Upon return to Princeton, a faculty member greeted him on the street and said he was sorry about what had happened. Wang appreciated the sentiment, but not what followed. The professor attributed the ordeal to the Trump administration and to American spies’ infiltration of the Iranian state. Wang, he implied, had been mistaken for one. “I was arrested three months before Trump was elected,” Wang told me. “And I was told I was a hostage—that they knew I did nothing against Iran, and that I was nothing but a pawn.” He was galled. “This is what they believe at my own university! What are they teaching their students? The facts just don’t matter.”
Summing up the change in his view of Iran, Wang told author Graeme Wood, “I was f**king stupid. Unbelievably stupid. If I could go back, I would slap myself.” Instead he spends every day on Twitter commenting about Iranian policy.
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