What you have to understand is that the United States started a war, almost immediately lost it, then began the laborious process of negotiating against itself, and is now settling into the secondary denial phase …

This is madness

Tehran, earlier today. Oh I miss those snow covered mountains so much. I cannot wait to walk your sidewalks and hug your trees.

while @jamellebouie.net isn’t wrong to note that this sounds like warmed over David Duke ca 1990, it is also very much vintage Peter Thiel circa 1988. these arguments were circulating in the debate over Stanford’s western culture program, a debate Thiel lost. he’s been bent on vengeance ever since.

Julian Casablancas just referenced the Iran Lego videos during a break in The Strokes #Coachella set! What the hell is going on?!

Important article on reasons for Iran’s resilience www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/b...

This is a great illustration of @larryglickman.bsky.social's point about how "backlash" framing lets the right play the victim.

bodied

Take a moment to remember how weird it is our president communicates with us through a bottom-tier social media site called Truth Social. It’s like if he governed from the comment section of a porn site.

dummymandering to the rescue!

The Final Big Mac 🏆

With 87% of the votes counted Tisza has 138 seats, 3 seats over a two-thirds majority. Fidesz has 54.

Lesson from the lit on competitive authoritarianism: Turnout matters, for winning the vote *and* securing the win. Participation won’t prevent authorities from trying to steal but it guarantees that the regime will pay dearly if they try. Voters have skin in the game! (See Iran 2009, Serbia 2000).

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Lessons from Iranian textbooks, before and after 1979, are as good a guide as any to understanding how this war has played out, from a cultural and sociological perspective. A 🧵

Lessons from Iranian textbooks, before and after 1979, are as good a guide as any to understanding how this war has played out, from a cultural and sociological perspective. A 🧵

My latest, an elegy for this misbegotten war, a study of the enduring Iranian commitment to self-defense and self-reliance. Here I draw upon my archival research on Iran's post revolutionary textbooks. 1/8 The Stories They Carried fpif.org/the-stories-...

"With this president, facts & fiction fold into one another until they become indistinguishable, disappearing into a singularity of bullshit...With each day comes a new performance, an improvisation produced by & for a world class fabulist, who is both narrator of & audience for his own mendacity."

“But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest”

My latest, an elegy for this misbegotten war, a study of the enduring Iranian commitment to self-defense and self-reliance. Here I draw upon my archival research on Iran's post revolutionary textbooks. 1/8 The Stories They Carried fpif.org/the-stories-...

My latest, an elegy for this misbegotten war, a study of how textbook stories reflect and shape the enduring Iranian commitment to self-defense and self-reliance. "The Stories They Carried" fpif.org/the-stories-...

My latest, an elegy for this misbegotten war, a study of how textbook stories reflect and shape the enduring Iranian commitment to self-defense and self-reliance. "The Stories They Carried" fpif.org/the-stories-...

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“Democrats should not withdraw this growing demand for Trump’s removal” bc 1) “Trump chickening out does not obligate the rest of us to unsee what we all saw.” 2) “it’s correct to insist on a debate over Trump’s fitness for office in light of everything that’s happened in the past month.”

With the NYT story again raising the issue of Israel/Netanyahu’s influence on Trump and its role in the decision to go to war, I’ll go back to where I started. The war is unimaginable without Netanyahu’s campaign to convince Trump, but Trump wanted this war and ignored warnings about its risks.

Democratic or otherwise, whatever system replaces the current nezam will be laser-focused on Iran’s survival. And there is very little reason for Israel or the U.S. to think that a reconstituted Iran will become more conciliatory toward either country once the war ends.

Teaching in the age of Dear Leader, who manages to turn agitprop into prophecy. Today in seminar we're discussing Khomeini's "Governance of the Jurist," the series of lectures he delivered in Najaf, Iraq in 1970 and that became the basis for the IRI. One of many such sections👇🏾

“World’s largest supporter of state terrorism” except they didn’t Pearl Harbor this war nor have they bombed 500 schools, 300 hospitals, and 20 major universities to “the stone age”

The patriotic defense of Iran isn’t a passing phase produced under the duress of bombs, but the default position, the big idea that holds Iran together, hardened over 200 years of history & the trauma of the loss of territory and dignity to outside powers, the 🇷🇺, the 🇬🇧, the 🇺🇸

Azadi Square, Tehran, Iran. Photo taken by me on June 15, 2009 at the height of the Green Movement Protests.

Disgraceful! The US/Israel just bombed Sharif University in Tehran. This is not only Iran's best university, but also a top 100 global university in the field of Civil Engineering. It has also been a center of student opposition to the Iranian gov And Trump just bombed it...

He is risen

What else can be said of where we are, where this is heading?

Two of the latest polls, from previously quite accurate pollsters, show a Tisza lead of ~20pp in Hungary. But can the opposition really win? Why is Orban on the backfoot? And what happens after April 12? 🇭🇺Hungary elections thread 🧵

Bombing last night in northern Tehran, just next to the neughbourhood I grew up in. The place they are bombing (Darband) is where we went to hang out on Summer evenings. There are 2-3 medieval castles there.

My talk at Princeton University on reasons for Iran’s resilience and root causes of the war youtu.be/YW75VV3JsH8?...

60 students and 5 faculty members have so far been killed in USraeli attacks on Iranian universities, as Aljazeera reports: www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/...

I had other things I wanted to do today but someone had to do it: A paragraph-by-paragraph takedown of why basically everything in this op-ed is wrong. Kind of shocking how rudimentary the Editorial Board's errors are here (starting with using "messy" to refer to hundreds of thousands of deaths)

Azadi Square, Tehran, Iran. Photo taken by me on June 15, 2009 at the height of the Green Movement Protests.

Not the first to say this but further evidence that we're governed by a "man" stuck in the 80s

In Trump's interview w/NYT in January, he raised his fears that his VZ invasion would end up like Eagle Claw three times. That visceral fear may be why he is hiding this weekend. emptywheel.net/2026/03/09/t...

The patriotic defense of Iran isn’t a passing phase produced under the duress of bombs, but the default position, the big idea that holds Iran together, hardened over 200 years of history & the trauma of the loss of territory and dignity to outside powers, the 🇷🇺, the 🇬🇧, the 🇺🇸

People don’t wanna put two and two together with what he did to usaid and him putting up those maps of global birthrates and saying white people are being replaced

Today was the first working day of the year in Iran after the Norouz holidays. USraeili terrorists waited until the workers at the petrochemical company in Mahshahr came back to work from their holidays so to kill the most people in those strikes.

Today, in my class, students looked at theories of legal change and authoritarianism (Neumann’s party/state behemoth; fraenkel’s dual state, and Scheppele’s autocratic legalism) and applied them to current events. and while we were all engaged and learned much, we’re all gonna have nightmares.

For 2 1/2 years countless dead & decapitated Palestinian babies appeared *daily* across my social media feeds. I let those children down. I did not do enough for Palestine, whose suffering is bottomless, & whose decades of oppression anticipated the present evil. A 1yr old, Tehran, March 28, 2026.

“I oppose the Iranian government not its people” Americans might want to consider how the crimes of the past month are going to play among a populace that has historically been the *most* pro-American in the Middle East

Viva la raza

A beautiful, heartfelt piece by my friend, and a true friend of Iran, @laurasecor.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...