Max Amini says Jimmy Carter helped put Ayatollah Khomeini in power to hold back Iran

Max Amini didn’t just blame Iran’s clerical regime for wrecking the country. On Club Random, he told Bill Maher that Jimmy Carter, with help from France and Germany, helped put Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power because the Shah had become too threatening to the West.

That is not a stray comedian riff. That is the kind of dinner-table theory that can make a Westwood restaurant go silent for half a second before everyone starts talking at once. Amini, who spent part of his childhood in Iran and part of his life building an American comedy career, delivered it not like a tossed-off provocation, but like family history with a passport stamp.

The diaspora theory came out clean

Amini first made the cultural argument. For him, the Islamic Republic is not the natural expression of Persian identity. It is the thing that got bolted on.

the difference between Iranians and Arabs is that Arabs religion is their culture. Iranians their their um culture is the Persian um sort of traditions. So we are not our our our culture is not our religion.

That distinction matters to Amini because it sets up the accusation. He is not just saying the revolution betrayed Iranian modernity. He is saying the betrayal was engineered.

the last 47 years there is a whole different ideology inserted into this culture and we believe it’s designed by the west.

Maher, normally not the house counsel for restraint when Islam comes up, actually slowed him down. Did Amini mean the West put Khomeini in power? Amini did not retreat.

Yes. Carter

His motive theory was even more direct: the Shah had stopped behaving like a manageable client.

he raised the price of oil and he wasn’t listening

A sharp story, a shaky history

As history, Amini’s version is too neat. Carter did pressure the Shah on human rights, France did host Khomeini in exile, and Western governments badly misread what was happening during the Iranian Revolution. But miscalculation, opportunism, and cold geopolitical self-interest are not the same thing as a coordinated installation job.

The claim works emotionally because Amini is describing a wound that still feels absurd. He remembers being an American kid in an Iranian school where children chanted death to America every morning. If your childhood soundtrack jumps from jingle bells to state propaganda, conspiracy is not just tempting. It arrives wearing shoes.

Maher’s skepticism helped the exchange, mostly because he did not pretend the Shah was a liberal saint. He pointed out that the pre-revolutionary monarchy had a savage secret police and that politics often comes down to the least bad choice, which is a very Maher way to say history is not a Marvel movie and nobody gets clean hands.

Amini’s strongest point was not the Carter accusation. It was his contrast between a monarch who fled and a theocracy that will kill to stay.

When he realized the people don’t want me, he got up and left. This regime will never leave.