In a Middle East Forum (MEF)/American Jewish University (AJU) September 30 podcast (video), AJU’s Rick Richman moderated a discussion on the impact of Middle Eastern actors, particularly Islamist groups and sovereign states, on American political processes and elections.
Guest speakers: Ryan Mauro, investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, focusing on extremist groups and threats from foreign entities; and Michael Pregent, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.
The following summarizes their comments:
Ryan Mauro:
There is now a Red-Green-Blue alliance in the U.S. that is adding to the existing damage currently being done by the Red-Green alliance, which is an affiliation of Socialists and Marxists (Red) aligned with Islamists (Green) to foment chaos across American university campuses. Joining forces with the Red and Green are the globalists [Blue — the color of the UN], who are funded by foreign actors such as Iran, Russia, China, and Qatar. The Red-Green-Blue alliance is aiming to influence America’s presidential election. While the Red-Green alliance activates students as its “useful fools” who are largely ignorant of the issues they align with, America’s adversaries enlist the Blue instigators and organizers to “neutralize the United States in terms of interfering” in the interests of the aforementioned foreign actors.
A 2024 U.S. State Department report explains the “political influence operations and election influence operations” tactics used. Foreign adversaries use social media to “inflame” issues related to their interests and “flood social media with either false information or even true information to divert conversations away from a certain topic” unfavorable to their interests. The objective of the foreign-funded network is to benefit the theocrats and autocrats of the world by undermining the appeal of Western-style democracy, thereby destroying opposition to their hold on power.
The Iranian regime “is paying influencers within Iran in order to amplify their narrative out to the world.” China is going further by “sponsoring influencers around the world to amplify their narratives.” Beijing is also connected to pro-Hamas groups in the U.S. “operating through different fronts.”
The objective of the foreign-funded network is to benefit the theocrats and autocrats of the world by undermining the appeal of Western-style democracy.
Domestically, pro-Hamas activist groups on U.S. college campuses, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), are unambiguous in supporting the terror group by claiming to be “part of the resistance” — Hamas’s term to justify its October 7 massacre. In addition to the campus chaos, SJP instigates fights with the police, which make their activities “no longer about free speech.” An upcoming Capital Research Center report will outline why groups like SJP “qualify as terrorist groups.”
Extremist groups in the U.S., consisting of Marxists, communists, anarchist elements among the left, Islamist extremists, globalists, and even white supremacists comprise a “seditionist movement” whose objective is to “be able to control enough to swing an election.” Although these groups by and large “hate each other,” they will nonetheless join forces against a target they agree on, namely undermining the established system of governance in the West.
A current example is their effort to “torpedo the Democratic party’s chances in the election by encouraging everyone to stay home.” They calculate that by exerting enough influence, the seditionist movement can “seize the U.S. political process” and prove its control over the Democratic party. Their message to the party is that, to win elections, the Democrats will have to cede power to the group that influences voters “in places like Minnesota and Michigan.”
They have understood that “you don’t have to have majority support to control elections in America. You just have to be able to control enough to swing an election.” The long-term damage beyond the election is to “increase apathy” and tribalism among the electorate until the population loses faith in their government and the system. The overall objective is to unleash “so much disinformation/misinformation out there that basically it becomes impossible to have a civil dialogue, to have an intellectual form of the democratic process. And so, you basically kill it by making it so dysfunctional and so difficult for people to know what is true and what is false, that you then gain the ability to direct political trends within the United States.”
Michael Pregent:
The Iranian regime “does not want a second Trump administration” because the reinstatement of the Trump “maximum pressure campaign” will “cripple Iran’s economy.” Currently, “we’re in a permissive environment ahead of a U.S. election where adversaries are going to get all they can” prior to November 5.
Post-October 7, “if we wanted to end a war that started on October 7, we should have done it on October 8. Instead, Hamas knew that they would have support in U.S. academia, U.S. political system, and in these activist groups here in the United States.”
Administration officials and representatives, such as Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, have an “affinity” for Tehran.
Administration officials and representatives, such as Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, have an “affinity” for Tehran. On October 8, they said “Iran was not involved,” despite the fact that Hamas, the perpetrator of the October 7 massacre, is an Iranian proxy. There were “no repercussions” when Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria launched hundreds of attacks on U.S. forces. “Wherever they [Biden-Harris administration] were focused on not losing the Arab vote, we’re likely going to see they’ve lost the moderate independent vote.”
Unfortunately, the post-October 7 period has revealed “a sympathetic position when it comes to terrorism” among America’s naïve and ignorant youth in search of a cause, which pro-Hamas organizations easily manipulated. America’s adversaries are conducting a “war of information” by exploiting Twitter and TikTok to influence low-information social-media followers. The mainstream media does little to expose the nature of foreign influences’ corrosive effect on the body politic. “All the American public ever wanted was curiosity by the press instead of a narrative uniform shutdown of any questions about anything.”
The polarization and infighting leave the U.S. distracted and vulnerable. “The more we are confused and disorganized and going after each other based on tweets or TikTok or whatever these politicians are saying in ads, the more likely it is that we suffer the consequences of that” from foreign adversaries.
The best defense against the corrosive effects of political influence operations in the U.S. via social media is to “find a balance.” Find who your trusted sources are arguing with and realize that “somewhere in between is the truth.”
