Liberals and so-called “leftists” denouncing Iran are useful idiots for the US empire.

Liberals tut-tut the mullah’s for their intolerance and accuse Iran of being a “theocratic fascist regime” while the US surrounds Iran with bases, and funds, arms and trains groups like MEK, who carry out terrorist attacks and act as agent provocateurs during demonstrations. Meanwhile liberal and progressive media are talking endlessly about the terrible regime violence against those peaceful protesters, based on extremely suspect sources.

The corporate media propaganda machine plays a big part in enflaming liberal passions, along with the many CIA-backed NGOs that help to stir the outrage and foment more violence. One of these groups is Human Rights Activists In Iran, frequently referred to as HRA or HRAI in the media. The group, and its media arm, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) have become the go-to group of experts for Western media, and are the source of many of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their assertions have provided much of the basis for stories in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others. And in a passionate plea for leftists to support the protests, Owen Jones wrote in The Guardian Tuesday that HRAI are a “respected” group whose death toll proclamations are “probably significant underestimates.”

Probably.

Part of the CIA’s mission was to create a worldwide network of media outlets and NGOs that would parrot CIA talking points, passing it off as credible news. As former CIA task-force leader John Stockwell admitted, “I had propagandists all over the world.” Stockwell went on to describe how he helped flood the world with fake news demonizing Cuba: “We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”

Then there’s the NED. The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, after a series of scandals had seriously damaged the image and reputation of the CIA. The Church Committee – a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into CIA activities – found that the agency had masterminded the assassination of several foreign heads of state, was involved in a massive domestic surveillance campaign against progressive groups, had infiltrated and placed agents in hundreds of U.S. media outlets, and was carrying out shocking mind control experiments on unwilling American participants.

The NED was created as a way to outsource many of the agency’s most controversial activities, especially overseas regime change operations. Basically it was a CIA cut-out used to advance regime change abroad. Presently the NED is spearheading a myriad of operations targeting the Islamic Republic. This is how they describe their regime-change operation. “Fostering collaboration between Iranian civil society and political activists on a democratic vision and raise awareness on civic rights within the legal community, the organization will facilitate debate on transition models from authoritarianism to democracy.”

Yes, yes. More of that sweet democracy.

Iran, of course, has been in American crosshairs ever since the removal of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Pahlavi himself had been kept in place by the CIA, who engineered a coup against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh (1952-53). Mossadegh, a secular liberal reformer, had angered Washington by nationalizing the country’s oil industry, carrying out land reform, and refusing to crush the communist Tudeh Party.

And if you think all of the regime-change mischief carried out by the NED is only supported by the Trump Administration and their Republican minions, then you need to get out more. Recently, U.S. representative Eli Crane introduced a provision into the recent spending package that would cut funding for the NED. In response to the amendment to defund NED every House Democrat, including progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Ilhan Omar, voted against it, along with 81 Republicans, slapping down the amendment 291 to 127.

None of this should be surprising. US foreign policies of regime-change are a thoroughly bi-partisan endeavor and liberal outrage over perceived tyrannical regimes is major reason why. What’s notable is that liberal outrage is selective, only focusing on the states that have successfully resisted being absorbed into the US empire, like Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Notice the way in which the liberal outrage died down after countries like Syria, and Venezuela were absorbed into the imperial blob.

There’s quite a history of liberal dupes for empire. Remember Afghanistan, with the evil theocratic Taliban and liberal concern for woman’s rights? Or Iraq, where liberals cheered on the illegal invasion to topple a savage dictator? Let’s not forget Syria and liberal outrage over the murderous Assad. And no list would be complete without commenting on the hysteria that liberals felt towards Putin’s crackdown on Pussy Riot and Russia’s “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine. There are still blue and yellow flags flying in my liberal neighborhood.

What’s also notable is that identity politics (Id-Pol) drives the liberal outrage. Domestically Id-Pol corrodes worker solidarity and supplants class-politics, while abroad Id-Pol is wielded by US empire managers to create and sustain support for the endless US “liberal interventions.” American propaganda is quite sophisticated and the appeal to liberals involves “human rights”, “gay-rights”, woman’s-rights, etc. rather than the USA–Fuck Yeah, pitch to conservatives. The New York Times, puts on a master-class daily.

Those states have successfully resisted being brought into the US empire maintain strong governments that don’t hesitate to exert control to by attacking and destroying the US regime-change ops and infiltrations which would otherwise have overthrown them. This doesn’t mean these governments are pure as driven snow or bastions of democracy, it just means they have a competent government and social cohesion, the qualities that enable a state to resist the US empire’s coups, color revolutions and psy-ops.

That liberals are outraged over the foreign governments that the US wants to overthrow, while ignoring the most tyrannical regime on earth–the US empire–demonstrates the power of our all-American propaganda. No other country has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression around the world, attacking civilian populations with deadly starvation sanctions, staging coups, aiding and abetting Israel’s Gaza genocide while garrisoning the planet with hundreds of military bases. Only the American empire is doing that.

Once again, Trump makes it all obvious. It took a mobster for us to see the mob rule we’ve always lived by.

Update: “After sponsoring the genocide of Gaza, welcoming the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro, cheering the bombing of Iran, backing murderous assaults on Beirut and Iraq and applauding the assassination of Yemen’s government, liberal leaders across the west have discovered international law just in time for the US invasion of Greenland.”