Daniel sent us this one — and it picks up a thread from a previous conversation about Hezbollah's popular support in Lebanon. The polling split was stark: roughly forty to forty-five percent approval among Lebanese Shia, and under ten percent among Lebanese Sunnis. Same country, same question, completely different answers. He wants us to use that fault line as a lens for the broader Muslim world — how Sunni and Shia populations diverge in their attitudes toward the West, toward Israel, toward Iran. And the timing matters, because right now, June twenty twenty-six, the Iran-Israel shadow war has gone direct, and the Gulf states are responding in ways that track almost perfectly along sectarian lines.
That polling gap isn't an anomaly. It's the key that unlocks a much bigger pattern. You look at the same Arab Barometer waves from twenty twenty-three through twenty twenty-five, and what jumps out is that Hezbollah's numbers among Shia Lebanese hold steady across geography, age cohorts, and education levels. But cross the sectarian line and it falls off a cliff. And this isn't just a Lebanon story.
Right — because if it were just Lebanon, you could chalk it up to the weird consociational system they have, where political parties are explicitly sectarian by design. But the same pattern shows up in places without that formal structure. Bahrain, for instance — Shia majority, roughly fifty-five to sixty-five percent of citizens, ruled by a Sunni monarchy. And when you poll attitudes toward Iran's regional ambitions, the sectarian cleavage is just as sharp.
The Washington Institute polling from twenty twenty-four really drives this home. Support for the Abraham Accords among Sunni populations in the UAE and Bahrain sits around thirty-five to forty-five percent. Among Shia populations in those same countries? Below fifteen percent. That's not a margin-of-error difference. That's a structural divide.
The question Daniel's really asking is: what's the mechanism here? Why does sectarian identity predict political views this reliably, across different countries, different political systems, different economic conditions?
That's what makes this worth digging into, because the answer isn't theology. It's tempting to frame this as a religious dispute — Sunnis versus Shias, fourteen centuries of doctrinal disagreement — but that's not what's driving the polling numbers. What's actually happening is that sectarian identity functions as what political scientists call a heuristic. It's a shortcut. If you know someone's sect in Lebanon or Bahrain or eastern Saudi Arabia, you can predict their position on Iran, on Israel, on normalization more reliably than if you know their income, their education, or their age.
Which is a clinical way of saying: your sect tells you who your enemies are supposed to be.
The mechanism works because it's been reinforced by decades of lived experience. Shia communities across the region — in Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, eastern Saudi Arabia, parts of Pakistan — have been on the receiving end of repression from Sunni-majority governments or Sunni monarchies. Iran steps in and says, we're the only state actor defending Shia interests. And whether or not you buy the theological justification, the political calculus is real. Iran is offering something tangible: patronage, weapons, political cover.
It's less "we share a madhhab" and more "they showed up when nobody else did.
That's the core of it. And you can see this playing out in Iraq, where Shia political parties have maintained alignment with Iran despite massive protests against Iranian influence from twenty twenty-two through twenty twenty-five. Iraqis were in the streets demanding an end to corruption and foreign meddling — explicitly naming Iran — and yet the Shia political establishment held the line. Not because they loved Tehran, but because the alternative was aligning with Sunni regional powers or the Americans, and that's a non-starter for their base.
Sectarian identity becomes a Bayesian prior. You process all new political information through this lens. An Iranian missile strike on Israel? Shia populations tend to see it as resistance. Sunni populations tend to see it as dangerous escalation that threatens the fragile stability they've been building with the Abraham Accords.
This is where the current moment gets fascinating. June twenty twenty-six — we've just seen the Iran-Israel conflict escalate from shadow war to direct strikes. And the Gulf responses are a perfect illustration of the pattern. Bahrain and Kuwait both condemned the Iranian strikes. But they remained conspicuously silent on the Israeli strikes. That's not diplomatic oversight. That's a sectarian alignment playing out in real time.
You've got a Sunni monarchy ruling a Shia-majority population. The government's foreign policy is essentially: Iran is the existential threat, Israel is a useful counterweight. But walk into a Shia neighborhood in Manama and ask about normalization, and you'll get a very different answer.
The monarchy knows this. That's why Bahrain's normalization with Israel is simultaneously a strategic win for the ruling family and a political liability with a huge chunk of their own citizens. The Abraham Accords created a Sunni-Israeli alignment against Iran, but it's fragile precisely because it depends on authoritarian governments suppressing popular anti-normalization sentiment.
Which brings us to the Israel dimension specifically. Sunni public opinion on Israel is genuinely complex. It's rejectionist in principle — Palestinian solidarity still matters, especially among older generations and more religious populations. But it's increasingly pragmatic in practice, particularly among Gulf populations who have watched Iran's regional expansion and concluded that Tehran is a more immediate threat than Tel Aviv.
The data bears this out. The thirty-five to forty-five percent support for the Abraham Accords among Gulf Sunnis isn't majority support — but it's a substantial minority, and it's been trending upward. Among Shia populations, by contrast, Israel is viewed almost entirely through the lens of Iran's Axis of Resistance framework. Normalization isn't just unpopular — it's politically toxic. It's framed as betrayal, not pragmatism.
You've got this strange dynamic where Sunni governments are aligning with Israel against Iran, Sunni publics are ambivalent but increasingly open to the idea, and Shia populations are structurally opposed — not primarily because of Palestine, but because of what Israel represents in the Iranian narrative: the ultimate symbol of Western-backed Sunni hegemony.
That's the misconception most Western coverage misses. The default assumption is that the Muslim world is united in opposition to Israel. But that's simply not true. The Sunni world is split — governments versus publics, Gulf versus non-Gulf, younger versus older. The Shia world is far more unified in opposition, but that unity is manufactured and maintained by Iranian soft power and proxy networks. It's not organic theological solidarity.
Lebanon is the perfect microcosm. Hezbollah's forty-plus percent approval among Shia isn't about loving Hassan Nasrallah's personality. It's about Hezbollah being the only political actor that credibly promises to defend Shia interests — against Israel, against Sunni extremists, against a Lebanese state that has historically marginalized Shia communities. And the under-ten-percent Sunni approval? That's Sunni populations looking at Hezbollah and seeing an Iranian proxy that dragged Lebanon into a war with Israel that Sunni communities didn't want and don't benefit from.
Even among Shia, support isn't monolithic. It peaks during conflicts with Israel and dips during domestic controversies — corruption scandals, the Beirut port explosion aftermath, economic mismanagement. Hezbollah's support is conditional, not absolute. But the conditions are set by sectarian identity. A Shia Lebanese who's furious about the economy might still support Hezbollah's military wing because the alternative feels like existential vulnerability.
That's the mechanism. Sectarian identity functions as a political heuristic, shaped not by theology but by decades of repression, proxy conflict, and strategic patronage. It predicts attitudes toward Iran, toward Israel, toward the West more reliably than any other single variable across the Muslim world. And right now, in June twenty twenty-six, it's shaping how Gulf states respond to the Iran-Israel escalation in ways that are both predictable and deeply consequential.
That's where we're headed next. Because this mechanism doesn't just explain polling data. It's actively driving the biggest geopolitical realignment in the region since the Iranian Revolution. The Sunni-Israeli alignment against Iran, the fragility of the Abraham Accords, the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Shia crescent narrative — all of it flows from this same dynamic.
Let's get into how it actually works. Why does sectarian identity predict political views this reliably, and what does that mean for anyone trying to make sense of the region?
I think the cleanest way to put it is that sect functions as a Bayesian prior for political information. You don't evaluate each event from scratch — you process it through a lens that's already been ground for you by decades of lived experience. And that lens tells you who your protectors are and who your threats are.
The lens gets ground differently depending on which side of the line you're on. Take the same event — say, an Iranian drone strike on an Israeli-linked vessel in the Red Sea. A Shia Bahraini in Manama processes that through a framework where Iran is the only state actor that has ever stood up for Shia communities against Sunni rulers backed by the West. A Sunni Bahraini processes the same event through a framework where Iran is an expansionist power that arms co-religionists to destabilize Sunni-led states. Same facts, completely different priors, completely different conclusions.
What makes this so durable is that it's not abstract. Shia communities across the region have concrete grievances. In Bahrain, Shia citizens are systematically excluded from senior military and security positions. In eastern Saudi Arabia, Shia populations in the oil-rich Eastern Province have faced decades of economic marginalization and religious discrimination. In Yemen, the Houthis fought six wars against the central government before twenty fourteen, each one reinforcing the sense that Sunni powers were trying to crush them.
When Iran shows up and says, we're your ally, it's not a theological sales pitch. It's a political offer backed by a historical record that makes the offer credible.
The Sunni side has its own version of this. Sunni governments — especially in the Gulf — have spent decades framing Iran as an existential civilizational threat, not just a geopolitical rival. The Saudi and Emirati media ecosystems have pumped out content about the Shia crescent, about Persian expansionism, about fifth columns. And for Sunni populations that have watched Iran build proxy networks in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, that narrative lands. It feels confirmed by events.
You've got two self-reinforcing feedback loops. Shia communities see Sunni governments aligning with the West and Israel against them, which makes Iran's offer more attractive, which makes Sunni governments more paranoid about Iranian influence, which makes them align more tightly with the West and Israel. Round and round.
This is where the misconception busting really matters. The default Western media frame treats sectarianism as ancient hatreds — Sunnis and Shias have been fighting since the seventh century, therefore the conflict is intractable. But that's exactly backwards. The sectarian cleavage is politically constructed and politically maintained. It's not that theology drives politics. It's that politics activates sectarian identity when it's useful, and the identity becomes a heuristic because it's been a reliable predictor of who will protect you and who will harm you.
Which is why the Lebanon polling is such a clean illustration. Hezbollah's support among Shia isn't about Twelver theology. It's about Hezbollah being the organization that fought Israel to a standstill in two thousand six, that provides social services where the Lebanese state barely reaches, that credibly promises to defend Shia communities against Sunni extremist groups. The Sunni rejection of Hezbollah isn't about theology either — it's about Hezbollah being an Iranian proxy that assassinated Rafik Hariri, that dragged Lebanon into Syria's civil war on the Assad side, that operates as a state within a state that Sunni political leaders can't compete with.
The same pattern holds when you zoom out to the regional level. Sunni attitudes toward the West are complex and varied. Sunni governments in the Gulf are among the largest purchasers of American weapons, host American military bases, and increasingly cooperate with Israel on security and intelligence. Sunni publics are more skeptical — but the skepticism is often about specific policies, not civilizational opposition. Shia attitudes toward the West, by contrast, are filtered through the Iranian narrative that casts the United States as the patron of Sunni oppression and the enemy of Shia self-determination.
What we're really describing is a political identity marker that has become the single most reliable predictor of foreign policy attitudes across the Muslim world — more reliable than class, more reliable than education, more reliable than age. And it works because it's not just an identity. It's a summary statistic for a whole set of experiences, alliances, and threat perceptions.
You can see this playing out in Iraq with almost laboratory clarity. After two thousand three, the Shia majority finally held political power after decades of Sunni-minority rule under Saddam. Iran was already there — building relationships with Shia parties during the Saddam years, funding exile groups, training militias. So when the Baathist state collapsed, Iran had a ready-made network of clients who owed their political survival to Tehran's patronage.
The Sunni provinces?
Welcomed the initial US invasion, or at least didn't resist it the way Shia militias eventually did. Anbar, Nineveh, Salahuddin — these were Sunni-majority areas that had benefited from Saddam's regime. They looked at the new Shia-dominated government in Baghdad and saw Iranian proxies taking over the security ministries. That's the priors at work. Sunni Iraqis processed the American presence through the lens of "these are the people who removed our oppressor." Shia Iraqis processed it through the lens of "these are the people who enabled Iranian-backed death squads to target us during the civil war.
Then the US withdrawal in twenty eleven confirmed every Shia suspicion — the Americans cut and run, but Iran stayed.
When ISIS swept through Sunni areas in twenty fourteen, the Shia militias — many of them Iranian-trained and Iranian-funded — were the ones who pushed back. The Iraqi army collapsed. The peshmerga held their lines. But it was the Popular Mobilization Forces, dominated by Shia factions aligned with Iran, that became the face of resistance to ISIS. That cemented the heuristic. For Shia Iraqis, Iran-backed militias are the defenders. For Sunni Iraqis, those same militias are sectarian death squads who carried out reprisals in Fallujah and Tikrit.
The same organizations are simultaneously protectors and persecutors, depending entirely on which side of the sectarian line you stand.
That's why the twenty twenty-two to twenty twenty-five protests are so instructive. You had Shia Iraqis in the streets — in Najaf, in Karbala, in Basra — demanding an end to Iranian influence. They were chanting against the wilayat al-faqih system. They were burning Iranian consulates. And yet, when it came time to vote, the Shia political parties aligned with Iran held their ground. Because the alternative — throwing in with Sunni regional powers or the Americans — still read as a bigger threat to Shia interests than Iranian overreach.
It's a terrible choice, but it's a choice that the heuristic makes for you. Better the meddling patron you know than the hostile powers you've spent decades learning to fear.
That dynamic isn't limited to Iraq. You see it in Bahrain, where the Shia majority's grievances against the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy are fundamentally about political exclusion and economic marginalization. The twenty eleven uprising wasn't framed by participants as a sectarian revolt — it was framed as a democratic one. But the regime immediately sectarianized it, calling the protesters Iranian fifth columnists, and Saudi Arabia sent troops across the causeway to help crush it. That response confirmed the Shia heuristic: Sunni powers will use force to keep us down, and Iran is the only state that even pretends to care.
The Al Khalifa regime's subsequent normalization with Israel fits perfectly into that same framework. From the monarchy's perspective, it's strategic — align with Israel to counter Iran. From the Shia street's perspective, it's confirmation that the Sunni ruling family is in league with the ultimate enemy.
Which brings us back to that Washington Institute data point. Below fifteen percent Shia support for the Abraham Accords in Bahrain and the UAE. It's not that Shia populations care more about Palestine than Sunni populations do. It's that Palestine has been absorbed into the Iranian narrative as the symbolic center of the Axis of Resistance. Supporting normalization means breaking with the resistance framework. And breaking with that framework means losing your political identity and your patron.
The Israel question becomes a litmus test that has almost nothing to do with Israel.
That's the irony. For many Shia communities, Israel is an abstraction — they've never met an Israeli, they don't live anywhere near Israel, their daily lives aren't directly affected by the occupation. But Israel as a symbol is enormously powerful because it's the glue that holds the Axis of Resistance together. Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria — they all define themselves in opposition to Israel and its Western backers. If you accept normalization, you're not just changing a foreign policy position. You're defecting from the coalition that defines your political identity.
On the Sunni side, the calculus is almost inverted. Sunni Gulf states have spent the last decade watching Iran expand its influence from Beirut to Baghdad to Sanaa. For them, Israel isn't the primary threat — Iran is. And if aligning with Israel helps contain Iran, that's a trade many Sunni governments and a growing minority of Sunni publics are willing to make.
The Palestinian question complicates this, of course. Sunni publics still care about Palestinian statehood — the Arab Barometer data shows that consistently. But it's no longer the overriding priority it was in the Nasser era. Younger Sunnis in the Gulf, in particular, are more likely to say that their countries should prioritize economic development and regional stability over the Palestinian cause. That's a generational shift that Shia populations haven't experienced in the same way, precisely because the Iranian narrative keeps Palestine at the center of the resistance framework.
The fault line isn't just about who you support. It's about which conflict you think is the defining one. For Sunni governments and a growing share of Sunni publics, the defining conflict is Iran versus the Arab Gulf states. For Shia populations, the defining conflict is the Axis of Resistance versus Western-backed Sunni hegemony, with Israel as the symbolic heart of it.
Both sides have evidence that confirms their framework. Sunni governments can point to Iranian missiles striking Riyadh in twenty nineteen, to Houthi attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure, to Hezbollah's takeover of the Lebanese state. Shia communities can point to Bahrain's imprisonment of Shia dissidents, to Saudi executions of Shia activists in the Eastern Province, to the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.
The heuristic isn't irrational. It's actually highly rational given the information environment each community lives in. The problem is that the heuristic becomes self-reinforcing to the point where contradictory information can't get through. A Shia Lebanese who hears about Iranian corruption won't update their view of Hezbollah's military wing, because the military wing is about survival, not governance. A Sunni Saudi who hears about Israeli settlement expansion won't update their view of the Iran threat, because Iran is about survival, not Palestine.
That mechanism — two communities processing the same events through priors that make opposite conclusions feel obvious — doesn't just explain polling data. It's actively driving the biggest geopolitical realignment in the region right now. And the first knock-on effect is the one I find almost darkly comedic: the Shia crescent narrative has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is the feedback loop that's hardest to break. Sunni governments, especially since the Abraham Accords, have been aligning more openly with the US and Israel. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain — they're not just buying American weapons anymore, they're building intelligence-sharing relationships with Israel that would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago. And from Tehran's perspective, that's proof that the Sunni axis is consolidating against Shia interests. So Iran doubles down on its proxy networks — Hezbollah gets more missiles, the Houthis get more drones, Shia militias in Iraq get more funding. Which makes Sunni governments say, see, we told you about the Shia crescent. And the cycle tightens.
Each side points to the other's behavior as justification for the very behavior the other side is pointing to.
The Abraham Accords are the accelerant. They formalized a Sunni-Israeli alignment against Iran, which was the strategic goal. But that alignment is fragile in exactly the way you'd predict from the polling. It depends on authoritarian Gulf governments suppressing popular sentiment that is, at best, ambivalent about normalization and, among Shia populations, actively hostile.
The June escalation is the stress test. We've got Bahrain and Kuwait both condemning Iranian strikes while staying silent on Israeli ones. That's not a coincidence — it's the sectarian alignment expressing itself in diplomatic language. But here's the thing: those governments are making a bet that their populations will tolerate this asymmetry. And the bet only holds as long as the Iran threat feels more immediate than the Israel grievance.
That's where Saudi Arabia becomes the fascinating case. The Saudis have been negotiating conditional normalization — public demands for Palestinian statehood, private security cooperation with Israel against Iran. Mohammed bin Salman is trying to thread a needle: give enough rhetorical support to the Palestinian cause to satisfy Sunni public opinion, while building enough operational alignment with Israel to contain Iran. Whether that needle can hold is the multi-billion-dollar question.
The Houthi crisis from twenty twenty-four through twenty twenty-five previewed exactly how messy this gets. You had a Shia group — Ansar Allah — attacking Red Sea shipping with Israeli links. Sunni public opinion in Yemen, which hates the Houthis for entirely separate reasons, actually supported the attacks because they targeted Israel. But the Gulf Sunni governments condemned them, because Houthi drones threatening global shipping lanes is bad for everyone's business. So you had Sunni governments and Sunni publics on opposite sides of the same incident, both claiming to represent Sunni interests.
Which exposes the third knock-on effect — the one that actually matters for anyone trying to make policy. The sectarian lens distorts Western strategy in a very specific way. American administrations have historically treated the Muslim world as a monolith on Israel. The assumption is: Muslim populations oppose Israel, Muslim governments have to manage that opposition, therefore any peace framework has to navigate a unified wall of rejection. But that's simply not what the data shows. Sunni publics are increasingly open to pragmatic normalization. Shia publics are structurally opposed. Treating those as the same phenomenon produces policy that satisfies neither constituency.
You end up offering concessions designed to placate Shia opposition that Sunni populations don't need, while failing to reinforce the normalization trend among Sunnis that could actually be cultivated.
The practical implication — if you're sitting in the State Department or the Israeli foreign ministry — is that any durable Middle East peace framework has to account for the sectarian distribution of affected populations. A deal that stabilizes relations with Sunni Gulf states may be actively destabilizing in Shia-majority Iraq or Lebanon. You can't do one-size-fits-all regional architecture when the populations you're building it for are operating from fundamentally different threat perceptions.
The Abraham Accords worked for the UAE and Bahrain — Sunni-led states where the ruling families could manage the domestic politics. Try to extend the same framework to Iraq, where Shia militias aligned with Iran effectively veto security policy, and you're not doing diplomacy anymore. You're doing wishful thinking.
What do we do with this? Three things I think are actually usable.
First one's for the analysts and policymakers — and honestly for anyone whose job involves writing a memo about what Muslims think. Stop treating Muslim public opinion as a single variable. Disaggregate by sect, and the picture flips. The Sunni world is far more open to engagement with the West and Israel than the headlines suggest. That thirty-five to forty-five percent Abraham Accords support among Gulf Sunnis isn't a majority, but it's a floor, not a ceiling — and it's been trending up.
The Shia numbers — below fifteen percent — tell you exactly where the resistance is concentrated. If you're designing a diplomatic strategy and you don't know that split exists, you're going to waste enormous effort trying to win over populations whose priors make normalization structurally impossible, while underinvesting in populations where the door is actually ajar.
Second actionable takeaway — and this one's for anyone following the Iran-Israel conflict day to day. Watch the Gulf Sunni response as a leading indicator. Right now, Bahrain and Kuwait are condemning Iranian strikes while staying silent on Israeli ones. That's the sectarian calculus holding. But if Sunni governments start publicly distancing from the Abraham Accords — if you see Saudi Arabia or the UAE issuing statements that criticize Israeli strikes with the same language they use for Iranian ones — that's your signal that the calculus has shifted. It means the governments have decided their populations won't tolerate the asymmetry anymore.
That would be a much bigger deal than any single missile exchange. The Abraham Accords are the institutional backbone of the Sunni-Israeli alignment. If that backbone cracks, Iran's entire strategy of isolating Israel gets a massive validation.
Third one, and this is where I think the real blind spot lives. Don't assume sectarian identity is static. Younger Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are showing real signs of frustration with Iranian influence. The twenty twenty-two through twenty twenty-five protests in Iraq weren't Sunni-led — they were Shia-led, in Shia cities, explicitly targeting Iranian overreach. In Lebanon, the October seventeen uprising in twenty nineteen crossed sectarian lines in ways that surprised observers, and the economic collapse since then has only deepened resentment toward Hezbollah's governance failures.
The generational dimension matters here. Younger Shia in both countries have grown up watching Iranian-backed parties dominate their political systems while delivering corruption, electricity blackouts, and currency collapses. They're not necessarily abandoning the resistance framework — but they're asking harder questions about what it costs them. And if Iran overplays its hand economically — if the patronage dries up while the demands for loyalty increase — that's when priors start getting updated.
The next decade could see realignment, not because theology changes, but because the heuristic stops paying off. If Iran can't deliver the protection and patronage that made its offer credible in the first place, the entire political identity structure that depends on that credibility gets wobbly.
That's the thing to watch more than any single poll number. Heuristics are durable until they're not. When they break, they break fast.
One open question before we wrap, and I think it's the one that'll determine whether everything we just laid out holds or collapses. Will the Sunni-Shia fault line remain the dominant cleavage, or does generational change plus economic pressure eventually erode it?
That's the tension. Right now the heuristic is durable because it keeps paying off — or at least, keeps feeling like it pays off. But the conditions that sustain it are getting more expensive for everyone. Iran's economy is a wreck, and patronizing proxy networks across four countries isn't cheap. Sunni Gulf states are betting their populations will accept normalization if it means stability and economic growth. Both sides are running on assumptions that could fail.
The next major test is already visible on the horizon. Any US-brokered normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel — that's the one to watch. Not because it'll happen tomorrow, but because when it does, the reaction among Shia populations in the Gulf and Iraq will determine whether the deal actually holds. Saudi Arabia has a Shia minority in the Eastern Province. Bahrain has a Shia majority. Iraq is Shia-governed and deeply entangled with Iran. If those populations see Saudi normalization as a Sunni declaration of war by other means, the regional fallout won't stay contained in diplomatic statements.
That's the thing about heuristics — they don't break gradually. They hold and hold and hold, and then one event makes the old framework stop making sense. For Sunni populations, that event might be an Iranian nuclear test that makes the Israel alliance feel existential. For Shia populations, it might be Iran cutting funding to Hezbollah because it can't afford both domestic stability and foreign adventures. Either one resets the priors overnight.
The closing thought, and I think this is what Daniel was really driving at — understanding sectarian dynamics isn't about reducing people to their identity. It's about seeing the structural forces that shape political choices. The Lebanese Sunni who opposes Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia who supports it aren't different species. They're responding rationally to different information environments, different histories, different threats. If you want to understand why the Muslim world fractures the way it does on Israel and the West, you have to see the fracture itself as the unit of analysis — not the monolith that Western policy keeps treating it as.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In 1962, a Chilean expedition to the Atacama Desert declared the phantom island of New South Greenland officially extinct from nautical charts — despite the fact that it had never existed in the first place, having been a mirage reported by a single whaling captain in 1823 who mistook an iceberg for land.
They undiscovered an island that was never there.
Cartography has a lot to answer for.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode at my weird prompts dot com, and if you want to send us a question like Daniel did, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll be back next week.
