About the Author
I have spent the past two decades working on the Middle East, writing and analyzing Yemen, Iran, and the region’s shifting power dynamics. But the things I studied in critical theory, the slow internalization of coercion, the way ideology normalizes itself through routine, rarely had a place in that work. Here, they do. This space is for tracing the quiet conversion of fear into common sense, and the ordinary language that makes extraordinary violence feel justified.
About the Ideology Machine Project
This isn't the type of writing I imagined writing first, especially when I have been specifically trained to write "punchy and quick posts for an American or an international audience." Editors and policymakers rarely appreciate long-form pieces that go in the weeds into ideology and religious movements. What’s common is headlines that grab attention in foreign policy and geopolitics. Although I spent two decades shaping my writing to fit that model, I believed it served policymakers, but I also think that the public is owed more.
There's a convenience in reducing complex realities to talking points. It makes policy briefings efficient, it makes editorials digestible, and it makes cable news segments smooth. But this efficiency comes at the cost of understanding. It treats entire regions as stage sets for Western policy debates rather than places where people live with the consequences of ideological transformations that rarely fit neatly into op-ed word counts.
The truth is, what preoccupies me is not only the geopolitics, but also how societies are transformed from within, often without resistance, and how what once felt intolerable becomes, over time, normalized.
When I think about the trajectory that led me to create The Ideology Machine, I return to a central observation: the most profound political changes rarely announce themselves. They don't arrive through dramatic proclamations or overnight coups. Instead, they seep into the fabric of daily life, altering the terms of what we consider possible, reasonable, or necessary.
This project began with a simple frustration: the people shaping our world aren’t always the ones with armies. Sometimes, they’re the ones with stories, stories that teach obedience, stoke fear, and erase alternatives. Washington flinches at the word ideology. It prefers chasing missiles to grappling with meaning. But the slogans, the myths, the moral contortions outlast the airstrikes.
The Ideology Machine looks at what’s left behind: warped vocabularies, eroded trust, and the quiet damage that survives every ceasefire.
This is a space for naming that war, the one on thought itself.
What You’ll Find Here
Essays that trace how narratives work, what they hollow out, how they endure, and the quiet ways they shape a future before anyone notices it’s gone. This is for readers and policymakers who want to understand power beyond headlines, who suspect that the most important battles happen in language before they happen on battlefields.
