“We Need Regime Change” - Elica Le Bon

21:49Francis Foster:Because it's just assault rifles, I like that. Well, can't they target that? No. They're targeting the booths. They're literally, they're targeting the booths where they're doing the checks. I know, but you're not going to take out every single AK-47 in Iran. It's not going to happen. And this is the thing. It's like the IRGC are still going to have guns at the end of the day. Yeah. Well, maybe then it involves arming the protesters. I don't know. Maybe it involves arming the protesters. Maybe it involves more coordinated riots. You know, the funny thing is that this is literally America's speciality.

22:20every time it's done these coups and things like that. Even 1953, that was exactly what they did. They coordinated protesters. They armed them. I actually don't know if they armed them, but they coordinated them. They made it a serious thing. And it was from that tension, that regime change, Mossad, whatever. But they know how to do that. I find it odd that there's no investment in that end of it, which is where the regime change happens. I think it's very odd. There's a part of me that wonders, do you want regime change?

22:51Francis Foster:Well, this is kind of the problem here because as we talked in that conversation that's coming out shortly, we've talked to a lot of people. Some of them work in the administration. Some of them know things, don't want to go into the details how they know them. But there is no plan here. There's no grand strategy here from what we understand. I'm not saying we know. We're not experts in this, but that's what we're being told. There's no great strategy here. This is just like, oh, we did Venezuela, now we can do this. And what you're pointing out is the same thing that we are concerned about, which is it hasn't actually been thought through to that level or pre-planned to that level, which is why you're not seeing the things that were promised or you'd want.

23:35Francis Foster:You see what I'm saying? Yeah. I don't know. I think that I think that this whole thing needs to be revisited, shall we say. But I do think that those are the three steps to regime change. It is, the war is one step, the uprisings, possibly armed uprisings is another, and defection is the other. And I think that those two things, if they're neglected, we're not going to have the regime change. And I think ultimately, this is the time to do it. If there is a window in time, it's now. and so I really don't understand why this isn't being coordinated in that way. It's also political, Elika, in that the Americans have no stomach for regime change, especially after Iraq, especially what happened with Afghanistan.

24:16But those are not the same.

24:18Francis Foster:They're not. They're not the same. This is kind of worse in a way, though, because Iraq wasn't holding the world ransom economically. Iran can and is. True, but the fear that people have over regime change is that, you know, it's gonna be another Iraq, it's gonna be another Afghanistan, it's gonna be another failed state. Well, it's not a failed state. It's like a thousands years old nation state. You're not... What those regime changes did was that they tried to impose an outside government and effectively build a state that didn't exist because those were new countries at the time as well. And so, Iran, you have this really old kind of nation state that is unified behind language, behind a flag, behind culture, behind all of these things.

25:02We don't want a foreign-imposed government. This is not Iraq. We want...

25:08Francis Foster:Well, you do, though. You do want a foreign-imposed government. No, we don't want a foreign-imposed government. Well, if you cause regime change and then replace it with one of your puppets, which is what you want to happen. No, that's not what we want to happen. Okay, maybe I'm... Reza Pahlavi is only a transitional leader. So this has been articulated so many times, I don't know why people don't get this. He's a transitional leader that comes into the country once the regime falls to facilitate moving the country into a democracy where people can vote for their own leader. What if they vote for an Islamist regime?

25:40Well, no one's going to vote for an Islamist regime. How do you not? Because we know the statistics of what people favor.

25:45Francis Foster:Oh, okay. I actually don't. What are the statistics? 90 % of people in Iran are against it. Against the regime? Against the regime. Wait, how do we know that? Because there's studies, like the Gammon study, which is in, I think, the Netherlands conducted, and it speaks to people inside Iran, obviously, anonymously, and they collect data about their public sentiments. And they say that 90%, or is it 85 % or 90%, there's 10 % that support the regime. Still, it's a country of 90 million. It's still a lot. And they have the guns. But your point about 90 % is very powerful. I mean, we've had people on the show, So Ayman Dean, who's a former Al-Qaeda, MI6 double Asian, for example, he gave a very different assessment of it, which was like 25 % of people support the regime, 25 % hate the regime.

26:39Francis Foster:To me, I'll give you a similar example for Russia, which is easy for me to explain. So I am someone who's a fierce critic of the Russian regime in the way that you are a fierce critic of the Iranian regime. But I would not say that I know what percentage of people in Russia are... Because maybe you don't know. Because nobody does. Yeah, but you absolutely can have a fair assessment about the sentiments of a country through extensive polling over time. And for the past 46 decades, repeatedly polls have shown that it's a very high percentage, almost 90 % of Iranians who are against this regime. And I just think it's just like, who would like this regime?

27:21You do have this minority. Of course, you have a minority of extremists, But this is where it's like, you do not know Iranians if you think that that's who the majority of Iranians are. They don't identify that way. They don't identify with Islamic extremism. It's not part of our culture. It's not part of our cultural personality. It's just, it's so obvious to us that when people ask these questions, it's like, we even give you the statistics, right? We even give you the polls. But it's like, people just believe what they want to believe. I don't know what to tell you. It's not a country that's 50 % Islamist radicalist.

27:57It's just not who the Iranian people are.

27:59Francis Foster:Oh, sure. No, no, I'm certainly not saying that. But again, example from my own experience, which sort of makes it easier for me to think about these things, the Soviet Union was deeply unpopular by the time it collapsed. But that doesn't mean that 90 % of people living in the Soviet Union were opposed to the Soviet Union. I think... You know, if you took a poll in the Soviet Union around the time that it actually collapsed and there was regime change, There was still a shit ton of people who supported it. It just became weakened economically and morally and in other ways. But to me, when someone says 90 % of people in a country agree on something, that to me, you may be right.

28:35Francis Foster:I'm not disputing it. I'm just saying to me, that's a bit of an alarm bell because that seems unprecedented. It's not an alarm bell. It's a terrorist regime that everybody hates and has destroyed the country. It's brought it to ruin, to economic collapse. everything about them that they do. They take the money and they give it to proxies. They are so radicalized. They don't take care of the country. They kill people for protesting. The methods of torture are medieval. They hang people. Nobody likes this regime. I'm not saying that 90 % of Iranians agree on other things. Iranians never agree on anything.

29:11It's actually disturbing how much they disagree. But if you want to include the diaspora, 99 % are against the regime, statistically.

29:21Francis Foster:Well, the diaspora are the people who left, right? So that would make sense that they'd be against the regime. So on average, you're talking about about 95 % of Iranians in this world at least agree on being against this regime. I've never even seen this type of overwhelming evidence of people who support the regime. When I go online, I don't see anyone except the bots that support the regime. If they are people who support the regime, they're here in the West. They're Anna Kasparian and Cenkuga. But where are all of these massive, you know, spokespersons for the regime? Well, I mean, look, there may be a lot of people in Iran who actually can't go online because there's been an internet blackout.

30:02Oh, they have internet. The ones who support the regime have internet. Okay. Yeah. And also as well, look, I don't know, but how many people get radicalised at school? They don't get radicalised at school. It just doesn't work. I mean, yes, they do. They have to go to school and they say, death to America, death to Israel. But it just doesn't work because they go home to their parents and their parents say, yeah, just say that, but, you know, we're not like that. You know, they don't go home to radicalized parents. It's just, the culture inside of Iran is very different. It's a culture of tolerating this sort of infrastructure of extremism, but also being outside of it because you have a people who are, what's the word?

30:45familiar, I don't know what the word is, it's like literate in this type of propaganda. And so you build propaganda literacy the more you live under this regime, right? And so it's just, it gets to a point where everybody understands it. Everybody understands the manipulation, the dishonesty, the lies, the danger. Everybody understands it. I'm not saying that there aren't the extremes. Of course there are the extremes. 10 % of 90 million, that's millions, I'm not good at math, but I'm pretty sure that's millions. That's millions of people. So I'm not denying that those millions of people exist.

31:19It's just there's a huge, you know, disparity. And you even saw when some of these uprisings were happening a couple of years ago, they started to throw the turbans off of the Mueller's heads when they were walking down the street. And, you know, that was a little bit controversial, some people said, you know. And other Iranians said, you know, F you. but there is quite a strong divide there. They don't even like seeing them in the streets. Because the concern is, going back to America, so they have said, for instance, on our show, Ted Cruz said that, I think it was by November, if the war had...

31:55By the midterms. By the midterms. If the war was still carrying on by the midterms, they would have failed. Trump said at the very beginning, four weeks maximum. Now, we all know that Trump talks a lot of nonsense. There simply isn't the stomach, Elika, to carry out a prolonged campaign in order to get rid of the regime and the regime's goons and everything that is needed to keep the regime in place, which is my concern. Because what could actually happen is Trump turns around in a week, two weeks, three weeks and goes, you know what, we've degraded their military capacity. We've bombed. He's already said that.

32:33We've got new leaders. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we've destroyed the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Tick, tick, tick. We've secured the Strait of Hamus. It's now up to the Iranian people. Rah, rah, rah, Cuba next. That could very easily happen. I mean, I think that's pretty much happened already. Yeah. He's already said that there's a regime change because everyone there is a new leader.

32:54Francis Foster:Right. So this is kind of our concern. And look, I know we're pushing back on a lot of stuff you're saying. I'm going to sound like our mutual friend who we all admire, Dave Smith here. Like, I really hope what we are saying is wrong. No, I don't. And we are rooting for the Iranian people to be free of the tyranny of the Islamic regime. But we're just really seriously concerned at this point that there is no great plan. And given some of the ways that we, because of the conversations we've had, understand the way this can escalate, we're just very concerned that basically what is likely to happen is Trump is going to pretend that he got this big victory, but actually what he's going to do is cut and run.

33:35Francis Foster:And I don't think the Iranian people are getting better off. I don't think the nuclear material is going to be eliminated. So the one thing you could say is, well, you flattened the missile program. You've destroyed the military industrial complex. You've set them back 10 years, let's say. Some people will take that, I guess. Yeah You probably wouldn't I think what they've said inside Iran Repeatedly is that the worst case scenario Is that the war ends And the regime remains in power Would have been better that there was no war at all Because after that, that's when they do Their most brutal crackdowns That's when they start killing everybody And saying you were a Zionist, you were a Zionist You were a Zionist People who are just filming outside of their windows Whatever So that's actually worst case scenario If they stop this war But, you know, you can't deny how much public sentiment has shifted the direction of the war as well, because it's considered generally a very unpopular war.

34:35And I think that, and this is why I think this is largely because of this backdrop of what the conversations that have been had in the Middle East over the past three years, especially the very, very, very, very, very anti-Israel view of things, which has sort of driven this conversation towards, okay, yeah, some people are extreme and they're going to say, oh, the regime are the good guys. But some people, the more like Dave Smiths of the world, are going to say, well, these people are not really bothering us. You know, these people haven't done anything wrong. They're just a regular government, just like my government and your government.

35:08And isn't America a terrorist government too? And that sort of really manipulates public perception in a way that people are not willing to get on board with a war that they just fundamentally don't think has any purpose or benefit to them, maybe not even in the long run, right? I genuinely do not think that the public, the American public, think that the Islamic regime is a threat. But because it probably isn't a threat to them, really, if you look about it, if you look at it and you analyze it objectively. Now, it's far more of a threat to the UK. It's obviously a much greater threat to the Middle East and the stability of the Middle East.

35:46But to the average America living in Kansas City, why is Iran threatening them? It's a threat if the regime succeeds in its ambition. It's a threat, right?

35:56Francis Foster:So what is it? Well, its ambition is death to America, death to Israel. And right now its task is to remove Israel. But that's kind of like my toddler saying death to daddy. It's not. Right. But there's action. There's not just intent. So what is the threat that they pose to America? Yes. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. So the first stage is to remove Israel because these are the two oppressors, right? The oppressors of the West and the oppressors of the Middle East. So they've put in action all of the stages necessary to remove Israel. They created a second IRGC called Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is closest border to Israel.

36:34Have been attacking Israel nonstop ever since. Of course, Hamas, same thing, Houthis. And all of this is part of the campaign to remove Israel. Now, Israel is relying on the United States for aid to defeat these proxy groups, which another thing that people are like, why should we have to pay money to Israel? Because they don't understand that Israel is the one that is holding down the forts against these forces. Because let's say if those forces did win, let's say the United States pulls out its funding. Let's say that they don't consider them allies anymore and Israel falls and the Islamic regime wins.

37:05Now the Islamic regime has exported its revolution out into the Middle East. Now you have the Islamic Republic of Lebanon, which already is a state within a state. It's just ready to go one way or the other. You have the Islamic Republic of Lebanon. You have the Islamic Republic of Palestine. You have the Islamic Republic of Yemen, the Islamic Republic of Syria, God knows where. And now you have these combined forces, right, with combined military technology, all of these things. You don't think at that point they're going to go for the second thing that they stated in their charter, which was, next, we're going death to America.

37:36You don't think that's going to happen. So, but then you could say, well, I just don't think that's ever going to happen because Israel will always be there and we're always going to support them. The public sentiment in this nation is that there should be no support for Israel, that Israel is the biggest terrorist state in the world. All of this stuff is just like a complete inversion. It's just total moral inversion of the situation. If you want to keep funding Israel for the rest of your life, then maybe the regime will never threaten you, sure. We get asked this all the time. Which VPN do you use at Trigonometry?

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39:31It's completely risk-free, so check it out today. But the one thing that I would say is that when we're talking about Iran, their death to America, Iran would have to be monumentally stupid. They would have to be monumentally stupid in order to do a 9-11 type terrorist attack, for example, because that would mean their entire country gets obliterated. That's why they go round the side door. they didn't do October 7th they went round the side door yeah but October 7th was done to Israel

40:04Francis Foster:right in the same way that like the Taliban didn't do 9-11 but they let Al-Qaeda train and do other things but then it was the Taliban that had the shit kicked out of them for like 20 years and now the Islamic regime is having the shit kicked out of them so it's not gonna be you know so direct but you move indirectly you say oh as Dave Smith said they had no idea about October 7th. Yeah, I don't think that's true. No. But I still don't know that if I were an American, I'd be sitting here quivering in my boots at the threat of Iran. I mean, some of the things that were said about this, you know, Iran is an imminent threat.

40:47Francis Foster:I mean, come on. Really? Imminent? I don't think it is, right? If it has a nuclear weapon, it's imminent. To whom? To anyone. Why? If as a nuclear weapon, you don't think it's an imminent threat? To America, no. No, it could do whatever it wants with it. Okay. But is North Korea an imminent threat to the United States? No. I don't know. North Korea got nuclear weapons so that they could just be left alone to have their dictatorship and peace, effectively, right? That's what they did. And this is the thing is like, I, you know, I remember I was very curious and interested in the arguments you made last time you won the show when you talked about the type of Islam that the Islamic regime practices in Iran and the fact that there's the Mahdi coming back and all of this eschatological stuff, which obviously that exists, right?

41:38Francis Foster:But from Iran's perspective, the much more rational reason to get nuclear weapons is to be a regional hegemon or at least to protect itself from what it perceives as the threat. But that's exactly the problem, isn't it? Because then you cannot control their behavior going forward because they're a deterrent state. Once you get nuclear weapons, they're a deterrent state. So yeah, you can march straight into Lebanon. Who's going to stop you? You can march straight into Gaza. You can go do whatever you want with Israel. Who's going to stop you? That's the whole problem. Well, Israel has nuclear weapons.

42:11Francis Foster:So who's going to stop you is Israel. So what, are we going to have a nuclear war? No. Well, historically speaking, nuclear weapons appear to actually create peace. Stalemate. Yeah. Yeah. This is not me advocating for us to let the Iranians get nuclear weapons. My concern is, if I'm being honest, as I understand the situation on the ground is, like, other than negotiations, which I don't think are going to work long term either, but they might work short term, there's actually no way of stopping the regime from getting nuclear weapons short of successful regime change and boots on the ground. That's why we need a regime change.

42:47And that's why everything else, no matter how long you go down the rabbit hole, is just kicking the can down the road. It just makes no sense. We want to get into this situation where both the regime and Israel have nuclear weapons, but the regime, this is the difference of what's in whose charter, right? In their charter, it's that they must eliminate Israel. So whether that escalates into a nuclear war actually becomes deterrent because they both have nuclear weapons, or they just keep... I mean, where does this end? And isn't the US always going to be implicated in that war when it comes to the regime and Israel?

43:21So I just... This is just dragging the October 7th nightmare on and on and on and on and on. I just think that none of this is going to make any sense unless there is a regime change. The problem is, is I don't think there is going to be a regime change simply because the Americans don't want it. I think the Israelis do want it.

43:40Francis Foster:I don't know that Americans don't want it. I just don't think they're doing, as you say, they're doing the things to achieve it. Yeah, so therefore you don't want it. If you're not prepared to do the things to achieve it, then you don't want it. If he wanted to, he would. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I don't get that reference, but it makes sense. You don't get that reference? No. Oh, you didn't get it either. Yeah, I got it. What's the reference? It's like with men. Like when they don't call you or whatever, you say, if he wanted to, he would. I've been married for far too long to understand that.

44:07Yeah, so the Americans affect, don't want it. You look at the Israelis, the Israelis do want it. But the problem is they can't. The Iranian people definitely want it. Absolutely. But the Israelis can't do it without the Americans because the Americans are the senior partner. And also, the more Israel goes down this path, the more it loses support in the United States. You already see that there is a massive chasm between the way people of the ages 40 and over view Israel and the way people 40 and under Because of all of this radicalization, which I genuinely have serious concerns about where this ends.

44:43You know, like, this is such, you know, it's such... It's such Soviet disinformation, all of it. It's like this whole idea that, you know, the West is the source of all evil, and Israel and the US reflect that greatest evil, and this, like, sort of perception hijack over time, right? And I think especially after October 7th, it has been most, most deeply entrenched. Such that you can, you literally look at all of these situations and the way that they see it is the total opposite to the reality. And the fact is that the more that there are these wars, the more they see the bad guys as the good guys, right?

45:24Because they're constantly circling back to the same conclusion, which is that Israel is the source of all evil in the world. And to, you know, to make that true, to make that conclusion true, Everybody else has to be good. Everything that Israel is fighting has to be good or misunderstood or just reacting to Western imperialism, right? That's always the story. All of these people are always just reacting to Western imperialism. For 1 ,400 years, they were reacting to Western imperialism, right? Zero agency. So what I fear happens over time is that the more they're able to rewrite and invert these stories through war, because it's always happening through war.

46:04it happened through the Gaza war, it's happening through the Iran war, the more they're radicalizing people towards this really staunchly anti-Israel, like deranged anti-Israel perspective. And that, oddly enough, is starting to really hurt the Iranian people because of how much they need to make the Islamic regime faultless by extension. So now you're seeing like, for example, they hanged three men, a young wrestler, right? And you see these people, leftists, taking to the internet saying, he murdered an IRGC officer, here's the video, and it's like some black grainy shadow that doesn't show anything.

46:50And they're literally just regurgitating state propaganda, and it's like, look at what you're doing. You are romanticizing a terrorist regime just because of your hatred for Israel. Because if this really was a terrorist regime and you had to accept that, then you would have to also accept that Israel being at war with it might be justified. And you can't in any circumstance make Israel justified. So to make Israel never justified, the regime can never do any wrong. And so now this is directly affecting us and now our morale, because we're experiencing this where we're seeing thousands and thousands of people being killed.

47:27and you see people going on Piers Morgan saying, we think that Ayatollah was a very courageous man because at least he didn't capitulate to the Israelis. It's like, what planet are you on? Who says that? It's like saying Hitler was a very courageous man. And so this is such a time of extreme distortion and moral inversion. And I think my fear at the same time is like, you have a physical war, you have a narrative war, but where does this narrative war go? Where does that end?

47:56Francis Foster:Well, this is part of Francis and I's concern about all of this, because I think you described it very well, what's happening. And I think there's been a huge amount of propaganda and brainwashing and whatever. And also, though, I think we also have to be honest. And we've talked to lots of people off camera and on camera on this trip. A lot of people who are not anti-Israel and who are not anti-Semitic and all the things that people like to say whenever anyone has a critique of Israel's foreign policy. Can we get some more water? Yeah, please. That was so sweet, the way you were like. Nothing there.

48:28Francis Foster:There seems to be no water in this cup. No, that's apparently how you're supposed to make... I didn't even think of it, but that's how you're supposed to make men do things to you. Oh, totally. You just identify properly. A hundred percent. You just go, oh, something's missing here. There's no water in my cup. Yeah. And you did it. Yeah, it's beautiful. I like the fact that you pretend you didn't know what you were doing. She didn't pretend. She described exactly what she's doing. I'm like, I'm just so innocent. Oh my God, no water. We will cut this bit out, I think. I think it's good. Oh, shall we keep it in?

48:59Francis Foster:Yeah. All right, cool. Well, she just manipulated me to get her some water. Yeah. Anyway, I guess the thing that I'm concerned about is I think there's also a lot of people who are not anti-Israel, who are not anti-Semitic, but who see that Israel and actually Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well, they have, as all countries do, their own agenda. And the agendas of those countries do not fully align with the agenda, as they would perceive it, of the United States. For the reason that we tried to talk about earlier, which is there are different levels of threat that are presented to those countries versus America.

49:37Francis Foster:And because of that, and this is where a lot of people have like a brain spasm, where I agree with you, the propaganda begins to take effect, because they go, Israel has tricked America. And it's like, how? how? What is the mechanism? And they start to make all this shit up about the super powerful Israel lobby, which I don't think that's remotely true. I don't think President Trump can be tricked into stuff like this. What he can be tricked by is his own ego or his own political ambitions. These things might be very well possible. But I guess what I'm saying is there are more and more people now in America who feel that Israel has its own agenda that's different from America's and they want their government to be pursuing the interests of the American people.

50:22That's fair.

50:22Francis Foster:Which is totally fair and totally reasonable. And my worry is as well that one of the other things that starts to happen is whenever anyone expresses that point of view, there are far too many people online who instantly start calling them names and start saying they're anti-Israel, anti-Semitic. I mean, we get all the names. Everyone gets the names. Everyone gets the names. There's no option where you don't get the names anymore. Sure, that's true. But if you want to radicalize normies against a particular view, just start calling them names for expressing a view. You see what I'm saying? Yeah.

50:55I mean, I haven't personally seen that. I haven't personally, because those people, in my opinion, don't speak up too much. I haven't seen people, I haven't seen really, I've seen some videos where someone's like, where, I think I saw this video of a woman that she was like, this is not our war, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was actually got loads of likes. Every time I've seen people say stuff like that, it's like very much like all the comments are like, you're so right, this is so amazing. I've never seen somebody get backlash for saying that.

51:21Francis Foster:I mean, there is a lot of people now who are in favor of this war, calling anyone who disagrees with it. You know, I mean, you've seen the, you know, the micropenis discourse on Twitter. I actually have not seen the micropenis discourse. It's one of the intellectual discussions of our time. The Mark Levin's of the world are going after the Megyn Kelly's of the world. And it's all just devolved to like literally micro penis. She's got a micro penis. She's a massive. I mean, I just like this is I find it incredibly sad that actually this is where the level of the discussion has got to. And it's body shaming.

52:01Francis Foster:I think you can shame someone with a micro penis. I'm still on board with that. I'm old school. You can what? You can shame someone for having... Oh, you can? Yeah, I think so. But how would you know? I mean, that's a good question. How does Megyn Kelly know Mark Levin has a micropenis? Yeah, the shame has to be at least accurate. Yeah, that's fair. Otherwise, it won't live in the body. And so what have you really achieved? That's a fair point. You might have MPE, micropenis energy. All right. Well, I'm glad this episode has taken this turn. This is great stuff. No, but I think that... I think this is all...

52:35This is all, you know, sometimes when I just look at the internet, and I try not to these days because it's so bad and it's getting worse, especially there's so many bots on X now. And I don't know if they've just targeted my account. I think it's the regime that's specifically targeting my account. Because every time I post, it's just like so many comments that are just like, you fucking bitch, all this, that. And it's always like zero followers, zero posts, zero. Oh, and I'm sure you heard about the whole beheading thing.

53:06Francis Foster:The beheading thing? The beheading thing. No. You guys didn't hear about that? No. No. So, Goldie and I, do you know Goldie? Goldie Kamari. Oh, right. Okay. We got an email from this hacker group saying that they'd commissioned a Mexican cartel to behead us for$250 ,000. So, um, I obviously went to the FBI and, uh, they opened the investigation. DOJ determined that it came from the Ministry of Intelligence in Iran. Wow. Yeah. So, and that was, and just get this, because it gets worse. After I had been on a, on an episode of Piers Morgan, right? and Anna Kasparian had taken a clip of me and Goldie laughing at Cenk because he was going, Israel's to blame for 9-11, Israel's to blame for Iraq, Israel.

54:03Like, it was just funny. Like, we were laughing. And then she manipulates the clip and takes our laughter and says essentially that we were laughing at war and she calls us laughing hyenas. So the Ministry of Intelligence in its email that it was going to behead me used Anna Kasparian's thing and said we were laughing like hyenas at war, just quoted her word for word. And it's like, is this? Oh, and then they have her in their Telegram group chats. So that Fast News, which is one of the state's media, they have her, they're promoting her, doing her like anti-Israel stuff within their group chats.

54:39And it's like, and they've also, you know, they've had Cenk Uygur on their Irib, which is their broadcasting channel. And of course, Tucker Carlson.

54:48Francis Foster:The gray man himself. And it's like, is there not a point where people are going to see, like, how on God's green earth, these are people that are going out there saying, like, oh, we're pro-American. You are literally being used by the enemy of the United States. They agree with your talking points. They follow you and fangirl over you. And the FBI is concerned about me against you. Do you know what I mean? Like, you're not pro-America. You've gone so far the other way. And it's this moral inversion that terrifies me, because where does that go, right? And I just, I don't think that people understand, like, I don't know why, but I keep thinking about Nazi Germany, because I get it now.

55:35because I get that during that period of time, the buildup, no matter what you said to these people, they would have been like, what are you talking about? This isn't extreme. This person is just saying their opinion and that opinion is true. Like there would have been no way to get through to people the more and more people were radicalized until something like that happened. And I just, it kind of just puts me like paralyzed in a way because I'm like, what do we do about this growing extremism, which isn't extremism anymore because it is the sentiment of a lot of the country now.

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58:04Francis Foster:Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. Well, the worry is you say you're worried about where it ends, right? I'm going to tell you where it ends. And we're already seeing it now, which is a growing rise of radical extremism and terrorist attacks. That's where it's, that's where we're seeing it. We've been here a matter of weeks. We saw a terrorist attack in Austin. We saw a happily supported terrorist attack on a synagogue in Michigan, which could have been horrific, a truck loaded with explosives. We saw a nail bomb attack happen in New York. And the more this war carries on, the more people get radicalized, the more Iran starts to fund terrorism abroad, which I'm sure it will do at certain points, the more we're going to see this.

58:48But this is exactly what the regime has been planning all along. The regime is planning all along to subvert the Western left. And now it's happened. No, I don't know. I don't know how it happened to the Western right, who would just, we're pro-America, apparently not. I don't know how you get Tucker Carlson and the Islamic regime. I genuinely don't.

59:05Francis Foster:I wrote a whole article about it. Oh, you did? I didn't want to make you sneeze again. I heard that inhalation. I heard that inhalation. I wrote a whole article about a long time ago, Tucker Carlson and the woke right. And I kind of lay out what I think is going on. And I mean, that point that you make, Alec, is actually really important. And I totally agree with it, which is, I think there is an honest critique of this war, for example, to be made. Of course. And we've made it today. I mean, it's war. But there's a difference between that and where people are getting to now, where Tucker Carlson is literally on camera saying, oh, you know, Sharia law has made all these Arab countries brilliant.

59:43Francis Foster:And you're going, what the fuck are you talking about? Literally, what the fuck are you talking about? But you know what's so funny about even when I saw that? He starts and he's like, yeah, our problem here is self-hate. We hate the West. It's like, you're so close. But you are the one that's doing it. Which is actually the point that I actually wrote in my article, which is a lot of people on the... Well, not a lot. Some people on the right have become so disillusioned with where the West was going, particularly during the woke period. They started to almost hate the West, but in a different way.

1:00:17Francis Foster:So the left hates the West for its ideals, whereas this section of the right hates the West for failing to live up to its ideals. And they kind of became radicalized this way. But you would think that, and the funny thing is, the reason that conversation came up is, all the evidence shows that the American right considers radical Islam to be the number one problem. Not anymore. Well, the bulk of it still does. But some of these people who've taken trips to various parts of the Middle East, they are now trying to make that not the argument. And by the way, as three people who come from Britain, I mean, we can tell you how this is going to go.

1:00:57Francis Foster:Yeah, absolutely. Very well. Absolutely. And for someone like Tucker, who keeps slagging off Britain for mistakes that it's made, to be fair, in terms of immigration policy and other things, to then not see that that is going to also happen in America, I just, I don't get it. I think, yeah, there's so many moving parts here. I think, you know, we have the part of, like, you know, the Soviet ideological subversion where it sort of comes into the US in the 60s and 70s and starts to sort of radicalize people towards this Marxist slant. And unfortunately, there was that fusing of the social justice movement at the time, right?

1:01:31The civil rights movement, which was obviously a legitimate movement. But once it becomes fused with Marxism, it's kind of like inextricably intertwined. And so that's why we have this Marxist foundation in modern social justice, which is inherently anti-Western. It is anti-West, anti-imperialism, because this is the root of all evil. Well, imagine if they saw what the Soviets did, right? Imagine if they knew what communism did, then they would know that there's a very different route of evil. And then I think another thing which is like really showing up for me right now, that sounded so therapy.

1:02:06Another thing that's showing up for me right now? But is I keep thinking about Rene Girard's scapegoat theory. I don't know if you know it.

1:02:16Francis Foster:Tell everybody. Okay, so, and mixed in, I sort of have this hybrid model with Carl Jung's shadow. But essentially, René Girard talked about something called mimetic rivalry, where two people, two sides would rival each other because they want the same thing. And the wanting of that same thing is what assigns value to it. Like, two kids wanting the same toy. Oh, if you want it, I want it. So this kind of mimetic rivalry is something that exists, you know, maybe between political sides, like the left and the right, the east and the west, whatever. Um, so what he talks about, when he talks about scapegoat theory, he basically explains that these two sides that are rivaling each other, let's say the left and the right in the United States, they eventually reach a point where there's imminent violence.

1:03:04It's like there's nothing that can happen here, except one of us has to kill the other. In that moment, uh, what will happen is that they'll find a scapegoat, and they will project all of their social problems onto this scapegoat, and they will eliminate that scapegoat, and then feel or believe that all of their problems have been resolved. Obviously, this has happened numerous times, and René Girard actually created this theory because of the Jews, like the Jews being the convenient scapegoat throughout history, throughout Nazi Germany, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, then there's this other side of it So that's kind of like a macro kind of look at it.

1:03:48But I think there's another side of it that it's the same thing that's happening on an internal level. So when you think about these people who are so, so like these Candace Owens, Anarchasparians, these people that it's like their life and soul to destroy Israel, it's very clear that there's something in them, some type of wound, some type of trauma, some type of pain that they are projecting outward to avoid confronting that whatever is in that shadow, right? And by eliminating that thing, you feel like you've eliminated that shadow within you, right? So that's also Carl Jung's theory, and it matches perfectly with Rene Gerard's theory.

1:04:26And what I feel like we're seeing is people who have some degree of like really deep interpersonal problems, and they are now doing this whole scapegoat theory. But the difference is now, instead of saying Jews, they say Israel. And you can really feel, you see it in these people's eyes. They genuinely believe that they will finally get peace, or the world will finally have peace once Israel is abolished. And you know that it's a fallacy, because you know all of the things that are around Israel that they continue to ignore. You know that they continue to ignore this terrorist regime in Iran. ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, oh, they're not that bad.

1:05:05And, you know, they continue to ignore the worst of it. And that in itself is kind of like an admission that what they're doing with Israel is some form of scapegoatism, which is both political, in my opinion, and personal. They also feel that essentially Israel activates all of these different countries. And if you took Israel out of it, everything would calm down. It would be like turning just the hob off. And all of a sudden, the Middle East would stop being this boiling pot of resentment and anger. Yeah, if you killed all the Jews. Yeah, well, yeah, Israel didn't exist. Well, they wouldn't even say that.

1:05:38They would just go, oh, we need to change what Israel is. And you actually drill down on what they mean by that. They can't explain it. But basically what they want is for the state no longer to exist. And then once it does, it's utopian thinking. We're going to reach this nirvana, which is obviously nonsense. Yeah, well, it's the idea that once the state stops existing, they will be absolved, right? They will be absolved of all of that white guilt of Western imperialism, like the original sin, right? It's like Israel is the original sin of Western imperialism, colonialism, and all of the things that they've ascribed to it, which also came from the Soviets, mind you.

1:06:19And it's this sort of spiritual renewal that they want to experience through it, which is just such a sort of leftist, privileged, luxury belief, you know? It's like, I'm going to have spiritual renewal by dismantling the state of 9 million people, including Arabs and Muslims. Well, Israel is the perfect, it fits very, very well into the woke theory of everything.

1:06:47Francis Foster:That's a good book title. The woke theory of everything. But if you think about it, what is the core of the woke ideology? The idea is that everything is best understood through oppressor and oppressed groups. There is a group that is oppressing everybody. There's a group that's oppressed. Within original Marxism, that was about class and economics. Obviously, they updated it to race and ethnicity. So you've got these white people, the Israelis, they're white, Yeah. Oppressing the brown people who are also clearly oppressed because they're losing. Because that's how you know who's oppressed. Right.

1:07:29Francis Foster:And I've always said this is like, it's the teacher in the playground mentality where she hears some screaming. She turns up. There's a kid hitting the other kid. That must be the kid that's the bad kid. Right. Whatever happened before that, nobody pays any attention to. And so Israel. I don't think teachers are allowed to hit. No, no, the kids are hitting each other. I glitched in the middle of that. I thought I was explaining myself very well. Apparently not. What I mean is... You were. It was my fault. Your fault. Okay, I will go with that. So it fits very well with this mentality. And Israel is therefore the perfect vehicle for expressing what is ultimately the anti-Westernism.

1:08:12Francis Foster:That's what this is really about. Because they just see Israel as like the... A colonial outpost. Yeah, and so the people who live here in LA who've got that no one is illegal on stolen land sign, they don't leave their house, but they can say Israel should leave its house. Right, because the spiritual renewal has to come from afar. Yeah, of course, because you don't want to leave your nice house. Yeah, and I think, you know, and how far the moral inversion goes is that, you know, you say, well, there would be peace in the Middle East if it wasn't for Israel, you know, activating all of these groups.

1:08:43that it's never, the responsibility is never on the other end. Like, can these groups stop trying to kill Israel and then everyone will be safe and free? Because, no, but they would say, and I know because I've heard it and I've had the conversations with them, they would say that this is an uprising because they're oppressed. October the 7th was an uprising. That's how they would see it. No, but the other countries. What are you going to say about Lebanon? What are you going to say about Heskola? They're fighting Calola. It's an uprising. That's what it is. Well, then why can't we go to war with Iran then?

1:09:14Because we're fighting a colonial... No, because...

1:09:16Francis Foster:They're not colonists. They're brown. Yeah. They can't be. They can't be. It's not possible. Well, but that's... You laugh. That is how they think. Yeah, I know that's how they think. It's still funny. Because when they look at the Middle East, they don't know that it wasn't all Muslim before. Yeah, no, they don't understand that. So they don't understand that Muslims colonized all of that land. We were Zoroastrians. So we were colonized by Islamism. Right. Yeah. So why can't we say that this war is fighting a colonial empire? Because the Ayatollah is brown. That's literally what it is. He's Jewish.

1:09:51He's actually Jewish.

1:09:52Francis Foster:Is he? No, but we should say that. They'd say, well, he deserves to get bombed. That's quite a conspiracy. That's why I say we should say he's Jewish. I think he might have a few... Or white. I think he might have a few issues. I think we could make ourselves white. I think we could make an argument for that. And it's also, there's, there's the, America is the evil empire. As a result of them being the evil empire, everybody else is oppressed. Nothing, like, just like nothing about it ever makes sense. You talk about the, you talk about Hezbollah, you talk about the Houthis, you talk about the regime.

1:10:25You're like, yeah, they're fighting oppression, but they are committing more oppression than anybody else.

1:10:30Francis Foster:Yeah, but they're, they're doing it for good, Alec. They're doing oppression in their own lands for good? Yes. Yeah, because to suppress the Mossad agents. Because they're brown. Yeah. And oppressed by evil Israel. It's good we're agreeing, finally. Yeah, finally. All of the debate is over. I think the logic is airtight. It's airtight logic. They win. I think we have to go forward as leftists because we clearly see that that is the superior world view. Well, I'm fine. I'm gay and trans. We've done it. I don't think we'd be accepted. What do you mean? I self-identify as a woman. You self-identify as a woman?

1:11:09Francis Foster:Yes, I think it's a good note to end the episode on. Elika, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Don't say it right. Ideological subversion. Should I say more? Yes. Oh, okay. I thought that was the end of the episode. So manipulative again. Do you notice that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Should I say more? She knows what she's doing as well. Of course she does. You said the end of the episode. I thought it was like, boom, and then no. You've watched our episodes. Come on, Aleka. Tell us more. Okay. I think that what people aren't talking about enough, or what people aren't seeing enough of, is the way that bad-faith actors use periods of vulnerability, such as war, to try and turn the public in their favor using tactics of ideological subversion and propaganda and how that, you know, radicalizes people, even people far, far away, people in the West, people in the United States.

1:12:11And that radicalization changes the nature, the fabrics of the society that we live in. And ultimately what happens is that this sort of, you know, becomes like a Trojan horse of humanity, where you keep saying that you keep siding with these people who have subverted you, right? You keep saying these are the good guys or these are the people that we need to have some understanding for. And then that sort of, you know, you usher in authoritarianism into our societies through this Trojan horse of humanity. And so now, authoritarianism, terrorism, all of those things start to become normalized when we see these terrorist attacks.

1:12:48We're like, well, I mean, this poor guy was probably like really just upset over something that happened. So we really have to have more understanding for it. And so our tolerant societies are now being lost to intolerance because of that normalization of authoritarianism, which is coming from this ideological subversion that these bad faith actors are doing to the Western world.

1:13:10Francis Foster:Nelika, thank you so much. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where she's going to answer your questions. The focus of Iranian female suffering is often on the birth of the the car. But what does life for an Iranian woman actually look like beyond that, that we do not or fail to understand?