy the Statue of Liberty (depicted with the head of the Levantine demon) on behalf of America’s victims. The list of victims began with the Amerindians and went on to include various nonwhite peoples who have fought wars against the U.S. It also included Epstein Island children, Qasem Soleimani, and Ayatollah Khamenei.

The video promised to deliver “One vengeance for all.”

The message is designed to resonate with Western leftists who condemn America for its alleged colonialism and imperialism. The addition of Epstein conspiracy theories plays to the popularity of what I call “Critical Pedo Theory” on parts of both the left and right.

Iran is wise enough to know how to pitch itself. Its Shia fundamentalism isn’t likely to appeal to nonbelievers. So the Islamic Republic adopts Western leftism to sell its cause. This isn’t a cynical ploy, either. Iran’s leaders share a lot of the same woke ideas as Western leftists, and many of them are directly influenced by leftist thinkers. Iran’s global PR strategy illustrates how America’s enemies will try to portray the United States. They’re not going to depict America as a liberal, multicultural hellhole. Instead, America will be the great white devil oppressing people of color both domestically and internationally.

Iran pioneered this tactic. Ayatollah Khamenei was an early supporter of Black Lives Matter, tweeting his support for Ferguson protests all the way back in 2014. “Today like previous years, African-Americans are still under pressure, oppressed and subjected to discrimination,” the Supreme Leader tweeted in August 2014.

In the years that followed, he would make several tweets in support of the black radical movement. “They celebrate a day for abolition of slavery but such crimes are committed against the blacks, #EricGarner #TrayvonMartin #BlackLivesMatter,” he tweeted in 2015. “It’s ridiculous that even though US President is black, still such crimes agnst [sic] US blacks continue to occur,” the mullah posted in response to the Freddie Gray case. “The U.S. gov. commits oppression inside the U.S., too. U.S. police murder black women, men, & children for no justifiable reason, and the murderers are acquitted in U.S. courts. This is their judicial system!,” he posted in 2017. Khamenei was also keen to celebrate the “martyrdom anniversary” of Malcolm X.

George Floyd’s death inspired a frenzy of woke statements from the ayatollah. Here are some examples:

US’s treatment of weaker nations is an enlarged version of the US police’s behavior, when a policeman kneeled on a defenseless black man’s throat until he died. Other western govts, as much as their power allows, are examples of the same catastrophic situation. #GeorgeFloyd

If you’re dark-skinned walking in the US, you can’t be sure you’ll be alive in the next few minutes.

The fact that an American police officer, with complete coolness, places his knee on the neck of a #Black person and presses down until he dies, he begs for mercy, yet he sits there coolly, and a few other police officers stand by and watch without taking any action—this is not something that has newly come into existence; this is the #nature_of_America.

In 2011, Khamenei argued America was built on the “the genocide of Native Americans.” In 2013, he claimed that what distinguished the American political system from the rest of the world was the massacre of Indians and slavery. He also consistently called on Latin America to assert its indigenous identity against the “American way.”

Both Khomeini and Khamenei were influenced by Third Worldist thinkers. While it’s debated whether Khomeini read Frantz Fanon,  the rhetoric of Iran’s first supreme leader echoed the viciously anti-white intellectual. The recently killed leader Khamenei was open about his intellectual debt to Fanon, claiming the works of the West Indian anti-colonial political philosopher awakened him to the plight of Iran at the hands of Western colonizers.

It’s clear that anti-Westernism is a core part of the Islamic Republic’s ideology. Their AI videos also indicate a new element in its effort to gain global support. Not only is America racist, but it’s also controlled by pedophiles. This is what I call Critical Pedo Theory (CPT). Initially championed by conservatives to attack the left, it has now come to resemble Critical Race Theory, which imagines America is governed by “systemic racism.” CPT adherents don’t buy that. They instead believe America’s ruling elite is characterized by “systemic pedophilia.”

This idea, once relegated to Qanon forums, has now gained immense popularity thanks to the Jeffrey Epstein case and is no longer limited to the fringes of the right. Now, even mainstream Democrats engage with it. As does Iran.

Presenting itself as the anti-racist, anti-pedophile power allows the Islamic Republic to gain sympathy not only among those in the non-Western world, but also among Americans who hate their government for allegedly being controlled by racists, or pedophiles, or both.

Some members of the Trump administration recognize Iran’s pitch for what it is. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Sarah Rogers noted Fanon’s influence within the AI propaganda. “People bicker over whether to call this ‘third-worldism,’ but you do see common propaganda threads here and elsewhere: the ideology is resentment-driven, civilization-skeptical, and obsessed with upending, cathartic violence enacted by the ‘historically downtrodden’ (ie ‘wretched of the earth’),” she wrote on X.

Iran’s appeal to woke ideas about race could easily be replicated by China and Russia to sell their respective causes. All three powers championed the recent United Nations resolution that condemned slavery as “the gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations. The U.S. was one of only three states to vote against the resolution, which it recognized as a way for its enemies to undermine the West.

Self-styled right-wing dissidents have sometimes envisioned Iran as a traditionalist bulwark against the decadence of the modern West. Some even fantasize that the Islamic Republic may help save Western civilization by defeating America. But this is a ridiculous view. Iran doesn’t oppose America merely for its decadence and support for Israel. It also opposes the U.S. because it was settled by white people and doesn’t achieve the racial equality demanded by the left. It wants a weak America that is subject to the whims of the nonwhite world.

Whatever your views of the Iran War, no self-respecting right-winger should see Iran as “based” or as a potential ally. The Islamic Republic is far too woke to accommodate that delusion.