Why Is Iran Now Pushing Right-Wing Fake News?

The Islamic Republic may not be MAGA-curious, but for some reason it is suddenly trying to find an in with conservative extremists. Facebook just took down a half dozen troll accounts posting anti-Trump memes in right-leaning Christian groups, and now there’s a Tehran-linked fake news site that wants you to think it’s recruited a handful of semi-famous right-wing pundits. So how and why is Tehran veering right in its fake news? 

Welcome to Rabbit Hole.

Ayatollahs for Jesus: In a post on Wednesday, Facebook said it had removed a handful of Iran-linked accounts posting on subjects ranging from politics to foreign policy. The accounts were linked to an earlier cluster of “inauthentic activity” from a previous suspension but this time their behavior was a little different. In the last suspension, Facebook took down a handful of accounts that recycled Iranian state news under the guise of original content from local news outlets.This time around, Iran was clearly trying to find friends with a different demographic—and it’s not the far-left types skeptical of U.S. foreign policy who have typically been targeted with Iranian propaganda. 

The accounts Facebook identified spent time hanging out in traditionally more right-leaning Christian groups like “Only Jesus Can Save” and “Jesus Christ Family.” In broken English, the posters appeared to try and stir up criticism of Trump and former National Security Adviser John Bolton with insults like “slave of gold” and questions about “Why some people are disingenuous and doesn't want to tell the truth?”

In a separate post, the cybersecurity firm FireEye announced that it had spotted pro-Iranian fake journalist personas hitting up “well-known U.S. conservatives opposed to U.S. President Trump” on Twitter and asking them for their opinions about the 2020 campaign, Saudi Arabia, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

American Herald Tribune: Nor is the Facebook takedown the only sign of a rightward pitch from Tehran. As CNN first reported, the people behind the fake news site American Herald Tribune tried to fool people into thinking the site was associated with Paul Craig Roberts, a former Republican official turned Holocaust denier. Roberts has spent his twilight years hemorrhaging takes consistent with an old school isolationist fringe conservative conspiracy theorist—pro-Nazi, pro-Russian, anti-intervention, anti-LGBT and other paleoconservative-style positions. Roberts has no affiliation with the site but the fact that AHT’s creators wanted people to believe he did shows the fake news site’s attempts at a right wing origin story.

Nor is he the only anti-Semitic, far-right luminary whose content AHT featured. The site ran a number of articles copied from Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and, like Roberts, a Holocaust-denying anti-Semite. Giraldi, too, presents himself as a disenchanted conservative in search of a less ambitious and interventionist U.S. foreign policy.  

AHT operators also stole content from a more notable standard bearer for Girladi and Roberts’ strains of far-right paleoconservatism, Pat Buchanan. The former Nixon and Reagan administration official is a white nationalist anti-Semite who’s tiptoed around Holocaust denialism and praised Nazi Germany (are we noticing a pattern?). 

Other conservative shoutouts in AHT’s content included a number of articles on hot-button cultural issues. AHT pieces attacked LGBTQ rights group Human Rights Campaign for supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential run; the Iranians’ lead: “Men pretending to be women support a Gorgon pretending to be human for president.” A columnist persona using the name “Becky Akers” also warned that, “Feminism is totalitarianism in disguise” and urged readers: “Let’s abort planned parenthood.”

Playing horseshoes: Scroll through AHT’s site for long enough and you’ll see that while its registration is trying to fool people into believing it was founded by a notable right-wing crank, its content is by no means uniformly right wing. Mixed in with the paleoconservative holocaust deniers are plenty of columns copied and pasted from “anti-imperialist” and left-identifying outlets and pundits. 

To be clear, it’s not that Iranian officials have an inherent fondness for American right wing or left wing politics. The logic of courting both poles is built around horseshoe theory—the belief that the farther you go along the left and right of the political spectrum, the more those groups start to resemble each other. While Iran has traditionally found more friends among the far left media personalities, its state-endorsed anti-Semitism, antipathy for American interventionism, and hostility for the current American political establishment are all themes where it can find common ground with right-wing extremists, too. 

In playing both fringes against the middle, Iran is basically cribbing from the same playbook used by Russia for its 2016 election meddling. The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Vladimir Putin was pulling for Trump during the election and a number of the fake right wing personas operated by Russian military intelligence toed that line. But the GRU-linked troll farms also pretended to be Black Lives Matter-supporting African-Americans and activists from a number of left wing causes in order to sow as much chaos as possible in American political discourse.

It’s not entirely clear whether Iran’s goal in courting right-wing audiences is focused on finding American allies for its foreign policy within the American fringe, stirring up domestic unrest, or somewhere in between but it is a strategy that’s proven successful for its allies. Spreading your propaganda across both poles of the ideological spectrum offers a number of advantages says Kanishk Karan, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s disinformation-tracking Digital Forensic Research Lab.

“It’s a tactic that helps evade the check from the other side of the political spectrum. Carrying an overt operation with targeting on one side of the political spectrum can put it in a spotlight.” Karan told The Daily Beast. “Also, many of these websites don’t have credibility and audience. So the initial part is largely to build audience.”

When Syria’s Assad regime was gassing women and children with barrel bombs and slaughtering civilians by the thousands, pro-Assad propagandists managed to successfully rebrand dictator Bashar al-Assad as a champion among American white nationalists and the alt-right.

Meatspace meetups: Iran’s cultivation of right-wing audiences online is also matched by its courtship of them in person. By now, most disinformation watchers are familiar with Russia’s flirtation with extremist right-wing Texas secessionist groups in the vain but nonetheless amusing hope that the relationship could spur if not outright secession than at least some civil tension. 

Iran made a similar outreach effort in the 1990s, although farther north. Former libertarian activist Joe Vogler formed the Alaskan Independence Party, which advocated the state’s secession from the U.S., in the 1970s and made a series of unsuccessful efforts for governor. As journalist David Talbot reported, in 1993 Iran’s United Nations delegation arranged a speaking slot for him at the United Nations where he was set to denounce the U.S. and call upon the world to support Alaskan independence.  

Vogler never gave the speech—he was the victim of an unrelated murder in 1993 before he could give the speech—but the incident caused a brief stir during the 2008 presidential election when reporters discovered that Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, had joined the Alaskan Independence Party a year after Vogler’s Iran-backed U.N. speech was scheduled. 

Gathering of the Juggalos: Iran’s backing for Alaskan secession was short-lived but the Islamic Republic uses an annual conference to build bridges with American far-left and right types. The annual New Horizons Conference in Iran bills itself as the product of a non-governmental organization for “independent thinkers and artists” to “discuss different aspects of the world as they relate to human ideals on one hand and the untold realities of the globe on the other.”

American counterintelligence authorities beg to differ. In addition to a hefty dose of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, American officials say Iranian spies allegedly used the conference to recruit former Air Force linguist and intelligence officer Monica Witt and have warned other former national security officials not to attend subsequent conferences. 

New Horizons organizers invite conference guests from the far left, often including many self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists.” But the conference also courts those on the right, as well. Phillip Girardi, whose columns were copied and published on American Herald Tribune, has attended past conferences.  

Another conference invitee, Merlin Miller, is a white nationalist and frequent candidate for office representing the American Freedom Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a racist far-right party run with help from a former David Duke acolyte. 

Attribution: OK, but how do we know the site is actually an Iranian-run propaganda site instead of Macedonian teenagers harvesting outrage for clicks or homegrown fringey types who like to copy-paste other people’s work? 

Fortunately, the operators behind AHT were pretty sloppy at covering their tracks.

There are clues the infrastructure used to set up AHT. WhoIs data collected by DomainTools shows that when AHT’s owners first set up the site, its nameserver—which directs clicks to the AHTribune URL to the site’s IP address—was hosted by IRPower, an Iranian company based in Shiraz, Iran. 

In May 2017, AHT was also hosted at the same IP address (88.99.115.178) used to host Balkanspost.com, a fake Balkan News outlet which publishes phony stories about the dissident Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq cult. The Balkanspost site is also widely believed by cybersecurity and disinformation researchers to be an Iranian-run fake news outlet.