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They killed 70 people that we know of. Now, you have to remember at this time, thousands of people are being arrested, they're being tortured and sexually abused in prisons. We hardly know what's happening in these prisons. And because at the time the media was incredibly controlled by the regime, very few pieces of information came out for us to even see what was occurring. You know, one of the big cases was Nega Aga Sultan, right? We saw about that death. But these images that heroic people tried to get out to the west and outside of Iran, didn't really change any outcomes at the time. President Obama was in charge, and his administration issued cautious statements. They avoided any overt support of the protesters. They focused on nuclear diplomacy, but didn't really say anything about immediate protection of the persons being harmed on the streets. So Tehran learned very quickly that, wow, we can be as violent and suppress these protests as quickly as we want. There isn't going to be any sort of international pressure or any kind of effects that come to us because of it. That was a dangerous lesson they learned. The next big protest occurred in 2017. It was nothing to do with reform. It was about economics. So there'd been, like, an economic collapse. There was corruption. There was a lot of inequality that started leading to this social unrest. Protests started spreading rapidly from cities and then, interestingly, into small towns. But when protesters were in those small towns, they weren't just complaining about the local leadership. They started very publicly complaining about the Supreme Leader, which, of course, did not go over well. The regime came in, killed at least 25 people. They detained thousands. And, of course, there was torture, intimidation, all the usual that comes along with it. Now, the US response rhetorically, was much stronger than it was in 2009, but it really lacked any kind of tangible support to these civilians who were protesting. And it didn't offer them a way to do secure communications to get information out to us or even provide any sort of asylum for some of these people being detained and unfortunately put up for executions and those type of things. And then in November 2019, you know, there was another series of protests. This really occurred because overnight, the Iranian regime massively increased oil prices. The protests erupted nationwide, of course, because we already told you, people are in a bad economic state. They can't afford these increased oil prices. And then the regime took the opportunity to crack down in one of its most deadliest events. Now, because of some of the media control, the numbers really vary on this, but it sounds like it was up to 1500 people were killed. There was almost a total Internet blackout across the entire country because, of course, they wanted to hide these killings. And then the mass arrest. We don't even have any concept of just how many people got arrested during this protest. And at the time, it was now the Trump administration, and they didn't post sanctions after the fact. But as you can imagine, that didn't help with, like, the current violence or just the deaths in real time. In 2022, we got the Women Life Freedom movement. This is, unfortunately, the movement that came after the death of Mahsa Amini. When she was in the morality police custody. This led to mass protests in the streets. And. And the special thing about this movement, it was women led. It also brought out a lot of underage protesters, minorities, et cetera. It was a real coming together of the population the first time, I think, so many different elements came together. Cities saw mass demonstrations. These demonstrations were the biggest in Iran since 1979. And even then, the Iranian regime didn't take a step back and think, hey, maybe we should do something different. Nope. They handled it as ruthlessly as possible. You know, at least 550 protesters were killed. Tens of thousands were detained. They even detained minors. And then they did something so atrocious. Like we talked about how in the past there definitely has been sexual violence against women in these prisons, but this time, they really took it to an extreme and made sure they harmed as many women sexually as possible in these prisons, because they're like, we want to make this a deterrence. We want to make a woman think, hey, if I go to the street and protest and I get detained, this horrible thing is going to happen to me in prison. Right. They're trying to discourage the women from being involved in this movement. You know, it did not work, but it was just a horrible way. Again, the security state got away with kind of implementing the rules they want on the people. Right. You don't get a say in this government, unfortunately. Now, even several US Citizens, some dual nationals, were also picked up. Because, remember, Iran also has this program where they take American hostages as leverage. We pay them billions of dollars. It's very, very, very broken. It's like they get away with these things constantly. It's incredibly frustrating. So at the time, it was the Biden administration. They condemn the violence, and then they sanctioned the morality police. I'm not sure that did a lot to them, but, you know, they at least sanctioned those units. They didn provide, though, kind of any Internet access for some of these victims to reach out or like some protections for the women, the journalists, et cetera, who were harmed in this case. And protesters really learned this time that survival depended on courage. Right. The international community was not going to step up and help you. Now, I also want to take a minute, though, and just, just step back as I walk through a number of protests, and we'll also talk about the current one. But I want you to understand that just because there's not a protest in the street does not mean a protest is not occurring. So in these phases, in between these years, I told you, like 2009-2017-2019-2022, and now late 2025. In between, the protests basically went underground and they almost cultural protests. A really great example is rapper Too Much Salehi. So he was very well known a lot during the 2022 protest because he started rapping about the Iranian regime's like, crimes against protesters and the way they harm people. And of course, he got detained and jailed and he was sent sentenced to death for it. Luckily, because he had a little bit of international presence, there was kind of a global push to really make sure he didn't get the death penalty. So United nations got involved, Amnesty International got involved. And then luckily, a couple people in the music industry got involved. Coldplay stepped up to defend him. We had Sting involved. So all of this international pressure really pushed down on the Iranian Supreme Court, and they kind of had had to reverse, you know, his death penalty. I want to tell you though, what they charged him with. Okay, I want to give you the exact verbiage because you won't even believe this. His charge was called corruption on Earth. This is how ridiculous this country is. He was being put to death by a very corrupt regime for corruption on Earth. I mean, it's just the most craziest thing. So luckily he's back to making music, but we have to be member. Like using art in this case was a form of protest, right? It was defiance. When you watch his rap videos, you saw it in it, and then luckily it brought international solidarity to the case. So when people are not in the streets, don't think this kind of revolution isn't alive and it's not evolving under the surface. So, you know, it's been a wild weekend watching these protests in Iran. We're going to now discuss kind of this current. Since we've talked about the history of the protest over the last 15, 20 years, and we'll discuss what we're seeing, what's different, how it feels on the ground, and then maybe some of the strategic adaptations the Iranian government's making, which is going to make this a lot more dangerous for Iranians. And then lastly, a little bit about the US Government response and where we see them going. So first off, this current wave is looking to be the largest mass protest since 1979. Many, many years, our government has said, yeah, Iranians are doing protests, but they never push it to the level that we think there's going to be a successful revolution. Well, this time is a lot different. They have not only gotten a lot larger, we have seen them go at police stations, they burn mosques. Recently they killed kind of a senior commander in the Iranian security forces. Right. This is an escalation like we haven't seen before. And even as government has increased and done these massive crackdowns, it's almost like more people are coming out to the streets. So it's very interesting to watch. Now the protests are in 180 cities right now, all 31 provinces. And then we're seeing massive ones like in Tehran, Mashad, et cetera. The government has tried to do a few different things. One is they recently on Saturday were like, we'll just cut off all the power to the street, take off all the street lights. And of course, that didn't stop the Iranians from coming out. And they just came out and used their cell phone cameras as light. So we're going to show you that it's very interesting to watch. Or you just hear them chanting in the dark. They're like, this isn't going to scare us. We've been in darkness for like 47 years. So we're really seeing something stronger than we've ever seen before. Now, we're going to talk a little bit today about some of the numbers, but because of these mass blackouts of communications, we have to understand nothing is exactly accurate right now. So we can say what's being said. But just understand, starting January 8th, the government really did like a complete digital blackout, right? They shut down social media, the phone lines, kind of any way to communicate externally. Now people talk about Starlink being there, and it is, and it's great. There's about 10,000 plus Starlink term in Iran. But even then, it's super, super complicated. The government's trying to find ways to jam satellites. The other thing is, as they're attempting to go at these devices, it leads to, like, a loss of data. It slows everything down. Very few people really have these up and working. So just think about it like the majority of Iranians are like completely black and cut out to the outside. So, so obviously we are getting trickles out from Starlink, which is a really great thing, and we hope Starlink finds ways to actually improve that. Some of the things could be making cell phones more capable, obviously, to talk to Starlink. So there's some technology pushes that can help. Starlink has been putting out different updates to prevent the government from being able to affect the technology behind this. But it is just important to know while this is a tool, it's not really a tool in everybody's hands. And so not everybody can get out information. So there's Just a lot of holes and gaps. Now, when we talk about these holes and gaps, the biggest one is right now the death toll. So it's pretty clear that well over 10,000 people have been detained, including children, which is a very frustrating thing to see. The death toll ranges, though, kind of from around the thousand mark to 2,500 over the course of the last, like, dozen days, with the str strongest occurring once this blackout occurred. Right. Because, of course, the Iranian regime is trying to quell this protest as fast as possible. So it's almost like you turn the lights off, you be as brutal as possible, and then you push people back into their homes and try to keep them away. And you do that, unfortunately, by harming them. Right. So we don't know those numbers yet, but it's pretty consistent. It seems to be 1000. Some of the hospitals are reporting out kind of the numbers they're seeing of dead and injured. They are getting overwhelmed, too. So there's kind of even lines to get into the hospital and get people treatment. Frustrating situation for the people on the ground. Now, the other thing is when you're on the ground, because kind of judiciary and the leadership in Iran is really calling these people terrorists. They're treating them in that way. So lethal force is okay. So we are seeing live ammunition, tear gas, a lot of different riot control mechanisms coming into place. Right? So people are really getting harmed. Some videos did come out this weekend where we unfortunately saw some of these deaths. We saw some of the security forces, you know, motorcycles just indiscriminately shooting at people. You know, it's a very scary kind of situation to be in. But still these people aren't staying home, Right? They're still going out and getting in the streets and getting involved. And so that's really, really amazing to see this courage and bravery. We're hearing, of course, a lot of chants, of slogans in the streets. Some of that's being twisted in the West. At the end of the day, the Iranian people just want to be out from this Islamist regime. Right? And that's really what we need to focus on. We now have people on both sides of the aisle here kind of arguing about, well, who then should take Iran, right? Should it be the Shah? We have all these lobbyists working for the mec, a group in Iran, and it's like, guys, guys, guys, guys. We're not even there yet. There's people being shot in the streets today. Let's focus on the current situation we're in. Stop always playing political games. People are dying. So that can be a frustrating thing. Now another thing the Iranian regime has done which is incredibly concerning is they have asked for outside help from some of their proxy militias. We're talking about some of the Iraqi groups and Hezbollah. So the numbers. But again, this could be all over the place because remember, the information is super limited coming out of Iran, right, Saying at least about 900 of these foreign fighters have come into Iran to support quelling the protests. Well, of course that brings in another escalation, right, because we have the Iranian police, we have the irgc, which aren't really good with human rights. And then now we have more terrorist groups adding into the mix and that makes it so much more dangerous for the people in the situation. This is a major escalation. Now what's fueling this wave? We're getting a lot of misinformation. Well, it was just a bad economy and they came to the streets. Of course, that's a piece of it. We have talked about economic collapse. You know, in one of the last protests, it's really like the whole economy is distressed, okay? And so they have this record inflation, so it's hard to afford food, it's hard to afford housing. Kind of the youth threat, maybe the generation in their 20s and 30s, they're really underemployed or they're not employed at all, which is a very, very frustrating thing. As you can imagine, the currency has really been collaps collapsing. And then there's just a lot of frustration with the corruption, the elites and just of course, this lack of accountability across this Islamist government. Now then, who is protesting really at this point, it's pretty much just a cross cut of the entire population. When it first started, it was a lot of bazaar merchants and shopkeepers. And then it was like working in middle class because of course, when you have a bad economy, these people are by affected, affected the most, the middle class. And then we saw a lot of this younger generation. As I told you, they're very impacted by a bad economy because they don't get any opportunity to kind of even get started in their career, in their life. Now when we talk about the different demonstrations and how they're organized, it's very interesting. Of course there's mass protests in the cities, as you'd expect. But I told you, they're in 180 different places, right? So there is is some pieces of coordination even with this limited communication. So it's really interesting to see so many people come together for the same cause, even with how difficult it Is also in some of these provinces, the protests are synchronized. They're kind of meeting at the same places, going out. There's a lot of, as you sing, nighttime protests. Because the Iranian regime was really starting at the beginning of this and being like, hey, we're gonna use the COVID of darkness even before they shut off the power. We're gonna go and pull people out of their homes. We're gonna do detentions in the middle of the night. We're gonna harm people in the middle of the night so it doesn't get re recorded and nobody knows about it. And so the protesters were like, fine, you wanna play that game? We're all gonna come up, we're all gonna record, we're all gonna be witness to these atrocities. You aren't gonna hide by the night. So it's a very, very smart thing that they did. Another thing, I told you a lot of things, business people are involved in this, these shopkeepers and stuff. So they've had rolling walkouts, rolling strikes, but also just they're closing their businesses early, right? Hey, we're close. We're backing the protests, we're in support of them. So it also makes it a little more inconvenient for the people supporting the regime. Right. Because the places they frequent are now being closed to support it. The other thing that protesters are doing that's really smart is they're kind of making, making like community and neighborhood defense mechanisms. For a long time, it's kind of flipped the other way. And the Iranian government has used their neighbors to spy on them. And they're like, hey, we need to fortify where we're basing our protests. We need to end the surveillance of going up and like physically destroying these CCTV cameras in their neighborhoods. And it's also then allowing them to limit access to the areas where they're kind of, of holding kind of ground so they can keep some of these forces out, which has been very, very smart. Cause remember, they have limited access to weapons. They have to be really creative in how they hold ground. And the best way to do that, of course, is within numbers. Right. And you know the train better than anyone else, and you don't let them surveil and surprise you in any way. So it's super smart. But you do see a bunch of mixed tactics. And really, is the protesters also evolving over time and learning different ways to get around kind of this brutality and the security state imposed by the Iranian regime? Now on that side of the government, we've seen this horrible escalation. They're treating these protesters as enemies of the state. But what everyone cares about is not what the Iranian regime is saying. It's like, hey, what is the west and especially the US Saying? You know, the protesters are really leaning into hope, right, that the US Government's gonna get involved. There's been many times they really haven't had faith the US Would. And at times, the US has undercut the protesters, but this time they feel. Last time we protested during the last Trump administration, he kind of came in after the fact, did sanctions, but he really didn't save any of the protesters. That has to weigh on him. He's talked about how he doesn't want to see these innocent Iranians harmed. You know, now that we could be one or two thousand deaths in. There is a lot belief that, hey, how is this affecting him? How is this weighing on him? And Trump has put out some positive statements. He's been on film, but he also put out one tweet and retweeted another. And I want to talk about these. One is, if Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Right? That gave so many people hope. I don't know if you saw originally after that, Iranians were going up in, like, changing street names to Trump's name in the city, right? Because it really kind of reinvigorated them. And there's a lot of different assessments coming out saying, hey, if the Iranians just do it themselves, keep this same course, they really could overthrow the government within a few months. However, if the US Gets involved and Trump really does do some sort of effects against the regime, that massively shortens the timeline. Obviously, if you massively short the timeline, no matter what happens, at least to these protesters, they think less of us will die. You know, we're in a really tough situation here because, of course, if the Iranian regime comes out ahead like they usually do, unfortunately in these cases, a lot of these people know that, oh, gosh, I'm gonna be potentially executed at the end of this. They know this risk and are still going out to the streets. It's just such a brave thing to see, right? They are done being ruled by these terrorists. Now, the other tweet Trump reported retweeted, but it got a lot of attention, was, it's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change? And then he has, like, Miga, right, his play on Make America Great Again. So, as you can imagine, this brings so much hope to the Iranians. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, under his personal account, of course, has said he's with the Iranian people. There's been a few of these. I think one of the US facilities in Iraq retweeted it. Now, Iranians are seeing these little pieces of information when they do get access online, and it is giving them hope and it is helping them come to the streets the next day because they're like, hey, the US Is going to step in, right? They're going to stop this regime from killing us. And that is something they're waiting on, of course. How is that done? How do you do that? And really, the best way, of course, is for the US Government hit, you know, Iranian regime military targets, of course, these weapons depots because the weapons are harming the citizens, et cetera. Right? There are strategic sites that can be hit in a bombing campaign. Right. No one's asking US troops to come into Iran, but it's like, hey, give us this leg up. Do some sort of campaign to change the tide a bit. Because remember. Right. Right now, the only focus these police and security services have in Iran, there's not really another enemy fighting them right now in the country is these protesters. Well, if they now have to secure some of their sensitive sites, these weapons depots, as I'm talking about, et cetera, they now have to shift their focus off of the street protests and onto their facilities and onto their people. And they need to get everybody kind of safe in those locations that they'd be worried about being hit. So they now have to waste time and resources to protect themselves. And while they're doing that, they're not harming people. Right? So this is kind of that trade off of, hey, this is how you help and support our movement. So when you look at Iran, just remember Iran is not unstable because there's these protests. These protests are occurring because this entire system they're running is unstable. It's economically, politically, socially, heck, even from a religious standpoint. So this current wave in these hundreds of cities is, like I told you, built on all these previous protests. This is not going to end. These are gonna continue until this regime is gone. The majority of the population do not wanna live under these terrorists. You know, this people kind of talk, oh, we don't want a regime change. They forget the mullahs in charge of Iran right now were the reg. 47 years ago. Right? All Iranians are asking is, hey, let's just reverse course and you get that regime change out of here. We never wanted them to begin with. They've caused so much damage to this country. Right. We just want to start over, you know, go back 47 years. And it's such a funny thing like, so they're not asking for some massive change. They're saying, hey, can someone come and help fix this problem that really the western world forced on them, you know, many years ago ago? So we'll keep watching. You know, as these protests occur, they're getting so much more lethal. Watching the videos is very, very, very hard. But we do need to be honest about what is occurring. This is what it's like to live under terrorists. They will treat their own people this way. They will harm their own people and we have to be honest about that. You know, we'll keep you updated as the situation evolves. And thanks for tuning in. This is the watchfor.
