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The Iranians Didn’t Select a Dead Guy as Supreme Leader, Did They? | The American Spectator

March 9, 2026

I’ll caution the reader that what comes below isn’t fully serious. It’s about 71.7 percent serious.

Maybe a little more. Or less.

But I’ll start with this…

Not even SNL could come up with something as insane as this.

Mojtaba Khamenei was sworn-in as the new Supreme Dictator of the terrorist Islamic Regime in absentia.

They brought out a picture of him while everyone started yelling “Allah-o Akbar”…

You can’t make this up… pic.twitter.com/2GVM9fg3zZ

— Goldie Ghamari | گلسا قمری 🇮🇷 (@gghamari) March 9, 2026

That has to be the strangest inauguration of a national leader in the history of the world. The Iranian regime just paid homage to a cardboard cutout of a man and named him the leader of the country. (RELATED: Americans Are Skeptical of the Iran Strikes. That’s a Good Thing.)

The man being Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the dead guy who had been Iran’s Supreme Leader until the end of last month, when he was unceremoniously de-rezzed by an Israeli airstrike along with a goodly portion of the Iranian regime’s top brass. (RELATED: US Mosques Hold Memorials for Iran’s Supreme Leader)

There were lots of rumors last week that a similar airstrike had done the same to young (relatively) Mojtaba, whose reputation is/was that he didn’t share the “avuncular” spirit of his father and was a “hard-liner,” an interesting reputation for someone whose commercial life contained an identity as a London luxury real estate baron. That story was kinda-sorta dismissed, though Mojtaba hasn’t been seen since.

Including at his own inauguration.

Which is why there is a theory going around that New Khamenei shares the vitality of Old Khamenei…

I HAVE A THEORY:

Mojtaba Khamenei, Ali’s son and the new supreme leader IS ALREADY DEAD and died in the same strike that killed his father!

How do you choose a supreme leader who cannot be killed? You pick one who is ALREADY DEAD!

Here’s the shocking part: No one has seen… pic.twitter.com/5hRkBKlPss

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) March 9, 2026

Yes, you say, but this is insane. Implausible. Impossible! Bill Mitchell and I are suggesting that the Iranians have selected a ghost as their Supreme Leader? Are we cracked?

I can’t speak for Mitchell, and you may or may not believe my protestations to the contrary. But I would offer a few things.

First, exactly what would stop the Iranians from putting a dead guy out there as the new Supreme Leader? In his current assumed state, Mojtaba has many fine qualities from the standpoint of the regime.

Chief among those is that if he’s already dead, he’s a lot less likely to get blown up in an airstrike like the rest of their leadership seems to have happened to them.

And one cool thing about a dead guy as the leader is that he isn’t around to contradict the people who speak for him.

Mojtaba thus becomes a Robin Hood-like figure, a specter which haunts the American and Israeli military in the event a ground invasion of Iran were to take place (which was never going to happen and won’t, but it isn’t like the mullahs are sure about that). And one cool thing about a dead guy as the leader is that he isn’t around to contradict the people who speak for him.

When the bombs are falling all around, and one of them might have your name on it, you don’t really want to tell everybody you’re the guy in charge. So make a dead guy the guy in charge, and whip up the folks every day by saying he’s still kicking.

Yes, but sooner or later, they’ll want to see proof of life, right?

That’s easy enough. Iranian state media has essentially already turned into the Deep Fake Channel; they’ve turned out videos of everything from a deluge of missiles turning Tel Aviv into a burning hellscape to the USS Abraham Lincoln sinking to the bottom of the Gulf of Oman. The level of fabrication the Iranians and their stooges have dispatched onto the information superhighway is nothing short of unprecedented; it might even surpass the Jesse Jackson funeral in its sheer departure from reality.

There is nothing to stop them from cranking out AI-slop videos of Mojtaba exhorting the Iranians to fight the infidel every day.

See? Proof of life. And don’t mind those missiles landing on all the government buildings; our IRGC and Basij troopers are safe as houses inside your mosque or your kids’ school.

And the IAF or USAF or USN can’t kill him. Not even with a silver bullet.

Yeah, but how’s a dead guy going to run a country? Well, that’s actually easier than you think, because nobody has been running Iran since the first of the month.

There are stories that have it that the regime has split its military command into 31 provincial commands, because so many IRGC leadership figures have been blown to bits, it’s become impossible for anybody to helm the thing. This makes some sense, you know — it would account for the fact that they’ve sent missiles and/or drones into some 13 different neighboring countries since this conflict ramped up, including bystanders like Oman, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.

I’m not sure what the stats are, but there might be a ramping up of Google translation searches for “Hey, what did I do?” into Farsi.

You don’t get this kind of erratic wasting of military resources when the adults are in charge. You get it when lower-level wackos decide it’s use-it-or-lose-it time and decide to take out personal grievances on distant cousins or those sneaky Uber drivers in Dubai.

Especially when the lower-level wackos are fundamentalist believers in the apocalyptic weirdness that is Twelver Shi’ism, which is the Iranian state religion.

It’s said that only 32 percent of the Iranian people are practicing Shi’ites, but you don’t generally advance in a religious theocracy unless you believe in the theocracy’s theology.

And boiling this down, essentially the Twelver Shi’ites think that the Twelfth Imam, the Hidden Imam as he’s known, went off and disappeared some thousand-and-change years ago, and he’s waiting to return amid a massive catastrophe so as to perfect the world.

If you believe that, why not shoot off those missiles at the Turks and the Brits and those surly Sunni Saudis to see if you can start enough trouble to bring back the Mahdi? Gotta make your own luck, right?

And speaking of the Mahdi… naming a pre-expired Mojtaba as the Supreme Leader of a Twelver Shi’ite country is sort of on-brand, wouldn’t you say?

Like I said, I’m only about 71.7 percent serious about this. Maybe a little more. Or less.

But it would seem like if Mahdi Mojtaba were actually among us, they’d fan him out and let us get a gander at him.

Prove me wrong if he’s still alive. Let’s see what kind of shape he’s in.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: The Grand Senate Bargain?

The Incredibly, Unacceptably Weird James Talarico

Americans Are Skeptical of the Iran Strikes. That’s a Good Thing.

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