In Reply to: Facts about Iranians in US vs Iranians in Iran posted by DSCBruin on March 10, 2026 at 16:49:59
> Asking the Iranian diaspora what should happen to Iran is like asking MAGA transplants from California in Texas who the next CA governor should be.
That's a f@@@ up statement.
Comparing Iranian diaspora to MAGA transplants is lazy and frankly offensive. A better parallel is the Taiwanese who fled mainland China — people who were driven out, not people who left by choice chasing lower taxes.
And the Christians among them? They're in a completely different category from American cultural Christianity. Back in Iran, faith came with a price — surveillance, persecution, the constant shadow of the intelligence services. That kind of belief gets forged, not inherited. It strips away the performative stuff and leaves something genuine.
American Christianity, by contrast, has largely become a cultural identity marker — a signal of ethnic and political belonging more than a theological commitment. Iranian Christian refugees didn't have the luxury of comfortable, consequence-free faith. Their Christianity cost them something real, which tends to produce exactly the kind of devotion the New Testament actually describes.
So no, they're not MAGA. They're survivors of a theocratic regime who understand better than most what it means when religion and state power fuse. That's not a political tribe. That's a testimony.