People Like Me Instigated America’s War in 2015: A Former Liberal Speaks Out – The

If you wonder how in America we ended up rehashing the — already won — civil rights battles of the 1960s in the year 2023, you can blame people like me.

In the wake of the 2015 Republican primaries, a massive and well-oiled machine consisting of hundreds, if not thousands, of media and social media outlets started to come together to harness an outrage mob of tens of millions of Americans, aiming to make President Donald Trump — and, by default, all Republicans — “toxic.” (READ MORE: The Danger of Importing Leftist Tribalism Into Republican Politics)

Today the ire of that mob has turned inward, and we find ourselves in the midst of something similar to a neo-Marxist cultural revolution — and it started with small groups of Americans like me and some fellow military veterans. Many disparate groups like mine simply didn’t like Trump’s rhetoric and wanted to speak out — then all of us became coopted by darker forces with an agenda.

My Experiences With the Narrative-Driven Media

Starting in 2015, I was growing disillusioned and quite heartbroken by what I viewed, at the time, as a growing sentiment of anti-Muslim rhetoric in the public sphere. As the son of Middle Eastern immigrants, I had a keen sensitivity to the anti-Muslim tropes that I was reading on social media. In one case, after a mass shooting incident, I remember a social media post that intimated that if the perpetrators were Muslim, it was “time for internment camps.”

Around the same time, Donald Trump appeared on the national stage and, rather than affirm the sacred right to religious freedom, casually made statements like: “Islam hates us.” These statements by a candidate for the American presidency infuriated and perplexed me. After all, my family had escaped extremism in Iran to flee to the United States, a nation that they viewed as a sanctuary for the dispossessed and a beacon of freedom for humanity. I felt compelled to speak out against candidate Trump, who I viewed as the loudest voice in this anti-Muslim movement.

I was backed by a vast, eager, and narrative-driven liberal media establishment, and Trump proved to be an easy target for my message. My articles were quickly picked up by national and international outlets, and liberal groups like MoveOn arranged media interviews for me immediately. The core of my message was that our strength as a people is found in the fact that becoming an American is the great equalizer in our society. I tried to communicate that our national unity is not based upon any religion, race, ethnicity, or sexuality, nor any other superficial attribute — none of these things matters one iota in comparison to the individual freedoms granted to us by God and enshrined in our Constitution by our Founding Fathers.

In other words, unlike my family’s home country of Iran, national unity cannot be coerced by way of decree from on high; rather, it is an assent given by a free citizenry dedicated to the proposition of liberty. But the only thing that mattered to the liberal groups with whom I was working was that I continued saying that Donald Trump was anti-Islam. That was the exact inverse of my message — that Trump’s take on Muslims was anti-American.

The Iranian-Style Totalitarianism of the American Left

I was born and raised in America; I grew up loving this nation. As a 1980s kid, I saw President Ronald Reagan as the defender of all that was good and free in the world against the forces of darkness that threatened all that I loved about America. I never felt Iranian and American; I was just an American kid with a cool family backstory.

After a semester of college in 1997, I joined the U.S. military, proudly serving in the U.S. Navy Presidential Honor Guard in Washington, D.C., and later with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Throughout my time in the military, I found that my ethnicity and Persian-Farsi language skills were only ever viewed as assets in my work. Among my peers and superiors, there was a feeling that our racial, religious, and ethnic makeup made us uniquely strong among the other military forces of the world. We all felt that the best of the best, from all walks of life, had come together for one singular cause — to protect and defend the last best hope of mankind’s freedom and liberty around the world. All of this was understood innately and remained unspoken. We certainly did not need a diversity, equity, and inclusion seminar to decree this inherent truth to us. (READ MORE: The Military Is No Joke)

Of course, the U.S. military, like any institution, has folks with preexisting biases against others. But as anyone who has served knows, those biases quickly fade away into the realization that “we’re all in this together,” and the very heart of the American ideal then comes to life, in the highest form of a meritocracy. In totalitarian nations like Iran, no such meritocracy exists. Ascension and success are bestowed upon those with the most zealous ideology — those who embrace the edicts of the state, no matter how vulgar, with the greatest rigor are the ones who are rewarded. The Iranian General Officer corps bows to the ideology of the day.

Does that sound familiar?

The quickest way to drive a dagger right into the heart of our nation’s sacred ideals is to dismantle the notion of individual merit and personal agency. And my heart feels shattered into a thousand pieces every time I think about what was unwittingly unleashed upon this nation beginning in 2015.

The Conspiracy to Tear America Apart

If I were an intelligence operative from China, Russia, or Iran seeking to tear apart the fabric that binds together the American republic, I would study the Maoist Cultural Revolution of 1960s and 1970s. I would find out, as Mao Zedong did, that I need convince only one political side, and an inherently corruptible media, that one group of citizens are evil, deeply bigoted, “old way” thinkers, seeking to oppress progress and the rights of the entire citizenry.

And then large swaths of the American people, convinced of their victimhood and oppression and seeking to right those wrongs, will mobilize to correct those invisible systemic injustices. And when those injustices never appear, the ratings-obsessed media will assure them, on a 24-hour loop, that they do exist.

If I were a foreign intelligence operative seeking to demoralize the American people, I would get to the younger generation by seeping into their trusted educational centers and academic institutions and forcing them to be “good people” and reject the “old ways” and read “complicity statements” about their inherent white privilege and their ancestors’ evil colonialism as an oath prior to beginning their studies.

And fortunately for me, as the foreign intelligence operative, a multi-million-person mob already exists to riot, harass, and digitally tar and feather anyone who dares be on the “wrong side” of this ideological civil war — a culture war that had no basis in reality and that I, the foreign intelligence operative, completely created out of thin air to destroy an otherwise good, optimistic, generous, and proud nation of people.

America’s Path to Freedom

Over the last 15 years, I’ve voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. So it gives me no pleasure to admit that I was wrong, but I’m man enough to own it, for I didn’t step out of my bubble soon enough to see the red flags.

Our great republic has diverted onto a very dangerous path. It is a path that has led to the downfall of other great nations. It’s the path of self-hatred and division.

The so-called tolerant liberal establishment is terrified of true unity — it’s terrified of an empowered citizenry who breaks free of the bonds of victimhood, rejects their hate-industrial complex, and aspires once again to the great heights of merit in human achievement.

My family escaped the darkness of a totalitarian regime to land upon the shores of this shining city of liberty upon a hill. For my part, I will spend however long it takes and do everything in my power to shed daylight onto any emerging evil that threatens the hard-fought, precious freedoms for which so many of our brave citizens rendered the last full measure of devotion.

Now that freedom is entrusted to us. As President Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.” That freedom will not be extinguished on our watch. 

Nate Terani is a military veteran, having served as a member of the elite U.S. Navy Presidential Honor Guard in Washington, D.C., and in HUMINT intelligence operations with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nate’s writing has been published by the Huffington Post, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Nation, TomDispatch, and many others. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the field of clinical psychology.