A columnist for the Iranian state propaganda network PressTV declared in a column Tuesday, the date of the 2020 presidential election, that Americans live in an “oligarchy” and have no power to choose their leaders.
Pundit Daniel Patrick Welch concluded that the only thing on the ballot this week was “who will be dropping the bombs the next time” and that no material policy differences exist between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Writing in strained attempts at American vernacular, Welch called claims that voting in America was an important civic duty “ridiculous” and that the “rational” world understands that America is not a free country.
Iran is an Islamic theocracy that holds elections in which Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei must approve of all candidates. Iran held its last parliamentary elections in February, as the Chinese coronavirus pandemic began spreading there, resulting in both record-low turnouts and skyrocketing coronavirus infection rates.
Welch did not address the status of his employer’s political system in his article, titled “Americans, Desperate for Change, Delude Selves into Thinking Vote Matters.” Instead, the writer used strained attempts at American vernacular to make the point that Tuesday’s election does not matter and Americans are trapped in an authoritarian system where only “warmongers” take the White House.
“Well, we’ll have to see whether that is enough to counter the enormous weight of shaming that went on with the democrats and their foisting Biden on the rest of us. It’s not the most important election in the history of history. It’s ridiculous, and it makes me really angry. When I hear it I just want to shut off the TV, the conversation. Just withdraw because it’s such ado about nothing,” the column read. “Well, we can compromise and say, you know, greatest in the history of mammals, right? The dinosaurs did okay. So we’ll leave them out of it. I don’t know. I can only make jokes about it because I just don’t know how else to react.”
American presidential elections are “when the rest of the world gets to find out who will be dropping the bombs the next time because that’s really what it means to millions of people around the world,” Welch claimed. “Also, be careful, your vote is important. If you vote for the wrong guy U.S. policy could fall into the hands of warmongers. That’s a joke because it’s like a trick question. There is not going to be any of that difference.”
“No matter what people choose they’re deluding themselves. And this always happens. That’s the thing. It’s not a special election,” he argued. “This always happens every four years, people convince themselves that this time it will make a difference. And there’s like a mass hysteria even if the famous Princeton study [no context is provided for what this is] proved that we’re an oligarchy, not a democracy, that people have very, very little power to change the rules that govern them and that power is given mostly or asserted mostly by the elites.”
While condemning American elections using the argument that no material differences exist between Trump and Biden, Welch reserves particular disgust for Trump, calling him “the most perfect distillation of what this country represents that any candidate has ever shown. It’s like he’s a caricature of the American, the Ugly American, except that other presidents have started even more wars and dropped even more bombs.”
He then goes on to predict that Democrats will privatize social security and enact “austerity” in America.
Despite running a column that overtly claims both presidential candidates are the same and implying that Democrats are more conservative than Republicans, PressTV also gave air to the opinion that Biden’s tenure as president would benefit Iran more than Trump’s. Under Trump, America walked out of the Obama-era Iranian nuclear deal, which granted the regime billions of dollars in sanctions regime; imposed even more sanctions in response to Tehran’s sponsorship of terrorism, and eliminated Iran’s most prized terrorist mastermind, Major General Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force. Trump also designated the IRGC, a formal wing of the Iranian military, a terrorist organization.
Biden, a “peace activist” told PressTV, would benefit Iran.
“It seems to me that Biden would be marginally better than Trump for Iran,” a professor identified as Daniel Kovalik told the outlet. “I agree that it largely does not matter who is president in terms of foreign policy. The two parties are pretty much in agreement on foreign policy and its imperial foreign policy. With that said, you know, there’s always some small differences, and given how powerful the US is — small differences can matter.”
“I had a friend who used to say, ‘Dan, the US is like a giant elephant, and if it rolls one way a little bit if you kill 10,000, if it roles the other way maybe it kills less.’ I kind of view it that way,” he added.
In remarks Tuesday, Khamenei, the supreme leader, denied that Iran was rooting for any one particular candidate.
“No matter who wins the U.S. elections, it won’t affect our policy toward the US. Some people talk about what will happen if this or that one is elected. Yes, certain events may happen but they don’t concern us. Our policy is calculated and clear,” Khamenei said. “The U.S. regime suffers from severe political, civil, and moral deviations. This is what their own analysts say. Such a regime won’t last long.”
Federal law enforcement officials announced last month that they identified a scheme by cyber-criminals tied to the Iranian regime sending threatening emails appearing to be from the “Proud Boys,” a male interest collective, meant to embarrass Trump.
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