So they tried to deport me…

The Free Press reported that the State Department was preparing to deport me. But it appears the hit piece was designed to trigger a deportation.

I have fought the neocons and warmongers in Washington for more than 25 years. Throughout, they have tried to silence, discredit, slander, and cancel me. Only recently, however, have they tried to deport me.

At least, that appears to have been the aim of a hit piece in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which claimed that Marco Rubio’s State Department was “investigating” me for allegedly seeking to “undermine the U.S.”—presumably because of my opposition to war with Iran. Yet just hours later, the State Department issued a statement to reporters clarifying that “the State Department has no plans to revoke the green card of Mr. Parsi at this time.” Nor did it provide any confirmation for the central premise of the Free Press story—that an investigation of me existed in the first place.

So here’s what I think happened.

I don’t believe there was any investigation against me. Rather, some elements within the State Department wanted to start one and thought external pressure could help move things forward. I say “additional” because for weeks, pro-Israel social media influencers had been urging the U.S. government to deport me, while some activists—or intelligence operators—even produced an AI-generated video of me being arrested by ICE. Full disclosure: I found the video quite amusing.

At the end of the video, a smiling, clearly satisfied Marco Rubio appears, suggesting that the intended audience was the Secretary himself—the decision-maker in cases like this.

That Jay Solomon and The Free Press would play this role, wittingly or unwittingly, should surprise no one. Solomon was fired from The Wall Street Journal in 2017 over his financial involvement in arms deals with a businessman who was also one of his key sources.

But the effort to trigger an investigation appears to have backfired. In part, that was due to the broad and organic backlash against deporting me—and against the very idea that people should be deported for exercising free speech.

I was deeply moved by the outpouring of support. It was truly heartening, and I am profoundly grateful.

From John Mearsheimer and Danny Davis reacting to it on air:

To a special video Peter Beinart recorded:

To Ana Kasparian’s monologue on The Young Turks:

To Kate Halper’s tweet and that of many, many others.

But something else was happening as well: pushback from within the Trump administration itself. At the Quincy Institute, we heard from sources inside the administration that there never was an investigation, that none of the principals were aware of the issue, and that the alleged source for the Free Press story may have been a “rogue actor.” That, presumably, is why the State Department took the highly unusual step of publicly refuting Solomon’s report.

This does not mean the matter is settled. Pro-Israel activists and their Iranian monarchist allies will continue trying to subject me to the ultimate form of cancellation—short of eliminating me altogether, of course—and their allies inside the U.S. government will no doubt continue to coordinate with them.

But at least this round appears to have backfired.

It does, however, reveal a larger pattern. As I noted earlier, the neoconservative war machine in Washington has spent years trying to silence and discredit me because I challenged its agenda. My first book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, revealed how Israel and Iran were close allies under the Shah and how, even after the Islamic Revolution in the 1980s, Israeli leaders and their neocon allies in Washington continued to advocate rapprochement with Tehran. At the time, they viewed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the greater threat and hoped the strategic partnership they had enjoyed with the Shah could eventually be restored under the Ayatollahs.

And yet many of the same neocon voices—Michael Ledeen among them—that later urged the George W. Bush administration to confront and even bomb Iran on the grounds that Tehran was an “irrational” and “suicidal” actor had previously advocated closer ties with the Islamic Republic because doing so served Israel’s strategic interests. The notion that Iran was uniquely irrational and beyond deterrence only emerged in the 1990s, as geopolitical shifts transformed Israel and Iran from tacit partners into regional rivals.

Based on extensive interviews with Israeli and Iranian officials, my book punched a major hole in the Israeli and neocon narrative in Washington. That narrative held that Iran’s opposition to Israel was driven by immutable ideological hatred and that, because Tehran was irrational and suicidal, neither diplomacy nor deterrence could work. If those premises were true, then only preventive military action could solve America’s—and Israel’s—Iran problem.

Since these forces can’t win an argument - or a war for that matter - they opted to silence and discredit me. They falsely accused me of lobbying for the Iranian government and acting as its agent in Washington. They sought to make both me and the grassroots organization I led at the time—the National Iranian American Council—politically toxic so they would never have to engage with our arguments in the first place.

Indeed, if you want to launch a war of choice, you must strip reality of its nuances and reduce it to a simple tale of good versus evil. Consider George W. Bush’s infantile justification for invading Iraq: “They hate us for our freedom.” Those who add context, complexity, and nuance become obstacles because they undermine the effort to sell the American people a dangerously simplistic narrative.

Years later, I had the honor of co-founding the Quincy Institute alongside Andrew Bacevich, Eli Clifton, Stephen Wertheim, and Suzanne DiMaggio. Our goal was to shift America’s grand strategy away from Liberal Hegemony and toward Restraint. From the outset, we understood that this would be impossible unless we built support for Restraint on both the Left and the Right.

While cooperation between the anti-war Left and Right had occurred before, it was usually episodic and short-lived. We sought to create an institution that would make such cooperation systematic and enduring. So we embarked on the difficult work of building bridges across ideological divides on foreign policy.

The uniparty war machine correctly saw this as a threat. The Free Press hit piece betrays its frustration that my colleagues and I at the Quincy Institute have been able to reach audiences across the political spectrum. On a given day, I might speak out against war with Iran on Democracy Now! in the morning and deliver the same analysis on Steve Bannon’s War Room just a few hours later.

It was bad enough, from the warmongers’ perspective, that I had retained a platform on the Left despite years of efforts to cancel me. But Quincy’s success in reaching MAGA and America First audiences represented an intolerable threat—and, I suspect, a key reason they sought to escalate their cancellation campaign into a deportation operation.

We will, of course, continue making the case against war and the grand strategy that has produced endless wars. And the warmongers will continue trying to avoid that debate by silencing us.

They do so because they understand something important: their greatest vulnerability is not our influence, but the weakness of their arguments. If they believed they could persuade the American people, they would welcome debate. If they believed their record spoke for itself, they would not need smear campaigns, blacklists, or deportation fantasies.

They would simply make their case.

Instead, after decades of failed wars, trillions of dollars squandered, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and America’s global standing diminished, they increasingly rely on intimidation rather than persuasion. They will continue to attack me, my colleagues, and others who challenge their thirst for war. And who knows, they may even succeed in deporting me.

But good luck deporting an idea whose time has come.

The era of endless war is ending, and no amount of censorship, cancellation, or political intimidation will stop the growing demand for a foreign policy rooted in restraint, diplomacy, and common sense.