The Iowa Republican exchange is an argument John Kiriakou says he had at a conservative event, recounted on the DeProgram programme in August 2025 as an illustration of a conversation that cannot be conducted in good faith.[1]
The setting
Kiriakou is offhand about why he was there. “I went to an event the other day. It was a conservative event and I don’t even know why I went, just because I was invited.”[1]
The other party he identifies by office and by position: “there was this idiot there. He was the head of the Iowa Republican Party. And he’s one of these abortion absolutists that — not only should all abortions be illegal from the moment of conception, but if a woman miscarries, she should be investigated.”[1][2]
The challenge
The subject was Gaza, though Kiriakou says he cannot recall what the man had said about it. His own reply moved from the war to the man’s stated ethic: “I said, you know, it’s up to all of us to support human rights. I said, ‘This is the thing I don’t understand about you so-called pro-life absolutists. You guys are pro-life from the point of conception to the point of birth. And then you don’t give a shit what anybody does or has happened to them once they’re born.’”[2]
The reply and the end of it
The answer, in Kiriakou’s telling, did not engage the point: “And he says to me, ‘You sound like you’re pro-Hamas.’”[2]
Kiriakou treats that as proof of his own thesis rather than a provocation to argue further. “And I said, ‘You see, that’s what I mean.’ I said, ‘You’re a fucking idiot, and there’s nothing I can do with that.’ And that’s how I left it.”[2][3]
A small administrative postscript followed: “I blocked his phone number. He had given me his phone number earlier in the day and I blocked it.”[3]
Why he tells it
The story sits inside a longer complaint about arguments conducted for effect rather than persuasion. Kiriakou and the host had been discussing organised online campaigns whose purpose, as the host put it, is not discussion but browbeating — and against which the ordinary method of accumulating facts has no purchase.[4]