Fake Leftists in the Age of Neoliberal Academia

Introduction If you follow Iran and Iran-related affairs you may have had the misfortune to encounter the name Arash Azizi. Even if you haven't, in all likelihood you will one day soon - he's quite the attention seeker and prone to pontification. He has an ill-informed and poorly constructed opinion on nearly everything and he's more than happy to share and plaster them all over the internet. Azizi is currently a second year PhD student at New York University and a 'journalist' working with the news site Iran Wire and the London-based television channel Iran International . The first is funded by the United States' Department of State, while the second, according to a recent report in The Guardian , is funded directly by the office of Mohammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, who by almost all accounts ordered the brutal dismemberment of Washington Post journalist and Saudi defector, Jamal Khashoggi. The Guardian 's Saeed Kamali Dehghan has