Trita Parsi

And it took only a couple of hours, but the State Department itself came out and denied this and made clear that they have no plans of doing so.

At least not for now, they said.

At a minimum, the elements that have been constantly trying to silence me have come from that direction.

And it's a lot because of, you know, I wrote my dissertation, which ended up becoming my first book, Treacherous Alliance on Israel and Iran.

And no one had written a book on it for about 20 years prior to me writing that book.

But everyone was constantly talking about it.

I mean, it was on the news all the time.

Should we bomb Iran?

And Iran is an existential threat.

And I try to get to the bottom of the story.

And I did so by actually really spending time in Israel to try to understand their perspective, understand the perspective of the Iranians, and then do it as a dissertation.

but it revealed a very different picture of what they were saying.

And I got a lot of play in media and that really threatened them.

And they started to do everything they could to silence me.

Later on, when we started Quincy, that became an even greater threat because we were trying to build bridges between the anti-war left and the anti-war right.

for such a long- Andy Bacevich was one of the people- Andrew Bacevich, the absolute legend was our first chairman and then one of the co-founders.

He changed before that.

He was against the war from the outset.

Towards the end of the 1990s, he, actually after he left the military, he started to, I mean, I think he's one of the absolute sharpest and deepest American intellectual critics of American foreign policy.

And so the tragic loss of his son happened already after he had completely turned against that foreign policy.