Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Iranian state media confirmed it. Forty days of mourning have been declared by the Islamic Republic. Somewhere in Tehran, people are setting off fireworks — not in mourning, but in celebration. And here in the fever swamps of social media, Cenk Uygur is typing.
Let me get to Cenk in a moment, because he deserves his own section. But first, a brief accounting of the man the world is now eulogizing or cursing, depending on which side of history you’ve chosen to stand on.
Khamenei took power in 1989 and spent 36 years turning Iran into a theocratic gulag with excellent PR. His fingerprints were on the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut — 241 American servicemen killed by Iranian-backed Hezbollah in a single morning. He spent four decades funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and anyone else willing to murder Jews and Americans as a hobby. He bankrolled rockets aimed at Israeli kindergartens, bombs on Israeli tour buses in Bulgaria, assassination plots from Buenos Aires to Bangkok. He pursued a nuclear program that kept the entire Middle East in low-grade existential dread for twenty years.
On the home front: the 1999 student crackdowns. The stolen 2009 election and the Green Movement suppressed in blood. The 2019 fuel price protests — 1,500 dead in days, the internet shut off so the world couldn’t watch. The 2022 uprising after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was murdered in custody for showing her hair — his forces responded by firing metal pellets into crowds at eye level, blinding protesters by the hundreds. And just this past January, the largest massacre of protesters in modern history: snipers on rooftops aiming at heads and torsos, IRGC units raiding hospitals and executing the wounded in their beds, children shot in Fasa and Azna, women raped in custody, a total internet blackout imposed so the world couldn’t see. He called the dead “rioters and terrorists.”
This is who Cenk Uygur chose today — today, of all days — to praise.
Here’s what Cenk wrote:
“I criticized Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a thousand times. He was oppressing his own people and preventing democracy. But there’s one thing you can’t take away from him, he died on his own two feet, instead of kneeling to Israel. That took courage. He didn’t bow.”
And then, doubling down:
“Two things can be true at the same time. Someone can be a terrible person and they can still choose to die like a man instead of living as a coward groveling to a foreign government. A lot of our leaders have chosen the groveling route. And that’s the thing I can’t stand.”
I responded — and I’ll own this — with something that maybe wasn’t my most eloquent moment: “So you’re praising him for being an unrepentant psychopath? Do you know how completely idiotic you sound right now? Is this like, a manly thing? The most manly thing to do when you’re wrong is to admit it, especially when it spares tens of thousands of lives. #sameshitdifferentday” This was me showing restraint by the way. I tend to get salty at times on X or twitter or whatever.
I stand by it. But let me let others say it better, because the internet today produced some genuinely extraordinary writing.
Gregory Scaduto demolished Cenk’s “he didn’t kneel” narrative with the surgical precision it deserved:
“Khamenei knelt constantly. He just chose his subjects carefully. He knelt to the logic of theocratic survival, which meant hanging teenagers from cranes for the crime of homosexuality. He knelt to the Revolutionary Guard’s economic racket, allowing them to hollow out the Iranian economy until the rial became wallpaper. He knelt to the principle that a woman’s hair is a national security threat.”
And when Mahsa Amini died in custody, Scaduto notes, he knelt again — this time to the impulse that answers grief with birdshot and batons.
Scaduto nails the deeper con Cenk is running, whether he knows it or not:
“What Cenk is actually doing here is reproducing the regime’s own propaganda framework. The Islamic Republic spent forty-seven years telling its people that their suffering was noble because it served resistance. That poverty was dignity. That isolation was sovereignty. That the boot on your neck was actually holding you upright. Cenk has just restated this in English for an American audience, which is ventriloquism.”
This is not a new trick. Every strongman from Stalin to Mao to Saddam “stood tall” against the foreign enemy while forcing his own people to their knees. Khamenei didn’t refuse to bow to Israel out of courage — he needed Israel. The entire architecture of the Islamic Republic required an external Satan to justify internal repression. Remove Israel from Khamenei’s vocabulary and what remains is a frail cleric with no mandate, ruling a country where the median age is 32 and the majority of the population was born after the revolution and never consented to its terms.
And then there was this, from Carlos, who asked us to look at what exactly those “two feet” Cenk praised actually did:
“He stood on them when he ordered ‘crush the protests by any means necessary.’ He stood on them when snipers aimed at the heads of teenagers. He stood on them when the IRGC executed wounded protesters in hospital beds with bullets to the skull. He stood on them when he imposed a total internet blackout. He stood on them over tens of thousands of corpses.”
Carlos asks: what is courage, really?
“Courage is Raha Bohlouli-Pour, a student shot dead near Fatemi Square for wanting to live free. Courage is Masoud Zatparvar, who wrote ‘I stood, whatever the cost’ and was killed by live fire in Rasht. Courage is Taha Safari, sixteen, whose family found his photo among the dead at a police station, his head destroyed.”
Those people stood on their own two feet. They stood against Khamenei.
Cenk looked at the man who ordered their deaths and saw courage because he defied Israel. The dead were not a factor in his moral calculus. As Carlos put it with a precision I wish I had: “There is a word for someone who eulogizes a butcher on the graves of his victims. That word is not journalist.”
Now, in the interest of honesty: I’m not celebrating Khamenei’s death. I don’t think that’s the right posture. The world is a complicated enough place right now that gloating feels both cheap and premature. We don’t know what comes next. The IRGC is still operational. The Assembly of Experts will select a new Supreme Leader. The same apparatus of repression remains in place, waiting to see if it can find a new face to put on the front of the building. A bad regime doesn’t automatically collapse when its figurehead does.
What I am is hopeful. Cautiously, carefully, desperately hopeful — for the Iranian people, who have earned about fifty years of good news and received almost none of it. For the woman who burned her hijab in the street. For the teenager who slipped a protest video to a foreign journalist knowing what might happen to him. For the families of everyone killed in every crackdown going back to 1979.
They deserve freedom. They’ve always deserved freedom. Khamenei spent 36 years making sure they didn’t get it. Tonight, at least, that particular obstacle is gone.
May whatever comes next finally, finally give the fine people of Iran the peace and dignity they’ve been fighting — and dying — for.
Let’s all pray for the innocent people of Iran and a peaceful, prosperous Middle East.
(And Cenk — buddy — maybe sit the next one out.)
