Kiriakou's 2026 viral wave
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Kiriakou's 2026 viral wave is the term for the sudden expansion of John Kiriakou's public audience in the spring of 2026, which he describes as arriving without warning and without an explanation he can offer. "It's only like in the last couple of weeks that my life has gone crazy."

The scale of it

His measure of it is selfies, which he says he never refuses. "I can't go 10 feet down the street without somebody asking me for a selfie, and I always always say yes. Always."

The counts he gives:

- A baseball game, a week and a day earlier: fifteen separate times, people came to his seat during the game.
- Dublin, where he had gone to accept a gold medal from Trinity College for integrity in the public discourse: "I took 500 selfies the first day. 500. It took 3 and 1/2 hours. The line went around the block." Another sixty followed after dinner, on the walk from the restaurant to his hotel.
- Berlin, the week before, filming a documentary: interrupted thirty-five times while shooting on the street.
- Poland, where he had gone for a day "just cuz I'd never been to Poland before and I wanted to say I ate pierogies in Poland": stopped for selfies by people who did not speak English.

By the end of that month his channel was over 200,000 subscribers.

The audience he did not expect

"Something happened to the algorithm. I don't know what it is. I am extraordinarily grateful for it." What the wave revealed to him was a demographic: "it's only now that I'm beginning to understand that people in the like 15 to 30 age group, almost exclusively men, are listening to me."

The algorithm question

Asked by a viewer whether the intelligence community might itself be priming the algorithm, the questioner grouping Kiriakou with Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent, and pointing to the reach of his anti-Israel material, Kiriakou offered no explanation but did not dismiss it. "My algorithm is Tucker, Tucker, Tucker, Candace Owens, me, Kent, Tucker, Tucker, Candace Owens. And it's all pretty much the same message. And you may be onto something here about the deep state having some kind of effect on the algorithm."

His response to the possibility was not suspicion: "In which case I welcome it. I welcome it."

'Once CIA, always CIA'

The wave brought with it the accusation that he is still working for the CIA, that the videos are a recruitment tool to make the agency sound appealing. Kiriakou's answer is the shortest he gives to anything: "I think that they're brain damaged."

"There's literally nothing that's more intellectually lazy than saying 'once CIA, always CIA.' Like, are you deranged? If you think I went to prison to make the CIA look sexy, then you've got some serious mental and emotional problems. So no, I dismiss those people as unserious and unworthy of a response."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou pardon request
