Hello, I'm Michael Watson, joined by Sarah Lee, and this is the Influence Watch podcast.

As we speak, it's February 25th as we record, so commentary on the current situation may be out

of date when you hear this. A naval armada of two fleet carriers and their accompanying surfaceship

escorts sits off the Middle East

as American diplomats pressure the Islamic Republic of Iran to renounce its nuclear ambitions

and its expansionist agenda to dominate the region. Given the brutality of the Iranian regime,

estimates suggest the regime killed at least 6,000 and perhaps as many as 30,000 Iranians

who protested against it earlier

this year, you would think that Americans, even those who oppose armed conflict to depose

the regime, would universally acknowledge the Molocry's evil. But you would be wrong.

Joining us today to discuss those who don't is our colleague Robert Stilson. Robert, welcome back.

Thanks, Mike. So, I mean, I laid it out there. There are people who actually support the

Islamic Republic of Iran that just killed possibly tens of thousands of its own people.

Yes, and to be clear, you know, this is a longstanding ideological viewpoint that a lot of the groups

are going to be talking about have taken.

This hasn't been in response to those massacres, but this is sort of the classic.

I've described them as, you know, the anti-American left.

Those groups, those activist groups, and a lot of them are taxes and nonprofits, but those groups that their entire worldview is premised around the belief

that the United States and or Israel and or the capitalist Democratic West more broadly is

responsible for any given problem in the world, any given manifestation of misery in the world.

And so they've applied this, they apply this to American foreign policy.

And of course, when you have a country like Iran that is often features prominently in an antagonistic sense in American foreign policy, you have

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