Pilled Iranian Monarchists feat. Josef Burton (E371)

Summary

QAA Podcast – Episode 371: “Pilled Iranian Monarchists” feat. Joseph Burton
Release Date: May 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the strange online and IRL world of the Iranian monarchist diaspora and their recent, highly online, radicalization—marked by bizarre spectacle, conspiracy, bot-driven campaigns, performative nostalgia, and a peculiar collision with Trump-era right-wing politics. Joseph Burton, a former American diplomat with experience in Middle East immigration and policy, joins hosts Julian Feeld, Travis View, and Liv Agar to dissect the movement, drawing detailed parallels to QAnon, MAGA, and global right-wing radicalism.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Who Are the Iranian Monarchists?

[00:32–03:46]

• Joseph Burton introduces the “lion and sun” monarchist community—a vocal, online Iranian diaspora obsessed with the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty.
• Monarchists in diaspora are mainly an exilic/diasporic phenomenon, not a direct continuation of pre-revolution or in-country politics.
• Notable Quote:
  “The diaspora supporters of Iran’s royal family are careening into a QAnon moment…for reasons quite familiar in North America: a heavily astroturfed, right-populist movement in a self-radicalization spiral as everything else collapses.” – Joseph Burton [02:56]
• The episode explicitly positions this as a North American—rather than a purely Iranian—phenomenon, with familiar patterns of astroturfing, radicalization, and essentializing identity.

2. Iranian History Crash Course: How Did We Get Here?

[03:46–14:56]

• Burton offers a lively historical overview, tracing Iran’s ancient empires, colonial pressures, and fall into corruption and foreign meddling, culminating in the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi (founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, 1925).
• Lands on the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup against PM Mossadegh, emphasizing it as a real-world conspiracy, not mere theory—laying the groundwork for the “conspiratorial” mindset.
  • “What happened to Mosaddegh isn’t a conspiracy theory—it was an actual IRL conspiracy that the West did to Iran.” – Joseph Burton [10:35]
• The Pahlavi era saw glitzy Westernized excess, secret police (SAVAK), and brutal repression: “Oil state with F-14s, a sub-40% literacy rate, and staggering poverty… cartoon-level gilded dictatorship.” – Joseph Burton [13:09]
• The monarchy’s fall in 1979 was comprehensive: “Nobody liked this guy in 1979.” – Joseph Burton [17:03]

3. From Exile to Diaspora: How Pahlavism Changed

[17:51–24:43]

• After 1979, a new Iranian diaspora forms, especially in the US and Canada. At first, most exiles shun monarchy as toxic legacy.
• Pahlavism is distinct from simple “exile politics”: the movement has grown up outside Iran, across multiple generations, with meta-political aspirations and disconnected nostalgia.
• Other oppositional groups, like the MEK, followed different paths—more paramilitary, cultish, but structurally unlike the internet-based Pahlavism.
• Monarchist politics only regain momentum decades later, primarily from the outside.

4. The Sad Prince: Reza Pahlavi in Exile

[25:44–38:41]

• Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is sketched as an hapless, awkward would-be leader—a “Coen Brothers character” [25:52] often embarrassed, never quite in control.
• Never a charismatic leader, ambivalent about even claiming the throne. He becomes a symbolic, accidental “figurehead” living a well-heeled, apolitical life in Maryland.
• Rumors abound about secret Mossad/CIA funding. Trump-era hawks never take him seriously:
  • “Trump… does not respect him at all.” – Joseph Burton [32:53]
• Think tank ecosystem: Pro-Pahlavi activism gets funneled through murky organizations (FDD, NUFTI, etc.) and funded by a “synergy of Saudi, Emirati, Israeli, and neocon money.”

5. The Neo-Pahlavist Moment & The Media Engine

[38:41–48:30]

• The movement’s modern radicalization is tied to two satellite TV channels, Manoto (nostalgic glitz) and Iran International (Fox News–style regime change radicalism), both targeting Farsi audiences globally.
• These media remake the pre-revolution past as a glamorized, lost utopia—“retrotopia,” per Zygmunt Bauman—erasing historical inequalities and suffering.
  • “It’s a nostalgia for the Shah that completely overlooks the underlying economics… a handful of literal princesses got to wear Chanel bathing suits, whereas most women didn't finish grade school.” – Joseph Burton [44:43]
• Iran International, especially, is credited with most recent radicalization, with its all-in extremism: “War now, attack Iran, the regime will collapse.” – Joseph Burton [44:20]

6. Class, Identity, and Social Base of Pahlavism

[48:43–54:53]

• The support base is cross-class and more about culture and identity than economics—mirroring MAGA/Trumpist movements.
• Growing “reactivation” of Pahlavism inside Iran, especially among a lumpen, lower-middle class, masculinist, and increasingly racial/nationalist group.
• Themes: Zoroastrian/Persian purity, profound Islamophobia (“Islam is fundamentally an Arab religion that’s foreign to our country”), and return to mythical ethnic coherence.

7. The 2026 Regime Change Catastrophe

[54:53–58:13]

• In January 2026, Reza Pahlavi ‘calls the question’ in an economically driven protest, declaring himself king and promising support from the US and Israel.
• The regime meets unrest with mass shootings; Pahlavism is exposed as both over-promised (no regime change) and underprepared.
• Tactics escalate: mass doxing, trolling, intimidation, threats, and even violence in diaspora communities (notably, the murder of anti-Pahlavi academic Masoud Masjidi in Vancouver).

8. Cult, Conspiracism, and the Weirdly Sexual Turn

[58:13–66:28]

• Online monarchist influencers (e.g., Mune Rahimi) mix thirst, right-wing spectacle, and denialism—even doubling down after suffering personal losses to the war they supported.
• Outlandish, sometimes sexualized spectacle: viral videos of supporters “dancing for Trump,” or covering themselves in ketchup in solidarity with Reza after a protestor threw ketchup on him [84:53].
  • “He stands in a very nice gray suit… sprays ketchup all over himself… Long live the Shah!” – Joseph Burton [84:56]
• Movement shows striking QAnon-like patterns: deep conspiracism, fixation on secret messages (“at second 11 of Trump’s video there’s a poster in the corner—see, he’s with us!”), and a LARPing performativity even as realworld consequences (deaths, exile, criminalization) bite.

9. Parallels with QAnon, MAGA, and the Global Right

[70:27–75:40]

• Pahlavism exhibits structural similarities to QAnon:
  • Online, spectacle-driven mobilization
  • Focus on betrayal, traitor-hunting, retribution
  • Post-truth, conspiratorial logic
  • An ambivalent, disengaged figurehead (Reza Pahlavi as Trump analog)
• Key difference: Unlike QAnon, Pahlavi leadership actually has some real connections to intelligence and global power, but the mass base is just as reality-disconnected and performative.
• Movement collapses after regime change fails but doesn’t demobilize; response mutates into extremism and increasingly unhinged conspiratorial activity, including targeting Iranian nationals and pro-peace dissidents for doxing and even to US immigration authorities.

10. Where Next? Risk of Violence and Uncertain Future

[93:21–end]

• Hosts and guest ruminate on the potential for further violence, or a “January 6th” moment, as the movement stews in defeat and sense of betrayal.
• The global picture: As Trumpism/MAGA becomes more diasporic and ethnically varied, the Pahlaviists represent a model for future, increasingly weird and dangerous, exiled nationalist movements.
• Closing quote:
  • “I do not see people who have been this mobilized, demobilizing… I don't see a lot of mea culpa and I don't see a lack of cognitive dissonance right now… all the conditions are there [for violence].” – Joseph Burton [93:21]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Nostalgia as a structure of feeling does not recover the past so much as reorganizes it to soothe a pained yearning.” – Liv Agar, reading from Kevan Gosorhi [47:40]
• “Posting as political action… it’s all spectacle and posting… the Pahlavist movement doesn’t really do politics.” – Joseph Burton [75:40]
• “He kind of feels like a Coen Brothers character… constantly humiliated… almost a kept man.” – Joseph Burton on Reza Pahlavi [34:06]
• “It’s like if they killed Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden got elected anyway.” – Liv Agar [72:39]
• “I don’t even care if this is intentionally horny or isn’t…” – Joseph Burton on provocative ketchup protest videos [87:00]
• “Making lists… we can’t wait to bring back SAVAK and arrest everyone.” – Joseph Burton, quoting Pahlavist activist [68:49]
• “Even the regime didn’t collapse, but Pahlavism did.” – Joseph Burton [61:38]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:32 — Episode Introduction, Meet Joseph Burton
• 02:56 — Diagnosing the QAnon Parallel
• 06:18 — Brief History of Iran & Pre-Revolution Dynasties
• 10:26 — The 1953 CIA Coup: Real vs. Imagined Conspiracies
• 13:09 — The Shah’s Excess and Downfall
• 17:51 — From Exile Politics to Diaspora Pahlavism
• 25:44 — Reza Pahlavi: The Hapless Prince
• 38:41 — Media Engines: Manoto, Iran International & Radicalization
• 44:43 — “Retrotopia” and Right-Wing Nostalgia
• 54:53 — The 2026 Regime Change Call and Crackdown
• 58:13 — Escalating Violence and Online Extremism
• 61:38 — Pahlavism’s Collapse Amid Real-World Violence
• 66:28 — Coping, Conspiracy, and Performative Suicidality
• 72:39 — Parallels with QAnon “Storm” and Ultimate Failure
• 84:53 — Ketchup Protest Viral Spectacle
• 93:21 — What Next? Escalation, Risks, and Community Fallout

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Style & Tone

The conversation is richly detailed, darkly comedic, and ironic—balancing deep historical analysis with irreverent asides. The hosts and guest lampoon the more absurd aspects (ketchup protests, sexualized spectacle), but remain sensitive to the real dangers, trauma, and political stakes for Iranian communities embroiled in this drama.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a multi-layered investigation of the new wave of Iranian monarchist activism and its collision with global right-wing radicalism, exploring how nostalgia, spectacle, and conspiracy coalesce into a spectacle-driven, online-first, and potentially dangerous political force. Through the figure of Reza Pahlavi, the hosts sketch a movement grappling with irrelevance, failure, and the abyss of its own contradictions—mirroring broader post-MAGA, post-QAnon diaspora politics worldwide.

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“May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you…” – Joseph Burton [100:47]

Transcript

[Joseph Burton]

Sa.

[Liv]

If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the qaa podcast, episode 371, Pale Iranian monarchists featuring Joseph Burton. As always, we are your hosts, Liv

[Julian Field]

Agar, Julian Field and Travis View. Finally, we got a chance to talk about Iran. But, you know, since I'm a product of both the American public education system and California public schools, you know, the, the politics of any other country kind of confuses and frightens me. So we brought in a real expert as Joseph Burton. He's a former American diplomat. He worked on Iranian Afghan immigration issues during the first Trump administration and we are delighted to have him on.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, it's great to finally be on. 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. 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. And if you've been logged on for the past six or eight months, you've probably encountered the lion and the lion and son crowd and are probably wondering like, what's kind of going on there. So it's great to share this and then immediately go back into hiding so one of them doesn't find me.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, these people are vicious online, much like Qadon people. Apparently they, they really believe in the power of being nasty and posting.

[Travis View]

Yeah, I, I, I just would never expect this from monarchists. I, I, I don't know. My heart is broken.

[Liv]

Famously, the most ideologically normal people.

[Travis View]

Yeah, people were like, king, please.

[Liv]

Again, Also being from Vancouver, I've also encountered them in real life quite a bit.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, Vancouver comes up in this episode in a, in a, a pretty gnarly way. So, yeah, it's, it's around. I was just across, 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 University of Washington, Seattle, I was, of course, I was studying Farsi, among other things. And yeah, the back and forth from Vancouver. I say Vancouver puts on a better party when it comes, like Persian dance nights and stuff, but they do seem to kind of be a little bit linear up there. And we'll get into that and maybe into why.

[Travis View]

Oh, Liv, I'm so sorry for ever intimating that It's a sleepy town. I hear it sounds like you're besieged by enemies.

[Liv]

Yes, lots of large monarchist rallies happening around where I live.

[Joseph Burton]

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 as sort of a Qanon moment. Not because though of any like 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, a heavily astroturfed, right. Populist movement that has found its own supporters in a self radicalization spiral just as the whole thing collapses. And I guess I want to be here and talk about this because, you know, the Iranian monarchists love to. I mean, as. Unless there's a secret Iranian here, like, none of us are Iranian in any capacity. I don't know who your ancestors were dueling. I think it was mostly Turks, but no Persians.

[Liv]

No Persians.

[Joseph Burton]

But these are people who like to talk about themselves in very essentialist terms. And to be like, we are fully representing what being Iranian is. And there's a really interesting kind of woke 1.0 standpoint Epistemology of how dare you, as a non Iranian speak about this. You know, nothing of blah, blah, blah. 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, 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. So what is Iran exactly? What's this Iran thing everyone's talking about? Iran's a country in West Asia, between Turkey and Iraq in the west and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the East. It's been in the news as a country the US is bombing that's actually quite, quite capable of shooting back, which seems to be something of a novelty that no one in power seems to have accounted for. Iran is old. It's a really ancient continuous civilization. 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. And it's been home to empires and royal dynasties going back over 5,000 years. Is this kind of mythologizing, you know, uncle with his cigarettes and coffee at the, at the card table kind of myth making? 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. But this isn't really a story about Iran or essential Iranian ness or ancient history or even really recent history before the 2000s. 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. They might dox me for this one, but we gotta talk about the pilled Pahlavis. Now. Remember how I said Iran had a series of royal dynasties going back thousands of years? This is a story about some people who really, really, really love the most recent and final one of those dynasties, the Pahlevis. So who are they? At the dawn of the 20th century, Iran was firmly in its flop era. 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. The Qajar dynasty, which had ruled since the 1700s, was corrupt, falling apart, and couldn't stop Iran from becoming a battleground between Russian and British influence to the colossal detriment of Iran's people and who suffered famine and humiliating foreign concessions, which meant Iranians had to like pay money for all their tobacco to the British government directly. It was a quasi colonial situation even though Iran was never colonized.

[Julian Field]

Boy, that sounds awful. Living in an era of a former great empire in its decline sounds awfully humiliating.

[Joseph Burton]

I know it means that you'd accept kind of anyone who came in and wanted to change things.

[Travis View]

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.

[Joseph Burton]

But yeah, they might get in on it. I don't know.

[Travis View]

That'd be so funny. If we got bullied by the British, I would actually respect them again.

[Joseph Burton]

I would. I though 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, could

[Liv]

you imagine the populace they'd elect if you had to pay like 40% of a tax to China to get vapes?

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, it would be calamitous and you know, we might live to see it. Who knows?

[Liv]

Yeah, it's possible.

[Joseph Burton]

So enter some guy. Literally just a guy. Reza Shah, later Reza Shah Pahlavi, 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. He didn't come from an aristocratic family or have any special characteristics. I've heard various things about if he was even able to read, but he was with the go Ahead of the British, able to shoot his way onto the throne and deposed the Qajars in 1925, he took the dynasty name Pahlavi, which is actually the name of one of the old pre Islamic Persian alphabets. 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. Reza Shah passes the throne to his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This is around the time Iran starts becoming a major oil producer. And the Pahlavi dynasty bets on two 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. So what's the Iranian revolution? Mohammad Mosaddegh, who I am sure most Americans are aware of.

[Julian Field]

So this is the guy from the Alexis de Tocqueville, which I'm sure most Americans have read meme.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, it's. It's Khatami in the former leader of Iran in a interview with CNN where he just casually is like, well, you know, I'm sure like all Americans know Alexis de Tocqueville. He's casually. He's like trying to be relatable to an American audience. This was during his open. He was a reformist leader. And the likes of him, they never let someone like him get elected again. But he really tried to like, lead with openness and intercivilizational understanding. Like he was, he was an Iranian bleeding heart. But he got on American TV and he was like, I know how to get to. The average American is. You know, you surely have read your nation's great philosophers and have all memorized them. Yeah. And there's a whole tangential side story about. I got this book of documents from the. That were like shredded from the old US Embassy in, in Tehran. And there's a whole side note about how Khatami got this copy of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in the 70s. But that's another story.

[Liv]

They should have gave him SpongeBob.

[Joseph Burton]

I should have gave him SpongeBob. They've learned a lot. Now they just try to communicate to Americans through AI Lego videos and don't cite Enlightenment philosophers.

[Julian Field]

That much, I think has proven much more effective.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, it's much more effective. They're like, I think someone sat them down and we're like, okay, so Americans love burger and they love gas prices and they understand Legos. So you've got to stop citing, like, Jeffersonian idealism in your efforts to reach out to the American people. But who most Americans are talking about when they talk about the Shah was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. And he rules as a young constitutional monarch until the 1950s when Iranians democratically elect a prime minister, Mohamed Mosaddegh, who asks, hey, wait a minute, why is our oil being drilled by a foreign country? 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. And I'm sure you can guess what happens next.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, yeah. CIA coup.

[Joseph Burton]

CIA coup. Yeah, yeah.

[Travis View]

I didn't even have to say it. I can get Travis to say it. It's so common.

[Joseph Burton]

The CIA and MI6 coup that overthrows Mosaddegh puts the Shah back in direct power. I want to take a note here of how people talk about conspiracy theory when we talk about politics in the Middle East. Earlier I talked about the kind of figure of the Middle Eastern uncle who tells you how it all really happens. 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. I've spent a lot of my life living in the region and it happens all the time. I was certainly serving in Turkey during the first Trump administration. And the first taxicab question is like, you know, Kim Trumpen Unity or like, who directs Trump? Who's behind him? And then they were really crestfallen when I was like, I kind of don't think anybody, man. I kind of think this is on autopilot. But, you know, this is a real guy and I know that guy. 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 is, you know, what happened to Mosaddegh isn't a conspiracy theory. It was just an actual, like, IRL conspiracy that the west did to Iran. When the contemporary monarchist movement is rife with conspiracy theories, we have to acknowledge that real conspiracies abound. And, you know, this is a part of the world where the most pilled possible thing has derailed entire societies at the pest of Western interests. So what happens with the Pahlavi dynasty after Mossadegh is also pretty predictable. There were attempts at reform during the Shah's white revolution which was basically throwing oil money at social programs to head off communist guerrilla movements and Islamist unrest. None of this could really fix the staggering inequality in Iranian society which was an authoritarian monarchist dictatorship. 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. 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. The Shah went nuts buying high tech western weapons and basically floated the western arms industry through the post Vietnam spending slump. He coronated himself in an elaborate ceremony which featured a little prince, his heir, Reza Pahlavi, who we will talk about soon. And I put in the doc, there's a little picture of young Reza Pahlavi barely sitting on his coronation throne in his little uniform.

[Julian Field]

I mean this doesn't inspire confidence when you have pre pubescence and just absolute regalia on you know, a golden throne. It makes one skeptical of leadership.

[Joseph Burton]

For me it was, it was a lot of sashes, a lot of aviator sunglasses, it was a lot of self coronation. It was kind of like a cartoon level gilded dictatorship. And even at the time I think people like to talk about how close the USA was to to the Shah. But even at the time people in Washington were pretty uncomfortable with the human rights record. 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. And so you know, there's a lot in the news about the Islamic Republic carrying out crackdowns which it is and has, that's not like unique to that form of government. Muhammad Pahlavi and the Shah's dynasty was absolutely doing very very similar stuff. So Iran in the 1970s was an oil state with F14s with a sub 40% literacy rate and staggering levels of poverty. 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. 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 is, they say it's Karbzodeh, which means you have been struck by the west. You are Western, confused and sort of enamored with the foreign culture. 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. European royalty though were invited and he flew wine in from Europe on the concord. The shah even imported 50,000 songbirds from Europe because apparently like Iranian birds weren't cutting it in that region of Iran and they needed to have like special bird song in all the trees he had planted.

[Travis View]

Dear God, can you imagine 50,000 songbirds released in your local bird population? Just what that does to like the native balance. That's so crazy. I'm sorry to fixate on that. No, it's, it's, it's the wine, you

[Joseph Burton]

know, it's, it stuck with me because this is just like the most like mad king thing that I think someone could do. 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. Like were our birds not good enough? Like they even like people go back and look at the menu and there's like, there's not even any Iranian food on this thing. Like this is like filet mignon. Like what are you doing? Like are you not even showing this country off? That have to like I don't know how they flew in the birds. I don't think the birds got the Concorde, but it's just one of the wildest.

[Travis View]

He was Louis XIV pilled.

[Joseph Burton]

This is extremely Louis xiv. And what's coming next is a very Louis XIV conclusion to this story. So I'm sure you can guess what happens next in pretty short order. 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 Shaw packing into exile. In the aftermath, the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini outmaneuver everyone else. Iran is declared to be an Islamic republic operating under the Viliyat I faqh or the government of the jurisprudent. Basically rule by clerics 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. It really is a 1789 Louis XIV style full social revolution. Complete with the terrorist. 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 is that there was really nasty street fighting between revolutionaries, the Shah's army, and savak. It wasn't really a full blown civil war because most of the army defected. Even Western governments and most Iranian military leadership were really trying to like, manage a transition to another form of government rather than try to save the Shah. Nobody liked this guy in 1979, the

[Liv]

most fucked position ever. You love the west so much, and they're like, well, what are options inside of you?

[Joseph Burton]

Damn. Damn.

[Travis View]

That's.

[Joseph Burton]

Damn. That's crazy. The us. The US wouldn't even give him asylum. So he. He had to kick around and like, went into exile in Costa Rica for a little bit, and then I think maybe Panama. 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 fail to develop the country. And, yeah, like, just. He kind of goes down as a pretty weak guy, but it's really grim. Not the most cucked member of the Pahlavi dynasty, but we will get to

[Travis View]

that during your exile, Travis. I will be assigned to you.

[Joseph Burton]

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. He's buried in Cairo in a mosque, which is kind of prickly for a lot of very, very anti Islam or Iranian exiles. And his family settles in America. And the family are not the only ones. After the 1979 revolution, Iran has something new. Iran has a diaspora. 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. Although Iran and America were now mortal enemies, America became the country with the most Iranians living in it outside of Iran. 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. And I want to distinguish here between exile and diaspora politics. Exile politics are when a country's own internal politics happen abroad because of upheaval or war. That's quite a lot when it comes to Iranian groups. The pro Mossadegh Tudeh party actually operated in exile in East Germany after the 1950s. Iranian Kurdish groups set up shop in Kurdish regions of Iraq. And members of the Iranian Provisional government that lost out to Khomeini frequently wound up getting assassinated in like Paris or London. Right. So it's when a country's politics happen elsewhere and there have been assassination attempts, there have been political figures in exile. That's not quite the same thing as a date, a diaspora movement. I don't know if it's 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. It's a new thing that's grown up outside of the country organically among a multi generation population of people who don't live there. Right. 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 exile politics. Right. So in the 80s and 90s, it's not like there were monarchists running around a lot. I mean there were some, but they weren't the biggest or most important group that opposed the Islamic Republic outside the country.

[Liv]

Right. I guess because everyone hates the monarchy, even the people who live.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, I mean they were like there was just a revolution and no one wanted to touch them with a ten foot pole. If anything, in the 80s among Iranian exile groups, the feeling was you're the guys who got us into this mess. Right. You're the reason I live in Frankfurt now, dipshit. Nobody wants you back. Everyone remembers your loser dad. Yeah.

[Travis View]

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. And your support of Mossadegh was always qualified because Mossadegh was just like a constitutional monarchist. He just believed that the Shah should be ceremonial. He didn't even oppose the existence of the Shah. He wanted it.

[Joseph Burton]

He believed that that was part of

[Travis View]

the, of part of law essentially. Like a pretty like holy law, essentially. So it's really funny, if you're in exile like that, you're definitely not about to become a monarchist.

[Joseph Burton]

Oh no. And like the two day guys like fought against the monarchy. The other group I'm going to kind of sidebar here is Mojaheddin Khalk, which like was a guerrilla organization. And it's also like. Yeah, that's an important point. Like Mossadegh was kind of a lib, right.

[Travis View]

I mean, he. Not just kind of.

[Joseph Burton]

He, he was, yeah.

[Travis View]

Like he was like a liberal, self professed, you know, constitutional monarchist.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah. And that doesn't translate to the experience of monarchism in, in the diaspora as it emerges. And the way we're going to talk about. No one's like, I would, I would like to have a, you know, constitutional monarch and there's a little changing the guard ceremony at Golestan palace and otherwise it's a democracy. Right.

[Travis View]

No, they don't want the British system. They want the periods where the Shah actually ruled brutal.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, actually like they, they want like the, the lion and sun to. I, I don't, I don't even know if they really know what they want. Activate Go super science to go super to go 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. I don't like. It's. Yeah, it's, it's a whole thing. But I think the other thing is there is a big kind of missing middle of like you don't see a lot of constitutional monarchs or liberals because the politics in country, all those people wound up dying or in exile. 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. It might be tempting to draw parallels between supporters of the Shah and one of the most major Iranian exile groups, the Mojahdin Khalk, or mek. But although there are parallels between them, they're very different movements that operate in really different ways. So the MEK was a group that fused political Islam and socialism and they operated as a guerrilla force in ir 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. Like they were duking it out with SAVAK in the street with assault rifles. But they got outmaneuvered in the post revolution struggles. But when Saddam hussein invaded in 1980, the group committed the unforgivable sin of supporting a foreign invasion and lost support inside Iran. They were branded traitors because they, they like were traitors. And the group fled to Iraq where under the leadership of Massoud Rajavi 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, Maryam. They fought on the side of Saddam. 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. The only left wing political cult, though, to ever operate a large tank force. So they were this, like, armed to the teeth, 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. 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. 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, the MEK stayed in Iraq, going totally mental inside Camp ashraf until the 2003American invasion. But here's a kind of interesting parallel also. Having become increasingly close to Israel and the United States as mutual enemies of the Iranian government, the US forcibly disarmed the group 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.

[Julian Field]

Oh, no mandatory post.

[Liv]

They're Internet soldiers.

[Joseph Burton]

No, they are Internet soldiers in a job giant cult compound in mountainous northern Albania where, like, they have, like, their bank accounts taken away and they're just made to manage these bot networks to post anti Islamic republic tweets all day long. And they have to do like, weird wife swapping stuff with the leaders. Rudy Giuliani, if you'll notice, like, came out against the Shah against pretty early. He was like, this Pahlavi guy is a loser. That's because Rudy Giuliani is completely in the tank for mek. And way more American politicians than you would think are, like, mobbed up with the mek. 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 a pretty good kind of arena for themselves.

[Liv]

What you're basically saying is that the Trotskyists and Yokon pipeline, like they invented it from first principles, basically.

[Joseph Burton]

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 guerilla struggle and the next you're like, hanging out with Rudy Giuliani or he's hanging out with you. No, it absolutely is. 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. 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. And I do want to talk about Pahlavism structurally. Right? And Pahlavism is a movement of parts of the right wing Iranian diaspora that emerges because of diaspora identity and astroturgical TV channels. It's not like a Khmer Rouge style example of radicalization under conditions of armed struggle. Right. Pahlavism is not like an exile group going nuts. It's a diaspora group getting really chudded in the years after the revolution. Nostalgia for the Shah was just that. It was nostalgia, if anyone even felt it at all. It wasn't an organized or armed political movement. There were plenty of former Shah regime officials that came to the US and built lives. For example, a former, like, deputy chief of SAVAK was recently exposed because he was going to pro monarchist protests in Los Angeles. And he was this less, like, legend I've linked to a story about it. He was this legendary torturer who people thought had disappeared, but it turned out he had just been living in Los angeles ever since. 79. And you know, these aren't people who are like plotting covert schemes. 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. That's. That's kind of how this works, right? So, you know, it doesn't really exist for a long time after the revolution. 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. And Pahlavism only reemerges years later. So when we're talking about Pahlavism or Iranian monarchism, the Shah's dead. Who are we talking about? Like, who is this Reza Pahlavi guy, right? And maybe this is surprising. But I'm kind of fascinated by the guy and to an extent I kind of feel for him. He really kind of feels like a Coen Brothers character to me 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. And I think the biography is pretty interesting even though he himself is not a particularly like engaging or interesting guy. 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. 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 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. They offered to defend the country even though the Islamic Republic was the regime that overthrew them. When Iran was invaded from outside, they said, said, we can't stand this. And from prison they said, if you need us, we'll fight. 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? 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. They're shooting down MIGs, they become these sort of folk heroes. There's even like an Iranian style Top Gun movie made about one of these guys. Guys. It's actually really good. It's called the Pilot. But the answer to Reza Pahlavi is no. Go away. So everyone else has this noble moment of national heroism volunteering from a prison cell and they're just like, no, not you though. You stay in America, we don't want you here.

[Liv]

It's probably smart politically.

[Joseph Burton]

It's probably smart, yeah, it's probably smart for them. They're like, yeah, we're not going to let the Crown Prince fly around and become a war hero. Like, absolutely, absolutely not. 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 he does a correspondence degree in poli sci from USC and he eventually winds up in the D.C. suburbs by the early 80s 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. So it's just kind of him hanging out with the guys who, like, 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. And he's just like, hanging out in a mansion in Maryland with no discernible job or qualification. Nice work if you can get it. So he's, 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. Like, he's kind of said it's not clear what citizenship he holds or, like, if he has a US passport. But he's said in the past, like, maybe I could be like a part time transitional leader for Iran. Like, maybe I could spend, like half the year in Maryland and then, like, half in Tehran if the government changes. 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? Right. Reza Pahlavi has always insisted that his means of financial support is his family's wealth. And while they did take a lot of money out of the country with them, he doesn't really know about his own finances, which, I mean, you kind of wonder why this dynasty got overthrown. This guy was just like, I don't, I don't, I don't look at the books. I don't know how much money I have. Let's, let's import more songbirds to Maryland.

[Travis View]

Are you telling me that little guy who was sitting on a throne in his regalia, he turned into a failsong?

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, it's. It's incredible how when you're nine and you're already wearing a general girl's uniform, it doesn't really set you up for success. 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. 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. 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, of Pahlavi politics is accusing Anyone you don't like of being a regime agent? 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, nah, should have gone a little bit better. Should have gone a little bit better.

[Travis View]

But also Trump, like, doesn't know anything about Pahlavi and doesn't give a fuck about him, which is very funny.

[Joseph Burton]

No, he doesn't. He doesn't care at all. And I think, 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. It's like, I see your tacky, entirely gilded house. I see your, like, I mean, like, Reza Pahlavi is a pretty schlubby guy. 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. And like, Trump knows this kind of like, dipshit guy who's just kind of pottering his along with his dad's business in a mansion somewhere, and he does not respect him at all. So reza Pahlavi enters the 2010s as a Maryland grill dad with a passion for wildlife bird photography. 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. I don't know what's going on with that, but he's hanging out in Maryland. He's ignoring the fact that his wife Yasmeen is, is flagrantly cheating on him with her French yoga instructor photos in there. When I said, when I said his dad was not the most cucked Iranian monarch. I'm sorry. If your wife has photos like this floating around with your yoga teacher, it's. No, it's over, dude.

[Travis View]

French yoga teacher is the most like, GTA French yoga teacher.

[Joseph Burton]

I mean, she's, she's having a great time. She's having a great time.

[Travis View]

He kind of, he kind of has a Matthew McConaughey thing going on.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, he's got the feathered hair. They're like backpacking in Thailand. They're like, like, you know, they're, they're. She what? She likes yoga. I mean, I get older.

[Travis View]

The Iranian queens are made the same age.

[Joseph Burton]

The Iranian princesses. I mean, in this case, I Think she's actually a little bit older, which is ooh. But yeah. So I mean, you know, this guy can only drive into the district and go to Moby Dick's House of Kebab. By the way, shout out Moby Dick's House of Kebab. Amazing Iranian chain in dc. I do not know about the politics. I have not followed who they are backing in the current crisis. I do not want to know. I just want the memories of their lunch deal. So like I said before, I personally find Reza Pahavi to almost be like a Coen's brother kind of a figure. A reasonably pleasant man who affects this self serious dignity while 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. And every time he tries to do something, he's constantly humiliated. He's almost a kept man. And in the 2010s the bill for this lifestyle comes due. The post 911 global war on terror era is a feeding frenzy for anyone who wants to overthrow a Middle Eastern government. And Iran was no exception. American hawks like Lindsey Graham were long interested in overthrowing the Iranian regime and glommed onto the cause. And both neocons and the Israel Lobby were all hopeful that they could get away with doing Iraq and Iran. The Israel backed Turbo Hawk foundation for Defense of Democracies was founded in 2001 straight up as like a Hebrew named Pro Israel organization that later rebranded and they pretty quickly staffed up with a number of pro regime and pro Pahlavi Iran experts. In 2003 the National Union for Democracy in Iran or NUFTI is founded. This is the closest thing to a Pahlavist think tank that exists. Like whatever policy documents or attempts to actually act like a government, they have have, this is them. It's also a structural backbone by which Israeli and also Gulf state money gets funneled into the Pahlavi movement. It's a whole elite ecosystem that's the result of a synergy of Saudi, Emirati, Israeli and neocon money. 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 like oh, it's the Adelsons, it's this person, it's this mega donor. You can't just directly point at Pahlavism and say it's all the Israel Lobby. You can't say it's all rich right wing Persians in Los Angeles. You can't say that it's all the Israel lobby or neocons. There's enough of that floating around where these institutional positions kind of get floated on it. But notice, not a party, not a mass movement, a think tank. Right. I do want to underline this amazing article in Jadaliya, which is an article that personally got my ass and called me out by Negar Razavi, which is. It's called the Problem of Iran Economic Expertise in Washington. And it's about this type of hawkish Iran expert who's just some guy they find and demon expert because they have a veneer of authority and say the things that they want. Right. For a long time, if you wanted to be a pro Iran regime change person, you could just be that person. Irrespective, if you actually like know anything about Iran or have the background. One of the most notable hawkish think tank experts is actually a guy who's like a scholar of 16th century documents or something like that. He's a classicist, he's not a foreign policy guy. 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. I put the link in the doc. It's a great piece in Jadaliya. If you ever wanted to know about people like me who know all the Persian spots in D.C. 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. It's good, but it's damning. 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 the regime change stuff she's really deeply mopped up with, like the Clarion Institute, which I think I've heard you mention before and is kind of the first person I can point to that is a bridge between the Pahlavis and the Pahlavist movement and Trump War World. Right. So these people, this kind of soup is floating around since the early 2000s.

[Travis View]

I did see them like at CPAC, the CPAC following the Trump victory. I saw all these like Iranians for Israel. And they were also talking about reinstating the Shah.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, yeah. They're really big at CPAC and they're really big with this kind of like Gen 1 Trump world type of person. Right. And they, they really latch onto that, 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. 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. This is where Pahlavism starts to resemble maga. And just like MAGA and its freakier fringes, it all comes together in the 2010s. You know, it's like the Bolsonaro movement. It's like Cuer Dankers or who I only know about because of QAA or like the Canadian trucker convoys. Like Pahlavism starts to emerge from this ecosystem really like post 2010. So I want to underscore that despite all the history and background and context, this is all like a really recent thing.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, part of a global wave of reactionaries losing their fucking minds.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, exactly. Reactionary. Getting what they want and losing their minds and burning quite a lot of elite money to do it and then breaking containment, 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, is the moment it really kind of breaks. Containment is because of a TV channel, or rather two TV channels. For a long time you got to understand that Iranian state TV was boring as shit. IRIB or Press tv, which is their kind of English language, like foreign propaganda of the, of the Iranian government was just guys with no ties and women in chadors talking directly at the camera. Low production values, lots of clumsy propaganda, nothing fun or cool. The censors won't allow it. Right. So if you are interested in watching a Farsi language news channel for a long time, you didn't have a lot of options. The whole thing about these like Internet savvy Iranian government groups creating the funny AI Lego video and the rap songs about how Pete Hegseth is a drunk loser. That's a totally new development in Iranian messaging and I didn't believe they had it in them, you know, the supporters of the Islamic Republic to make like a catchy Lego rap song about Epstein, you know, for a long time it was at most relatable, a guy talking about Alexis de Tocqueville to try to try to message to Americans. So a lot of people inside and outside Iran would watch the Voice of America in Persian or BBC fart Farsi and they've always been sources of Persian language news. They've also always been sources of anti regime and opposition Persian language news. Right. Voice of America and BBC Farsi are, you know, like dissident organizations that are against the Iranian government. But it was always a very liberal kind of opposition. Human rights activists, feminists, filmmakers who've been censored artists, 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 open and liberalism and reform. So they would report on how sanctions made life hard in Iran or about Western abuses in the region so they could build credibility. That was the exile kind of news media environment in Persian, very PBS coded, right? Where they kind of kept the hey, maybe the Islamic Republic isn't very good, a bit on the down low as part of a bigger kind of liberal message. But in the 2010s you have two networks that come out of nowhere, Manoto and Iran International. 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. And Manito starts broadcasting in 2010. And it is unironically, I think it is the reason for all of the Iran before the Islamic Revolution memes. 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. Manito is based in London and its origins are a bit murkier than the clearly Saudi backed Iran International. But Manato has very high production values and it does a lot of cultural programming. So they like Kuga, who's like the legendary Iranian singer. Her music is so good, all bangers. She's been around forever, since the 70s, but she hosted a version of the Voice on Manito. There's cooking programs so you can make all of the absurdly delicious, finely crafted Palavs and stuff like that. There's all of this stuff that's very relatable to a maybe less highbrow, less politically engaged cultural interest stuff for Farsi speakers. 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, close to the Shah. 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. This is what white men don't get anymore, right? 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, and it's like, well, yeah, that. I mean, that existed for some people before 1979. Certainly not most. Right?

[Julian Field]

Yeah. 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? And it's like a late 19th century southern, large plantation, like a ball or something. It's like. Well, yeah, because even if you weren't invited to those things, even if you were, you know, did exist at that time, it's like those are like, you know, they like the, like, top 1% of white people at the top time.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, exactly. 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. And I wouldn't even say openness, just like kind of cult, like the shit rich people always get up to 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? And, you know, for anything else you can say about the Islamic republic, it's taken things like literacy and education very seriously. 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. So, like, you know, it's the same kind of right wing nostalgia you see everywhere. You know, the idea of, like, a man used to be able to provide for his family. And it's a picture of like, Don Draper. Like, you weren't that guy. And neither were you. Were you invited to any of this. Right now that's Manito, right? But Iran International, the other big network, is much more of a late comer. 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. Please blow up Iran, like, invade. We need regime change. This isn't propaganda or lobbying directed at foreigners either. It's not saying to, like, Americans, hey, America, you should attack this evil country that hates America. This is like, to an Iranian audience saying, a precondition for anything changing or getting better in Iran is war. Right. Not that it might be regrettable or not be necessary or that we want the government to change. It's not even arguing that, like, well, we want there to be a different system of government. It's, we want there to be a war so there will be a different system of government. Right. Iran International is probably responsible for a lot more of the radicalization. Like when you have or 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. But I think it's important to take it together with Manito as a package, even though they're different organizations that probably have different benefactors. And the story of, like, people getting Iran International pilled is really familiar to this podcast and the movements like it. Right. Shout out to the Iranian American novelist Porkista Khakpur. She goes on Instagram Live a lot and she's been very open to talking about what's happened in her family and the kind of things that have taken place. As, you know, a lot of her immediate family has become ardently Pahlavist by basically just having Iran International on all the time. Right. It just kind of sucks everything out of the room. My beloved umphy 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 retro. Retrotopia.

[Liv]

This oneness, however, is less an expression of shared present conditions than a projection of a selectively remembered past. 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. In this formulation, Iran was perfect before the Islamic revolution, culturally cohesive, economically prosperous, and fundamentally unified. But this utopic nostalgia, or retrotopia, to use Baumann's language, seeks that which does not exist. Nostalgia as a structure of feeling does not recover the past so much as reorganizes it to soothe a pained yearning. In doing so, nostalgic representations also smooth over contradictions, suppress conflicts, and promote an image of coherence that obscures the heterogeneity of lived experience.

[Joseph Burton]

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. And that's the point.

[Liv]

Do we know the kind of like general historical background of Pavlovists? So like are they more likely to have been wealthy before, before they left Iran?

[Joseph Burton]

That's a super interesting question. 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, it isn't in the same way that like MAGA or Qanon can actually be more cross country class than you'd think. It's not as directly correlation. Like there's a lot of people who are rich under the Shah, that stayed rich under the Islamic Republic and even a lot of people who got rich under the Islamic Republic. You know, one left wing criticism that's leveled against the Iranian government is really that they're not particularly anti capitalist. Right. 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. I mean you can find people who are like auto mechanics that are Pahlavists, you can find people in the diaspora that are millionaires who aren't inside of Iran. And Pahlavism inside of Iran is different. That's more recent and I, that's really something more for like 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. And the Pahlavists, the neo Pahlavists inside of Iran are very much like a kind of lumpen lower middle class, right wing street fighting group of guys who are like very right wing, very racial, very misogynist and very kind of. It's very Latin America coded to me in a sense of like toughs who are ready to go out there and fight anyone and are guys with no economic prospects or hope, you know.

[Liv]

Right. I guess it's like the secularism in that context is like an insertion of like ethnic Persian identity as opposed to like Islam as a foreign thing. Is there some of that Quran?

[Joseph Burton]

I would say they believe both those things at the same time. So there is a, 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 in a lot of these contexts. The Islamophobia and the anti Islam thing is also an ethnic thing, right. Where they are 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 like, Islam is fundamentally an Arab religion that's foreign to our country. And we don't want to hear now it's. That's a whole other can of worms. It's not, I don't really have a dog in that fight. It's a whole thing. But a lot of the, like, the emphasis on Zoroastrianism, the looking at Islam as something foreign, there is a 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? Now the fact that most Iran, like Iran is a very religiously Muslim country, irrespective it was under the Shah, it is now doesn't really seem to factor into that. 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?

[Liv]

Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like originally I thought of it more as like Russian emigre situation of like people who are mad about the Bolsheviks upsetting their position in Russian society. 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. And anyone who, who's like, was formerly rich in like a communist country, like my family in Yugoslavia had their wealth taken away and like their people are like, oh, you took away my. My factory or whatever. This seems to be maybe less driven by that sort of grievance.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, my dad owned all the eggs in China, that famous tweet, right. Like they had their. Well taken away. 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. Right. But up until this war, they never touched that. Like, if you had problems accessing your money back in Iran, it was because of American financial sanctions. Sanctions, not because of the actions of the government. So there's not a clear class component to this moment. And that's why I really wanted to distinguish between an exile movement and a diaspora movement. Because it is like, that is the classic thing, like the embittered Croatian nationalists being like, and they can you believe the communists sent my father to prison simply for being a Ustasha colonel? This is not exactly that. No, those people are there, like the SABAK deputy director who is protesting in Los Angeles. But it's not all or most of them. 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. Iran is next to Cuba, one of the most sanctioned and embargoed countries in the world. It is almost impossible to do anything there. It is almost impossible to, to send money, to have anything. And so their economy is underperforming and collapsing, mostly due to sanctions. But you also have to put some blame on mismanagement. Now, this includes, like the Women Life Freedom movement, big employment protests. There's a lot of government crackdowns, hundreds of people die. 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. But in January 2026, Reza Pahlev, he kind of hijacks the narrative around a round of economic protests and declares that this is a. 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. I have the backing of America and Israel. I am your king. Go out there, overthrow the government. Right as it starts heading towards a crackdown. He basically says, like, do it. Now is the time. Help is with you. I don't have to get conspiracy brained against this. American and Israeli leaders have both said, said, yeah, we had agents on the ground there. I don't know the degree of it. It's just 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. No, you're a liar. No, you're a regime of bal. Just. No, you're a foreign agent. Look, he goes out there and he says, go out there, fight the cops. Help is coming. Burn down your local mosque. I am your king.

[Julian Field]

King.

[Joseph Burton]

Overthrow the government. And the Islamic Republic calls his bluff by just shooting people. Right? That's kind of the political dynamic that matters for Pahlavism here. Pahlavism reinterjects itself in this call towards a Basically unsupported, unorganized, unprepared kind of revolution thing that ends, by the Iranian government's own admission, them shooting thousands of people? 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. You say, we don't like mandatory hijab. You're told you're a foreign agent, you want the Shah back. You love America and Israel. You want to overthrow the government. You say, why is my movie censored? They give that same answer. You say, why can't I afford rent? They give that same answer. 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 overcome. Overthrow the government. Right. You know, I don't know. A government on earth that would not react to a serious attempt to overthrow it in this way. I mean, I think about January 6th, like, push came to shove. 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. It's a massacre. But this coming to a boil had actually been building for a while. So there's a great piece in Politico from 2023 called I'll burn you a light 5, which is about how hostile and threatening the Iranian diaspora environment had become in the wake of the Women Life freedom protest movement. And there were these coordinated, like sexual assault and death threats sent to anyone in the Iranian exile or diaspora community who supported diplomatic solution to the Western impasse with Iran at that time. So pro regime change and pro Pahlavi groups and associations, both formal and informal, have engaged in sustained and engineered attempts to shout down any dissenting voices. They really wanted to make it come to the point of mass protest and massacre. Right. This is not. 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. And they don't like anyone who's advocating for a path that's not theirs. A lot of these threat campaigns were aided by huge online bot networks and doxing that seemed to take place with a level of state resources. And it was kind of an astroturfed movement that really only after 2022 starts coming into prominence, 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 life, freedom protests that totally fell apart organizationally. But even during that time, Reza Pahlavi was seen as a very divisive and fringe problematic figure. Each even among the Iranian exiles, 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? And is there more like other groups that maybe were more organized who have been doing more actual on the ground political work or something like that? 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, is this has only become like a hegemonic point of view since like 2022. Right?

[Liv]

Yeah. I feel like the only, like, even like pro Israel, pro America running diaspora people I knew around this period were like, paplavi is washed. He's kind of sucks.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Travis View]

I mean, he barely wants it. 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. It.

[Joseph Burton]

It is, it is one of the most Trumpist things. And as we start kind of talking about how the. This starts to resemble not just maga, but also Q. I think Pahlavi'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? Look at, look at you go. It's very similar. Like, he's washed. And even, even the more kind of thoughtful pro regime change Iranians will basically say that, like, Reza Pahlavi is just the last man standing. He's the least bad option. Or they will say, like, well, he'd be a transitional figure for now. Like, he's, he's chopped and everyone, everyone knows it, right? But things after 22 start becoming increasingly contentious. There's threats of violence, and at times, even before this war, it crosses into actual violence. Masoud Masjidi was an incredibly litigious Simon Fraser University professor who was actively involved in non Pah Pahlavi Iranian dissident movements. And he just loved to sue people. And so he was 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. Which, like, to be fair, if I was the Iranian government and wanted the opposition to me to be Figureheaded by the most off putting and insane people. I would probably have done everything that the Pahlavists have done. But Masjidi was, you know, one of these guys in a smaller non Pahlavist anti Iranian regime organization whose body was found in rural Vancouver and a ardently pro Pahlavi, very strange Iranian Canadian couple has been charged with his murder. I'm not even personally convinced that this was like an organized hit or something that that would be pure political violence. They like followed each other on Twitter. They all had massive Twitter drama on Farsi Twitter with each other. 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 were super duper pro Pahlavi and really into getting like into huge fights on, on Farsi Twitter and now they're charged with murder. 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.

[Liv]

Lots of swinging in this episode. Specifically anti Iranian regime.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, 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. And I can't really, I don't know, like I don't come from the religious theocracy society. I can't really speak as to what that does. I don't know, I don't know. 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 Pallavis tried to portray themselves as, as, as, you know, maybe a way to express themselves but I don't know what's going on there.

[Liv]

So like an appropriation of the like unveiling the Muslim woman kind of discourse.

[Joseph Burton]

I don't even think appropriation, an explicit full throated endorsement. The idea of like I'm stripping down and I'm going to do a twerk off to thank Trump against the Islamic Republic. 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. But you know the Pallavis, if anyone hasn't been watching the news, they are the dog that caught the car. Now they got the regime change war that they've been dreaming for, for years and almost immediately everything fell apart. The Islamic Republic does have, you know, about a 20% of the population core base of Support, that's about how many people in every Iranian election vote for the most conservative parties, the principalists. They're the real regimes, the true believers. Right? But the thing is, 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%. I think a lot of people would be offended and say, no, nobody wants this regime at all. They purely follow it for cynical reasons. The way this war unfolded in exactly the way the Pahlavas begged for, it's really meant that the central question isn't, do you. The Islamic Republic, it was like, do you like foreign countries sneak attacking you while you are negotiating with them? Do you like hundreds of little girls being blown up by cruise missiles? Do you like a bomb being dropped in your own neighborhood? So even though lots of people even inside of Iran were like, oh, yay, this is it. This is the regime change war. The regime's going to fall pretty much immediately. The way the US And Israel have behaved has meant that this is not a question about the regime. Right? They like, to paraphrase Katt Williams, you know, we're not at war with their army, we're at war with them. Civilian infrastructure like oil refineries, cultural treasures like Golestan palace came under attack almost immediately. And Trump went out of his way to say, like, we're going to destroy your civilization. Like, this is. Whatever legitimacy the Pahlavists have has cratered because of this war. In the end, the regime didn't collapse, but Pahlavism did. Even two weeks into the war, there's a statement from Reza Pahlavi's own mother that's very cagey and conditional. 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. Like, this is his mom in an interview with France 24. Basically kind of slow rolling. I don't think you're the guy. And I just, like, imagine reading that in, like, your wife's at yoga class again, and you're, like, sitting with your dad, Dad's old business buddies in, like, the open floor plan kitchen in your Maryland mansion. And just like, it's so weird for me to feel bad for this guy, but I do, you know, Trump. Trump pretty quickly starts calling him the loser prince and says, you're not the guy. 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, this is not the guy. But that doesn't mean that his followers are giving up. So you have, you know, we're going to start talking about influencers now. This is Mune Rahimi. She's an Iranian monarchist influencer who created the Trump dance on the first day of the war celebrating the attack on Iran. I have a picture here. Short shorts, cowboy boots. She's dancing with Trump's little two hand thing to ymca, saying all Iranians right now are dancing around to ymca. This is, this is day one when the school in Mass Knob got blown up, which of course everyone you know on this side, this, this kind of type of person was like, oh, well, that's fake. The regime did it. But you know, the thing about Mune Rahimi is that it's not like she's just about this one thing. She's hella chudded. She does baddy dance videos. She's also arting Elon Musk and she insists that this is not a war, it's a rescue mission to save Iranians from the mullahs and Islam. You could be like, girl, what are you talking about? They're blowing up your own country. And then that happens to her. 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. 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, no. She doubles down. She places blame 100% with the Islamic Republic for being there and it redoubles her faith in Pahlavism and regime change. She is tweeting every day. She is still out there. 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. It's really sad, but I think for this podcast especially, especially seeing the way that the kind of, when you're not just maga, once you're marching down that kind of Q path, this kind of psychological mechanism starts just coming out all over the time.

[Liv]

Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

When the US 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.

[Julian Field]

Oh, God. Yeah. No, that's, that's how, you know, it's like very serious. Yeah. Friendship over.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, yeah, friendship is. And it's very Drake.

[Liv]

Yeah, he's gonna post like a message he sends to Trump on Instagram.

[Joseph Burton]

We're about eight weeks out from a Areza Pahlavi notes app apology that he's gonna, he's gonna screenshot and, and do it. Do a statement of harm that he did a, he did a no growth. He did, he did a regiment change.

[Travis View]

Everyone's going to be like, how the fuck did he get it to working with Comic Sans?

[Joseph Burton]

So, you know, the Monarchists were able to cope that like, not enough Iranian 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 benefactor organizations that kind of created Pahlavism. Goldie Ghmari is also another pretty perfect example of a hardcore and politicized Pahlavist. Not just a cultural person who dances around, but someone who's in ideologue. She's super pro Trump, super maga Internet personality. She goes on oann sometimes. 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. 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 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 like we're making lists, you know, basically explicitly saying we're, we can't wait to bring back Sabak and arrest everyone. I've screenshotted a tweet here. This was nine hours ago today. She said, Mr. Trump, please finish the job. Rekindle the friendship and allyship that existed between Iranians and Americans before the terrorist Muslim Nazis occupied Iran in 1979, begging for a restart of the war, not backing down even a bit. 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. And I think we should watch this tweet and play the audio.

[Julian Field]

She says, hello, friends, 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 week night. First of all, that's not President Trump's job, okay? It's not President Trump's responsibility to tell the world who the leader of Iran's revolution, the lion and son, is. That's our duty as Iranians. We need to tell the world. We need to show the world who we want. That's not the American's job. That's our job. That's point number one. And for those who want to complain that they there's no trace of the prince in President Trump's video. Let's look at second 11 of President Trump's video together. And she points to a picture here. What's this picture?

[Liv]

Presumably that's the shah.

[Julian Field]

Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

It's a picture of. In the corner of the frame at a pro war Iranian rally, there is a corner of a poster with a picture of Reza Pahlavi being held up by one guy.

[Julian Field]

Okay.

[Liv]

Trump is sending subliminal criminals that that's who he wants.

[Joseph Burton]

So she's like, don't worry. 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.

[Julian Field]

And then she. Yeah, she stares into the camera, kind of like blinks, like, see, see? Waves her hands saying, that's clearly evidence. She says, what more do you want President Trump to say? How else should he prove he's heard your voice? We just need to keep going, going, continue our path. Continue listening to the prince's words and guidance.

[Liv]

It's so funny. Listen to his words and guidance. It's like a guy who, like, doesn't even want to be there.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, yeah. He doesn't really have a message. So this is where kind of the meat and potatoes, or I guess the fragrant saffron rice of this episode is, is the structural comparison to what I see as the developing kind of QAnon structure. Structural comparison. And what do we have here? There's a populist and right wing movement. It is very online, to the point of maybe even mostly existing online. It's posting as political action, an emphasis on, like being a voice, speaking out, sharing information. It's cross class. There's not like one clear demographic of person socioeconomically who falls into this. And it's very focused on retribution. Right. Payback against the people who've been against us, the malignant bodies in our own society, the people who don't embrace it. And, you know, 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. And also very, very MAGA and very Q is that the leadership of this movement seems to be pretty ambivalent about its own followers. But what really does set pathavism apart from QAnon is there's an element of non LARP. 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. 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. But they're also treating it like a Q drop. So there is a conspiracy here. And it's been the long US Gulf State, Israeli alliance against Iran, Iran. Reza Pahlavi absolutely does hang out with secret agents and is doing all the things for real that QAnon followers thought Q was doing. The delusion isn't that the storm is coming. These people got their version of the storm. All the people the Pahlavis hated in Iran actually did. IRL get vaporized by stealth fighters and drones. The Israeli Air Force blew up the Supreme Leader. All the top IRGC commanders are dead. Now the regime change war the Pahlavi movement wanted actually took place. So this is like if Q people got the storm even after they got Trump and still it all fell apart.

[Liv]

Yeah, yeah. It's like if they killed Hillary Clinton and then like, Joe Biden got elected anyways.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like we there, we. 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. And then at the end of it, Joe was just like, come on, man. And then just won. Right? Like, this is absolutely that. Where the Israeli bombs started dropping, the people were told to rise up. There were all these rumors of we're getting ready to send exiles in, and then just none of it materialized. And also materialized so fast, very, very quickly. I think once the Iranian government kind of rallied and started shooting back, anyone in a position of power just went, oh, yeah, this is not happening. Right. Except for these people who have for years or maybe decades, decades, built their identity around it, it happening. 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. They're kind of realizing now that they've been passengers that they're not the ones kind of driving history, and I think it's breaking a lot of their brains. So what does this look like? Pahlavis have always loved street theater, but after the war started, their protests are getting substantially stranger. Yeah, yeah. In Canada, there was a. In Toronto, there was this strange reenactment of the Pahlavi 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.

[Liv]

There's a lot of unusual stuff I was seeing in Vancouver as well. 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 Pavlovi monarch. My favorite is, like, a lot of them have American flags, and they're like, the day after the war started, there was this really, really large march downtown, and there's a lot of American flags in there, which I was thinking about the association there of being in Canada during Trump's invasion threat and being like, yes, we love Canada, and we also love America. I do wonder if that offended anyone.

[Joseph Burton]

I mean, that's actually. That's a really good point of like, yeah, they're not going around like, they're in Germany with American flags. They. They're in Canada with American flags. And there's actually. It's the next video. I don't know if we want to read it off on the pot or not, but there's a video of a pro Iranian opposition guy at a rally who has the lion and Son flag. But he just asks other guys at the rally, why do you have so many American flags? Aren't we Iranian? And they start threatening him. It's pretty wild.

[Julian Field]

I mean, is this stuff a lot of, like. I know that QAnon, sometimes it's like, a lot of their activism, especially when they do things irl, it's limited to attention getting. This is why they wear, like, Q shirts at, like, Trump rallies and stuff. And they. They think that, well, like, if we get attention, if we get people talking about us, we're winning somehow. And that's like, they didn't think past the attention getting. Say, is that kind of like. That kind of, like, online brain where things like attention equals support or attention equals winning?

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, absolutely. There's a huge emphasis on, like, being your voice and Speaking out. And even most of the demands and things like that they threaten are about posting on the Internet. And there's this I. There's not a commute even really an attempt to like communicate a political platform at these things. Right. All of this is pointing to a single brutal truth, which is that the Pahfist movement doesn't really do politics. It's all spectacle and posting. They're not building institutions or organizations. They're not interested in having outreach or like winning over people with compelling arguments. It is really what 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. They're doing it kind of to troll people or to stand out. Right. 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 palavism if I cared about optics. But they don't care about optics. They care about yelling at people and maintaining and asserting a kind of cultural hegemony. Right. So there are orgs like this thing called I put orgs in quotation marks because it's not really an organization. It's called like the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists or aairia, which styles itself as like a think tank or tracking org. But it's literally just like a group chat of Pahlavists that have a spreadsheet of logged on Iranians that they think are like pro regime or anti war. And so it is very Q in like getting attention, speaking out, sharing things, getting views on the Trump dance. It's not that that is a way to get eyes on a political platform or even to focus how people feel. Like the spectacle is it. But paradoxically, that spectacle then leads to some, I think has the potential to go to some darker places. 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. You know, Muslim ban 2, which I've written about, the first one, that was actually my first big point of contact with the Iranian American community was fact that I was a Muslim ban specialist when I was with the State Department. Like, we sanctioned and banned people from being with their families for being Iranian. 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. You cannot have family, come, immigrate to join you. You can't come to the United States under any circumstances. And if ICE rounds you up, even if you are fleeing persecution by the Iranian government, they will deport you back to Iran. So what these Pahlavists are doing is they're just diming out people. They don't like to ICE in the United States. 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, like, subject to these racist immigration controls in the United States, it creates a very, very dangerous and toxic situation. 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? They will just say it's the Islamic Republic's fault. Once the regime changes, everything will be fine. Like, that was the source of the problem and not just baseline American racism. Right. So, 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. And there's a lot of them to too, like, pro government people are people related to people in the government 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. 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, like, locked up. So, like, Laura Loomer was like, we found, 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. 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. Oh, my God. So there's just random people are being snatched up. There was a Iranian student, a PhD student in the US who's getting deported now because he actually spoke up against the war and was dined out to ICE by Pahlavius 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.

[Iranian Monarchist Influencer (possibly Mune Rahimi)]

I don't know who needs to hear this, but I just had to hop on here. 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, they have lost everything. They have lost family members. They have seen family members being killed, being tortured. They can't even find some of their family members. But it's not because of that. It's because they're losing hope as there might be a deal going on between us and Islamic Republic. 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 want to make a deal with monsters. With the Islamic Republic. Enough is enough. We need to show up for the Iranian people. I have received tons of messages that if this deal goes through, they are going to kill themselves of schoolgirls. And I'm going to post it here. So you see that this is serious. We do not want deal with the Islamic Republic. I don't know who needs to hear this, whether they're politicians, whether they're physicians, whether there is God that I don't even believe in anymore. But we do not need a deal with the Islamic Republic. Our youth are losing hope because they feel betrayed by the international community. Please, please help us.

[Liv]

Youth feels betrayed by America because America is no longer bombing their schools.

[Joseph Burton]

It's. It's really. I mean, to outside of it, it seems like this is ludicrous. This is the announcement of a peace deal. 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. 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 what she's saying. I'm getting messages. We need to speak out. There's no suggested course of action other than, I don't know, going to Centcom and getting Pete Hegseth to start shooting again. Like there's not an actual politics in here, but there is life or death stakes, the threat of suicide. And like this happened in Iran. So I didn't really include it in the episode, but there was a guy after the January protests who literally was like, Mr. Trump, don't deal with the Islamic Republic, don't do it. And then he just gets up and hangs up himself in the video. It's really messed up. So like that one guy did it and he was an art And Pahlavist. And that's become kind of a rhetorical tactic or tick of like, oh, well, we're gonna kill ourselves if you don't do this.

[Liv]

It does betray this idea that they think that America actually gives a fuck about them. Like, Trump is like, sure, kill yourself. I don't. Who cares?

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah. I mean, what's it to us? Like, I mean, and there's almost a. I don't know if it's a conscience or self conscious evidence. Oh, like millions of schoolgirls, like schoolgirls are ready to kill themselves. I mean, there is a pile of dead schoolgirls in Iran, and they didn't kill themselves. It was an American Tomahawk missile. 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. 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? He's not rving the dinar. Don't you care about us, Trump? My life still sucks. And that's where things kind of take a much darker turn. But it's not all grim. We gotta talk about ketchup. On April 23, an Iranian guy throw ketchup on Reza Pahlavi at a rally in Germany. 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, it's called sauce khairsi or like bear sauce. 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. And the ketchup attack was interesting because it was someone in the Iranian diaspora being like, you suck. Nobody likes you. I'm going to throw ketchup on you. And the reaction from monarchists is it's kind of indicative of where they are right now. 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, I can translate this guy if you want. So I'm here today in our movement for our dear prince, our beloved king. You are not alone. Your pain is our pain. And then this guy in a nice shiny suit.

[Julian Field]

Oh, my God.

[Joseph Burton]

Starts spraying ketchup all over himself.

[Julian Field]

Yeah.

[Travis View]

What the.

[Joseph Burton]

He's so serious and he says, long live the Shah. Long live the Shah. As he stands in A very nice gray suit and a blue tie and sprays ketchup all over himself.

[Travis View]

It's like, this is.

[Julian Field]

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. Ketchup. It's very silly.

[Joseph Burton]

I don't understand what the audience is for this. Yeah, like, I don't understand what kind of reaction this is supposed to elicit.

[Travis View]

This checks out for Monarchist with like, the, 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, like, I would never, like, you know, endanger my nice suit.

[Joseph Burton]

But they're pretty sharp.

[Travis View]

He's got guys are. These guys are like, ah, I wear a new suit every morning. I throw them out.

[Joseph Burton]

The second one is even weirder to the point where I. I didn't even feel comfortable retweeting this because it feels kind of not safer work, even though it technically isn't. Let's check this out.

[Liv]

Okay, How do you describe this?

[Julian Field]

So it's a woman.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, woman.

[Julian Field]

Draped in the flag holding some ketchup. And the caption says, I caught the guy who threw tomato sauce at Shah Reza Pahlavi. And then she. She stands back to reveal a man in all black with a black hood over his face. We don't know who he is. He has his hands behind his back where we assume he's restrained in some way. And then she proceeds to. To pour the ketchup all over it. Yeah, it looks, it looks maybe like fetish content.

[Liv]

Looks like a video Jordan Peterson would retweet.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like, this is fetish content, right?

[Liv]

Yeah, absolutely. He's like, squirming as. As he's. She's pouring the ketchup.

[Joseph Burton]

He starts convulsing and she's wearing leather pants and the ketchup is going everywhere. And he's like, yeah, he's like convulsing and he's wearing a hood. And I'm just like, I don't care if this is intentionally horny or isn't.

[Julian Field]

And then she is having a great time. Look, she is smiling and laughing as she's pouring this ketchup over this.

[Travis View]

Yeah. I mean, come on, guys. Whatever that shorty.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, ketchup.

[Travis View]

But it's so.

[Joseph Burton]

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, threatening mass suicide. And the other half are like, oh, no. Oh, you've, you've caught me. You're gonna put the ketchup on me. And I like. And these things coexist, right? Naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty. 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? Like there's mean women are gonna spray all sorts of condiments all over me if the Shah comes back into power.

[Travis View]

I am just your black bagged French fry. Please, please just squirt on me.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, I don't even know what to make of that. But this is the soup, right, that whatever is going to develop, is going to develop out of. So 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. 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 cpac. Even being on Instagram so heavily winning over Lindsey Graham, even throwing your lot in with Israel and the golf lobbies 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. So they're wedding themselves to these forces that are on the out. You don't see these people hanging out on Rumble. You don't see them with Nick Fuentes. You don't see them. None of them are based. Do you know what I mean? They're super mobilized. Some of them are well off, they're very committed. 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. So the lady who was baking is. She's still going on oann. The Pahlavists are trying to be part of the global right, but does the global right have a place where for people who are basically neocon hawk conservatives who want regime change, wars, and what can the Pahlavists bring to the table to these movements other than running cover for, hey, we think Iranian people want this. They don't really have organizations, they can't deliver many votes and most of the money flows into them, not out of them.

[Liv]

I do wonder as well that the tension possibly with them being like, I guess Ostensibly, like secularists seems to like, be pretty antithetical as well.

[Joseph Burton]

I wouldn't say, say. I wouldn't say secularists. I would say anti Islam is maybe a big, a big winning point. But a lot of them really do believe in, like, return to being Zoroastrian, which, like, 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. And like when. And like we have like Zoroastrian friends, Parsis. And when you go to them and you're like, hey, did you know your religion is like a huge nationalist symbol in Iran? They're like, what? Like, I have, I have no what. Because, like, even being Zoroastrian, like, you can't convert into the religion, which means it's actually kind of dying out. So they fit in really well with the Islamophobic global right of like the early 2000s. 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.

[Liv]

Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

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. And you know what? I love those parts of what I think Islam is. That's awesome. I agree with it, like very much like the Andrew Tate style. I don't think they have a lot of room for these guys exactly. But they don't have any lack of enthusiasm. 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, there's a lot of slogans that they're using. Like they are the only people in Germany who can get away with chanting we are Aryans. Like, this is our we are. Because one of the official titles of the Shah was the Light of the Aryans. And like, that is a weird European racial theory. But like, the Aryan historical peoples, like, were from Iran. You know, that's there. But like, what's the future? Is it palling around with the Eduard Habsburg guy on Twitter like they're not even that fun. Like, these palavists are not really, really that fun on Twitter. They're very self serious. 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. And I think that this is kind of a nice note for this passage to end on about what Pahlavism was. 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, 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 way 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.

[Liv]

These diaspora monarchists have lately become a salient presence in Republican politics. In March, a dedicated ban descended on the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC in Texas, where they were the only catalysts of any urgency at an otherwise sleepy gathering. Yet Trump's announcement of a temporary ceasefire deal in early April, just 10 days after Pavlavi in his CPAC speech urged the president to stay the course force reflects the limits of the movement's power. 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 with Trump having publicly abandoned regime change as a goal, Pavlovi's supporters, Parsi fears, will just become more and more radical and more cultural in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance of not only their failure but their betrayal of Iran. As he observed, they were dancing and celebrating while Iranian civilians were being killed.

[Joseph Burton]

So where is this going? Pallavis are going to stay mobilized even as their organizations fracture, even as the money goes away. The foundation for Defensive Democracies and nufti, the Pallavist think tank, are not doing so hot right now. And I think that these organizations are going to get hung out to dry structurally. 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. But whatever global MAGA is, and I mean specifically maga, whatever that is, Palavis are part of it now. 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. So what you're going to see, and probably in the comments to this podcast, is like, well, how can you you as a non Iranian Invalidate my lived experience by speaking over POC voices in your arrogant liberal whiteness to talk about Iran. All these trends, Holavism is kind of at the nexus of it, of MAGA clearly running out of steam, but also other alternatives not quite forming peak conspiracism also being there just kind of impregnated into everything and a readiness to take very dark and interpersonally violent directions is there. And I think that might be an elevated risk. 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. And I don't want to put the flashlight under my face, but I think that all the conditions are there and it makes me really concerned for, you know, people in a community that has had like a very hard year. You know, I think any, any, any Iranian or Iranian American American or Iranian Canadian or whoever you know, who has connections to that country has probably had a very stressed out, very frayed time and that night not get better. But I don't think that these people are necessarily going to get better. I don't see a lot of mea culpa and I don't see a lot of lack of cognitive dissonance right now. So I don't know, y' all are the Q experts. How pilled do you rate all this and what do you think the risk is for this kind of moving forward into something grimmer?

[Julian Field]

Well, I mean, it's interesting to ponder what a January 6th moment might be for these people because you know, that's, that's something that felt like kind of the event that sort of like QAnon culminated because like it seemed like a third of the, the people who stormed the Capitol that day were wearing some kind of like Q merch because they really believed so wholeheartedly, I mean like including the woman who was shot killed, that they felt compelled to do obviously dangerous, unproductive activities in order to, you know, and to advance their bizarre fantasies.

[Liv]

Yeah, I do wonder whether this movement will be a liability to like any sort of American far right like non Trump, these ostensibly anti neocon movement too, that the Pavlavists will be like our strategy of like trying to destroy the Islamic republic is contingent upon like Trump style neocon stuff. And, and you guys getting away from it is like ruining the one path forward we still envision for our country.

[Joseph Burton]

I mean that's a really good point. They show up at CPAC and even Trump Trump, I think, got a lot of support by saying, I'm not for new wars. And the fact that he has launched this war, it might sink him. 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. But this has been real bad and it's a liability, especially for the people who came after him. I think JD Vance is going to position himself as like I was against this disastrous war. But the problem is he's also a lot closer to that kind of institutional conservatism and cpac. And as long as these debates are happening, the Pahlavists are going to keep showing up, 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 and remember how gas prices spiked and America got humiliated. That was cool. We love it. And also we're associated with you. 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, on social media, like, is this going to be like. My question 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 mega. Right, yeah. And also how, you know, because the reactions we're seeing is just a couple of weeks after the ceasefire. I mean, what happens? 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. There's been some exchanges of missile fire, but, like, if this does settle down, what's going to happen then? And what are the repercussions going to be inside this movement and inside this community? Especially if Reza Pahlovy has to go, has to actually get up there and be like, I'm not the guy, please let me go photograph birds.

[Julian Field]

Boy. Yeah, I guess we'll find out with everyone else.

[Travis View]

Diaspora for the win.

[Joseph Burton]

It's more and more, and I think that's also a big part of how MAGA is changing. I mean, I don't think in Trump too, you can really make as many aspersions of it being necessarily a white supremacist movement, considering how ethnically diverse it is. And also considering in Trump, two to, I think how many other diaspora groups are going to shoot their shot in the way that the Pahlavists did. You know, it's pretty open. There's Already people talking about like, well, sure, Iran didn't go great, but we could invade Cuba. You know, a lot of Venezuelan right wingers definitely felt like they were shooting their shot. It didn't wind up very well for them either. 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 and America, Erica actually loves me and it's actually gonna work out for me. It's the Tobias Funke talking about open relationships. Like, sure, it never worked for those people, but you know, maybe for us.

[Julian Field]

Yeah. So very strange, but also grim stuff. Joseph, I know you're about to go on social media lockdown to avoid the wrath of the monarchists who are about to go after you, but where can people read more of your work?

[Joseph Burton]

You can read my work on Twitter. I. I usually have a little link tree. It goes to my articles. I got some articles usually coming out every now and then about how things are going. Honestly, most of the stuff that I've written about has been the US immigration system and how that interplays with other things. But you know, with all of this and the sort of state apparatus going after, you know, Iranians is particularly leading to a war. I'm kind of writing more broadly because one thing I would say is like there's going to be the valid question, why couldn't you find an Iranian, Iranian American to talk about this? And the reason is a lot of them are like pretty scared to do so. Like I I am going to go on on social media lockdown. I have some pieces coming out about unrelated things about the history of passport regulation and hopefully some other stuff. But you can find me at Pinstripe Bungle on Twitter and see whatever I'm up to.

[Julian Field]

Okay, we'll include the links in the show notes.

[Travis View]

Thanks for listening to another episode of the QA podcast. If you haven't already, please go to patreon.comqaa and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a second episode for every main one and access to our entire archive. You can also go to cursed media.net if you'd like miniseries, because there we have all of the episodes ready to binge of spectral Voyager 2 timeslip radio, as well as all of the other miniseries that we've made in the past. Joseph, would you like to do the Listener until next week, May the D Dish bless you and keep you.

[Joseph Burton]

Dear Listener, until next week. May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. We have auto keyed content based on your preferences, bruh.

[Podcast Narrator/Commentator]

Somebody threw tomato juice all over Reza Pahlavi. And just like collectively as a society, can we bring back throwing tomatoes at performing reformers, politicians, whoever we don't like? Because this is hilarious to me. And truly, the reporting on this also is equally as funny because. What do you mean? They attacked Reza Pahlavi with tomato juice? Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Iranian prince, was attacked by tomato juice as he left a press conference in which he denounced the US Iran ceasefire. 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. Police immediately seized and detained the person who threw the liquid. It's not sulfuric acid. Okay, you put your spaghetti in that. The article continues by saying that people on social media were questioning, who is this man? Why was he permitted to get so close to Mr. Pahlavi? I'm sorry. The people just want to throw tomatoes. The reporting the of 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. I don't know. Just enjoy this with me for a moment. 2026. We're all throwing tomatoes at politicians.

[Travis View]

Please,

[Joseph Burton]

Sam.