“He’s a piece of sh*t”: Journalist DESTROYS Iran’s Self-Appointed Crown Prince
Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté
Useful Idiots, LLC
4.5 • 4.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Watch this week's Friday Free-For-All: We Can't Take the Risk of Not Going to War with Iran http://usefulidiotspodcast.com
Join us LIVE on Youtube every Monday at 10am EST for Monday Mourning, where we watch the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to.
We’ve got two interviews for you this week: first up we’re talking about Iran.
Trump is threatening another regime change war in the Middle East, ordering the largest US military deployment since the Iraq War. To get an understanding of what’s happening in Iran, we spoke with independent journalist Bushra Shaikh.
Bushra went viral for a video from a recent trip to Tehran in which she walked through a rally without wearing a hijab. She explains that this is a common occurrence, and that so much of what we hear about Iran in Western media turned out to not be true.
Bushra Shaikh: This picture that’s created in the West is more of a very old-school type of Iran. There is a movement in Iran that is taking shape. And it’s purposely being censored from the West.
I was walking in that rally. It was such an amazing place to be because there were hundreds of thousands of people coming out in support of their government. I was there without a hijab on. And honestly, it was it was just one of those experiences that I thought I would never have. And given the propaganda in the West, I was even confused because when I got there, I was like, ‘Bushra, you’ve been propagandized.’
So having that experience for myself really was an eye-opener.
Useful Idiots: And what do you think is happening on the ground?
Bushra Shaikh: What’s happening on the ground is you have a large community at the moment who are very worried about the prospect of a war, of being illegally attacked in their country.
One of the main concerns that a lot of people spoke about were the sanctions. They told me, ‘We just want to live good lives and we want to prosper and we want to be able to enhance our economy, build good ties with other countries. And these sanctions need to be lifted.’
So most of people’s real concerns were sanctions. It wasn’t changing who’s in charge of their country.
For our second interview, we’re discussing the life and message of civil rights icon Reverend Jesse Jackson, who died this week at the age of 84. He worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He then ran for president in 1984 and 1988, pushing to cut the Pentagon budget while increasing domestic spending on education, housing, and healthcare.
Jackson was also active in international struggles and campaigns, ranging from the anti-apartheid movement to supporting rights for Palestinians. Jesse Jackson also visited Palestine, and of course he was criticized for defending Palestinian rights.
To hear firsthand stories of the Reverend, we spoke with Eric Easter, former press secretary to Jesse Jackson for the National Rainbow Coalition, and Albert Mokhiber, who worked on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1984.
Watch or listen to our full, unpaywalled interview with these great guests. Thanks for supporting independent media. If you’d like to help keep us running, please consider supporting us with a subscription.
If you do, you’ll get our weekly recap, the Friday Free-For-All: We Can’t Take the Risk of Not Going to War with Iran
00:00 Intro
01:25 Jared Kushner's creepy Board of Peace
03:23 The Democrat who's on board with bombing Iran
06:38 Fmr Obama/Biden official BACKS TRUMP in trashing nuclear deal
08:30 Bushra Shaikh interview
09:02 What's Tehran actually like?
10:43 The impact of santions
12:01 Nancy Pelosi wants to inflict pain on ordinary Iranians
14:27 In Tehran without a hijab
29:21 Interview with Jesse Jackson's former comrades
47:43 Listen to this awesome Jesse Jackson speech
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | And Reza Pahlavi is, you know, they actually make jokes about him and his family. |
| 0:05.0 | Some of the people that I interviewed, I mean, I'd like to say this quite openly is, |
| 0:10.3 | I'm not sure if I can say it on your platform, you know, but he is actually a piece of shit. |
| 0:20.1 | Hello and welcome to useful idiots. I'm Katie Helper. |
| 0:23.1 | I'm Erin Mate. Thank you so much for being here. Our website is Useful Idiots Podcast.com. |
| 0:28.1 | Go there to support the show and get bonus content. This week, we'll be bringing you two different |
| 0:32.4 | interviews. We'll be speaking to Boucher Sake. She is an independent journalist based in the UK, |
| 0:50.3 | who was just back from Iran and got to see for herself what it is like there as Trump threatens another regime change war in the Middle East, ordering the largest U.S. military deployment since the Iraq war. |
| 0:56.1 | So we'll hear from Bushra about what it was like on the ground inside teheran and we'll be talking about the late jesse jackson the civil rights leader who passed away uh who revolutionized |
| 1:02.9 | politics in so many ways pick an issue and jesse jackson was at the forefront of fighting for it |
| 1:08.9 | including palestine Before any national, prominent |
| 1:12.1 | politician in the U.S., Jesse Jackson was speaking about Palestinian rights and took a lot of |
| 1:16.6 | heat from that, especially from his own party, the Democratic Party. And for that, we'll be speaking |
| 1:21.0 | to two of his comrades, Albert McIber and Eric Easter. All right. Every week we do a recap of the |
| 1:26.9 | week is called the Friday Free For All. It's for our paid subscribers. But if you're a free subscriber, here's a preview. And what could be matter than a gathering of Trump's so-called Board of Peace in Washington? All the heavy hitters were there, including Tony Blair, the guy who helped George W. Bush destroy Iraq in the Middle East. |
| 1:46.8 | Now he's on the Board of Peace, along with Israel. |
| 1:49.4 | Why not, right? |
| 1:50.7 | So here's Jared Kushner, the guy who doesn't even have an official government position under Trump, but happens to be Trump's son-in-law. |
| 1:57.1 | So he gets to decide the fate of the biggest geopolitical crises in the world, |
| 2:01.0 | from the Russia-Ukraine war to Iran, to Gaza. And he wants you to know that, yes, sure, |
| 2:07.3 | he's a, he's a very wealthy person. He's surrounded by wealthy people. He takes money from |
| 2:12.6 | his private equity firm from governments like Saudi Arabia and Trump's digital currency company takes |
... |
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