Much of the global press is engaged in broad speculation over how Iran will respond to the United States’ recent bombing of its nuclear facilities. Coverage includes warnings about potential domestic fallout and calls for heightened vigilance against possible retaliation by Iranian “sleeper cells” already within the U.S.

This overlooks, however, that mainstream partisan political interests are effectively counting on an Iranian response—and, for them, the more politically destabilizing it is domestically, the better. Such a response supports the real “regime change” they seek: the overthrow of their conservative opponents, and above all, President Trump, who embodies everything they oppose. The more a war weakens his administration, fractures Trump’s coalition, splinters his party, or shakes the confidence of his financial backers, the more it advances their long-standing effort to ideologically undermine the United States.

The “base camp” of Iranian sympathy and encouragement is, in many ways, on our university campuses. Students and faculty have already formed political opposition and protests, and their beliefs have been further fueled by President Trump’s financial challenges to higher education, which, at its core, is a challenge to their collective obedience and loyalty to the government’s economic dependence and control over higher education. With this is an entire academic political culture of social progressivism that has permeated universities and many of its intellectual frameworks.

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In many ways, the Iranian regime serves as an ideological proxy for progressive-left political thought—a worldview deeply hostile to capitalism, and especially to capitalists themselves. A theocratic, authoritarian Iran—opposed to Judeo-Christian beliefs, backed by secular communist China, and allied with actors capable of defying the United States and diminishing its global influence—represents precisely the kind of political axis favored by Western intellectual elites committed to “dismantling” American power and dominance. Indeed, the university is a source of active political destabilization through lawfare theories, top-down, state-centered public policy, and scientific and medical authoritarianism, which target social and biological divisions. University political science is generally aligned with the consolidation of political parties and demographic changes resulting from illegal immigration and social welfare.

Iran isn’t going to back down, and their biggest fans are cheering them on within our universities, reinforced by faculty hostile to the current adminstration, almost exclusively loyal to the DNC, and firmly centered in an anti-Americanism that stems from class resentment, wealth redistribution and reparation ideology, which serves their commitment to American “remaking.”

Iran and its allies symbolize, and to some extent, are thought to instrumentalize their ideological solidarity in that political revolution.

Cover by Jared Gould using image of “Columbia Encampment Day After NYPD Raid” by Pamela Drew on Flickr & “Flag of Iran in map” by Haideer23 on Wikimedia Commons