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I’m skeptical that anyone could beat the Trump and Netanyahu administrations at sounding like cartoon villains. The IDF named its last-minute bombing campaign in Beirut “Operation Eternal Darkness”. Feel free to drop some quotes to prove me wrong though.
85% of Americans do not approve of congress. This in no way implies that Americans would rather be ruled by an executive council appointed by Xi Jinping.
If the poll was before the regime killed thousands of protesters, it was also before the IRGC successfully repelled a US/Israeli military operation aimed at subjugating the country. A big mistake the US made in Vietnam was assuming that people joined the Vietcong because they were communists. In reality people joined the Vietcong because they were fighting for Vietnamese independence.
This is a fringe view. The majority position is that Imam Mahdi will reappear first, and then he will lead the forces of Islam to liberate Palestine and defeat the West.
Unfortunately the fringe happens to be in charge of a country.
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And note that this is a general point about escheatology. Treating end-times prophecies as warnings about events that will happen in the future by manifest divine intervention (with no-one to know the day or the hour) is effectively harmless.
The dominant interpretation of Christian escheatology in Catholicism and mainline Protestantism is preterist - i.e. that most of the apocalyptic prophecies in Revelation etc. were already symbolically fulfilled by the destruction of the Temple after the 66-73 Jewish-Roman war and the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine after the 132-135 Bar Khoba Rebellion, but it isn't dogma. Treating it as a symbolic roadmap for contemporary geopolitics is something that only happens in American evangelicalism, and even then it is a minority view. (The most popular escheatology in American evangelicalism is the Rapturism of the Left Behind novels, which are mainstream in the limited sense that they treat Revelation as a warning and not an instruction manual, and they predict that the prophecies will be fulfilled by manifest divine intervention and not human action)
Similarly, in Judaism the Third Temple movement (which seeks to actually act out parts of the Messiah prophecy) is fringe even within religious Zionism.
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