Iran’s Parliament Speaker was preparing for the funeral of his country’s supreme leader. So why was he posting about American food stamps? That is the central question of this week’s podcast recorded on the ground at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. There are three segments: a breakdown of why the Iran ceasefire fell apart (spoiler: it’s theological, not just tactical), a full conversation with Justin Robert Young of Politics Politics Politics, and a behind-the-scenes look at where Watchtower Intel stands a few months in.
There’s a moment in my conversation with Justin where he pointed out how much Iranian information operations on social media have evolved. The day before the funeral ceremonies began, when the Islamic world would watch state television coverage of the burial of the Ayatollah, whose office places him as the vicegerent of God on earth, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was on X, trolling the American food stamp program.
Not the martyred Imam.
Not the “Great Satan.”
SNAP benefits.
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It was a direct shot at President Trump, who had made comments about Iran’s economic struggles and floated the idea of eventually supplying Iran with American food commodities. Ghalibaf’s response: “Imagine having forty-something million of your own citizens on food stamps and calling another nation hungry.”
Justin’s read on the broader pattern: “I go to people like you, and I go to people like Ryan McBeth, and I look for Iranian sources, and I’m like — how much of this is them glomming on to things? In the way that the Russians understood on Facebook. Let’s find these wedge issues and let’s blow them up. Or are these being fed? Are these little things that are then being blown up by these outside forces?”
Justin is asking the right question. Effective influence operations do not always invent falsehoods. Often, they take something real, strip away its context, and amplify it until it becomes tribal ammunition. While I can’t peer into the man’s soul, I think it’s safe to say Ghalibaf probably doesn’t care about American poverty. He's tweeting about SNAP because he knows which wounds to pour salt into.
In short, is the SNAP issue reflective of a genuine crisis or simply tribal politics exploited in the information space? It’s the kind of question central to Justin’s work.
I’ve been a longtime listener of Politics Politics Politics, and Justin’s approach is deceptively simple: politics, at its core, is about who pushes the button in the voting booth. Not the culture war du jour. The mechanics. Who votes, and why they vote.
Balls and strikes.
His political awakening, he told me, came after the 2000 election. He grew up in South Florida during the time of the hanging chad controversy and the Clinton scandals.
But Bill Clinton, while many things… was the proverbial political duck. Despite the scandals and impeachment, he maintained high job approval ratings during his second term, presiding over a booming economy and demonstrating the unflappable charm of a web-footed water bird unfazed by the controversies rolling off its feathery dorsal.
“Everybody’s got opinions, but the thing that really moves, that stirs the drink, is tactics, strategy, execution, follow-through. And to me, that’s objective.”
Objective is the operative word in Justin’s framework. And I want to spend a minute on it because I think it’s the most misunderstood thing about what he and the rare political animals like him do.
People assume political journalists are objective when they treat both sides equally. That’s not objectivity; that’s symmetry. Justin’s version is something closer to what an intelligence analyst tries to do: identify what is actually happening, in terms of measurable outcomes and key indicators, and resist the gravitational pull toward the particular answer he wants.
He told me his reason for avoiding partisanship is explicitly selfish: “I don’t want to be wrong. And I know that the way that I would be wrong is if I was rooting for somebody.”
It’s a rare discipline in political media.
That discipline matters more now than ever. Justin put it plainly:
“Every penny that is spent in politics is meant to radicalize you as much as you can be radicalized. That is the name of the game — because you want the most surefire voter you can have, and that means the most foaming-at-the-mouth radicalized person. There’s no doubt they’re going to vote. They’re going to vote and bring friends.”
This is the architecture of modern politics, not just the content but the fundraising model and the engagement algorithm; all of it is biased towards intensity. The most useful voter to a campaign is an unquestioning true believer. So that’s what the system produces.
Justin’s other observation was grim: we don’t really have anywhere else to go. America, he argued, runs on two entertainment destinations: football and politics. Everything else — movies, art, music — is diminished. “There’s not a lot of release valve aside from football.” So people who might have spent their passion writing a 4,000-word forum post about Lord of the Rings are writing a 400-word Facebook screed about *insert hated political figure here instead. The same psychological energy, the same tribal intensity, is redirected into politics.
I’ve spent a lot of my professional life studying how influence works, how adversaries (and algorithms) shape what people believe is true. The broad term is information warfare. But the manipulation tactics are similar to what Justin describes: find the person’s identity, their tribe, their fear, their grievance… and then pull. The lever is the same whether you’re a foreign intelligence service running a social media operation or a super PAC running a targeted ad.
That’s what made the Ghalibaf SNAP comments so clarifying. God’s funeral is a geopolitical event. SNAP benefits are a domestic wedge. The operational goal is to increase the fractures in American civil society, to flood the zone with information that increases mutual distrust, that confirms existing grievances, that keeps people embedded in the partisan ecosystem rather than stepping outside it to… touch grass, as the kids say.
In this week’s episode you’ll hear:
The real reason the Iran ceasefire keeps falling apart — and why it’s as much a theological crisis as a military one. (This builds on the piece I already published on Substack last week, so if you’ve read that, you’ll have the context. If not, the episode stands on its own.)
The full conversation with Justin Robert Young — his origin story and his read on where political media is going next.
And finally — a behind-the-scenes look at where Watchtower Intel stands a few months in.
Also here’s a fun picture of Justin and me from Dragon Con like 12 years ago:
[Podcast also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.]
MTFBWY
-Riley
The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of War.
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