We Who Have Never Known Revolution
Nate Bear
Jan 16, 2026
The reactions to the protests in Iran have been insufferable.
Predictably from the right, but also from the left. And often they’ve been indistinguishable.
I watched a viral Instagram video by a western comedian leftist influencer who ‘explained’ what was happening in Iran by repeating CIA/Mossad/MI6 talking points about the ‘regime.’
Owen Jones wrote a Guardian article reproducing the same western security service talking points about the ‘barbarous regime.’ (One pro-regime change Guardian journalist incidentally, has written 19 articles in 16 days for the paper.)
Multimillionaire leftist streamer Hasan Piker said the US should lift sanctions on the condition of elections in Iran.
The right were more inclined to also demand the bombing of Iran. But on the evilness of the ‘regime,’ (a manipulation of language never applied to one-party states aligned with western imperialism), well, everyone was on board.
The only distinguishing feature was the leftist invocation to stand with the protestors and against Trump. This was presented by people like Owen Jones as the goldilocks position, the product of the virtuous, compassionate, rapier-sharp mind.
The drivel from the right wasn’t surprising and can be dismissed, but the drivel from the left, and the overlap therein, needs to be examined.
Why, just like for the right, did ‘the Iranian people’, in a moment of opportunistic chaos, become a monolith for the left too? Why did many on the left, with the forces of imperialism poised to strike, throw off the shackles of anti-imperial critique and decide the protestors were the true expression of all Iranian thought and desire? Why did many, in the crucial moment, decide not to burden themselves with any level of intellectual probity?
For people like Owen Jones and leftists influencers, there was no attempt to wonder whether the repetition of CIA/Mossad/MI6 talking points was bad. No attempt to read beyond the mainstream and wonder how the protests started. No attempt to investigate why the protests turned violent. No attempt to wonder why protests in Iran always dominate western headlines yet protests in other countries do no such thing.
One reason for this, a reason many on the left won’t admit, is because they, like the right, view Iran as a unique evil. Decades of brainwashing about the “ayatollahs” and the “mullahs” has done just as thorough a job on the left as it has on the right. And therefore, at moments of crisis, we read nothing from the professional pontificating left that could counter imperial rhetoric. All we see, all we saw, were the same notes being sung from the hymn sheet, minus, perhaps, the odd quaver or two.
It got me thinking: so often we in the west do not see ourselves because we cannot see ourselves.
We do not understand what we are from, and as such, we cannot understand what others are from either.
Modern Iran is the result of a revolution. A proper, popular, multifaceted revolution which overthrew a corrupt, repressive monarchist leader aligned with the west and installed a revolutionary form of anti-imperial, Islamic governance. Both the form of governance and the process of its emergence are beyond our understanding and, crucially our, imaginations, forged, as they have been, by imperialist, bourgeois sensibilities.
The Iranian academic, Helyeh Doutaghi, put it best in a must-read article about how Iranian unions organise and act within the context of a revolutionary state.
“Resistance within a state forged through popular revolution and committed to anti-imperialism requires a set of principles and practices distinct from those practiced in the imperial core."
Many in the west truly cannot understand this because we inhabit anti-revolutionary states of both the political and the physical.
We are imperial bodies in imperial lands.
We long ago submitted to the forces of enclosure, capitalism and neoliberalism, forces which are overwhelmingly anti-revolutionary in nature.
We sit atop stolen treasure, paraded proudly in our museums, and the corpses of millions of innocent people stripped of life by the anti-revolutionary imaginaries of colonialism and imperialism made real.
Leftists like Jones in the imperial core have not an ounce of credibility to pronounce on the wrongness of a revolutionary process he and his kind have never had the guts for. How you can sit comfortably inside the imperial meat grinder and honestly believe you have, whether on the right or left, a moral, let alone intellectual position from which to judge a revolution is beyond me.
But Nate, the American Revolution!
The American Revolution? The American fucking Revolution? The American ‘Revolution’ is the biggest lie, the biggest misnomer in history.
The American Revolution was another episode of European fratricide in a distant, indigenous land. A ‘revolution’ which culminated in a European-on-European civil war within a state that had destroyed and dispossessed the original of the soil.
Eradication has always been, and remains, the preferred form of western revolution.
We see it today, anti-immigrant nativists spewing the language of eradication as the west’s latest ‘revolutionary’ ideology.
The tales white westerners spin in grasping for a heroic, revolutionary heritage make me sick. And these tales are spun while denouncing real, currently-existing revolutions, whether in Iran, in Cuba, in Venezuela or yes, even in North Korea.
We exist within anti-revolutionary, bourgeois formations. Within states of the personal and political committed to nothing other than wealth accumulation and actualisation of the self.
The English made their revolution stick for about three minutes. The French got rid of a monarchy and embraced this power to become the second largest colonial power on earth. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe folded itself into an anti-revolutionary imperial process that embraced neoliberal capitalism and NATO warfare.
We, Europeans and Americans of the USA, have no commitment to a thing outside of ourselves, to a transcendent form of collective existence that goes beyond the self. We have absolutely zero concept of fully realised versions of solidarity.
And to make ourselves feel better about this cowardice, we hide behind systems of liberal democratic electoralism and call it freedom.
Our people go hungry, our shelter costs half our wage, ten men own half our wealth, our health systems are decimated, our taxes get spent murdering distant people in distant lands, but because we can vote for this barbarism we call it freedom!
We call it freedom and we demand, like Piker, that others adopt this system of freedom too.
The fetishization of liberal democracy is the gateway to imperialism.
And imperialism is our perfect revolutionary form.
We of this world, westerners who have never known revolution, we who drip in blood and stolen treasure, have no credibility nor vestige of moral authority to judge the revolutionary processes of others.
Describing why the gas workers unions in Iran did not shut down the gas works while demanding better conditions, Doutaghi, in her article, says that such a praxis “can only be understood within a state forged through popular revolution and subsequently subjected to sustained imperial assault. Protest under conditions of sanctions, war, and regime-change pressure cannot, and should not, mirror the organisational forms, success metrics, or strategic imaginaries developed in the imperial core.”
We can’t understand. But we could.
Jones and the rest could have been writing, if they truly had the courage of their supposed anti-imperial convictions, articles about the revolutionary formations and organisational modes in Iran that balance national sovereignty with justice, revolution with progress.
We could have been hearing about the 21-fold increase in female higher education enrolment since the revolution, how women comprise 60% of all university students, how Iran produces more STEM subject graduates, both male and female, than the US. Do Jones and the aesthetic leftists even know this? Do they know that Iran’s literacy rate, at 90%, is higher than the USA’s?
If they don’t know these facts they are ignorant, and if they do they are negligent. Either way, they decided at the critical moment to reproduce regime change propaganda instead.
Doutaghi explains how Iranians have constantly to guard against these sorts of western imperialist interventions at moments of unrest. She explains how protests in 2022, led by women, “emerged as a set of legitimate social grievances but were rapidly appropriated and rearticulated — through overt Zionist endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare — into a regime-change project.”
Doutaghi also reminds us that the police in Iran cannot be compared with the police in the west who “function as the domestic arm of the empire, suppressing dissent, criminalising resistance.” She says that in Iran, by contrast, the police “exist within a state born of popular revolution, subjected to decades of sanctions, assassinations, sabotage…a state which faces sustained attempts at disarming it internally by delegitimising its capacity to maintain order.”
Leftists and anarchists then, operating inside empire and outside of a revolutionary framework, filter everything through a Eurocentric frame, including the response of the police, who could only ever exist to subjugate the masses.
We can’t understand. But we could.
Leftists would do well to read Doutaghi and seek out viewpoints from Iranian organisers operating within an anti-imperial, revolutionary context.
The next time Iranians protest, those who have never known revolution, risking nothing while covered head to toe in the entrails of empire, would do well to stay quiet.
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/we-who-ha ... revolution
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‘We consider Trump a criminal’: Khamenei
The Iranian leader warned that those responsible ‘will not go unpunished’ even as Tehran rules out wider war
News Desk
JAN 17, 2026
(Photo credit: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader)
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei accused the US and Israel on 17 January of direct responsibility for the deaths of “several thousand” people during weeks of riots in Iran.
Speaking in a nationally broadcast address, Khamenei said actors “linked to Israel and the US caused massive damages and killed several thousand” during protests that began on 28 December in cities across Iran.
“We do consider the US president a criminal, because of casualties and damages, because of accusations against the Iranian nation,” he stressed.
“The latest anti-Iran sedition was different in that the US president personally became involved,” Khamenei said, adding that Washington and Tel Aviv were directing events on the ground.
“We will not drag the country into war, but we will not let domestic or international criminals go unpunished,” the Iranian leader highlighted.
The speech marked the first time Iran’s top authority publicly cited casualties in the thousands following weeks of unrest.
Khamenei also said that the violent foreign-backed rioters burned more than 250 mosques and medical facilities, with Iranian officials saying about 3,000 people have been arrested.
Authorities maintain that the protests began as a genuine expression of grievances over a manufactured currency collapse. These were later “hijacked” by armed groups “equipped, financed, and trained” by foreign powers.
Earlier this month, Iranian authorities said they arrested a Mossad agent embedded among violent protesters, with Iranian media reporting that the detainee confessed to being recruited and directed via social media during unrest tied to sanctions-driven economic collapse.
A Reuters report on 14 January 2026 revealed that Kurdish separatist fighters were dispatched from Iraq and Turkiye toward Iran to exploit the unrest.
After days of near-total blackout, limited SMS and internet services were partially restored across the Islamic Republic as the unrest subsided.
https://thecradle.co/articles/we-consid ... l-khamenei
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Fighting Starlink
January 17, 3:05 PM
Fighting Starlink
Interesting details from the analysis (
https://github.com/narimangharib/starli ... nk-iran.md ) on the fight against Starlink in Iran.
Active GPS spoofing - the terminal detected fake GPS signals (18 satellites visible, GPS is working, but disabled)
Effective countermeasure activation - anti-spoofing protection is activated using the inhibitGps flag
Significant performance degradation - packet loss exceeding 20%, no stable connection, limited throughput
Beam tracking degradation - pointing error is 3-4 times greater than position determination error
Basic connectivity maintained - connection maintained despite electronic warfare
Key takeaway: Even though Starlink's anti-spoofing system is working, GPS interference effectively reduces connectivity from broadband to virtually unusable.
The terminal remains online, but with:
Consistent packet loss of over 20%;
A connection that never stabilizes;
Limited bandwidth
; Suboptimal beam pointing.
This demonstrates that GPS spoofing/jamming is an effective tactic for degrading (but not completely eliminating) satellite internet service. SpaceX's backup positioning algorithms maintain communication, but are currently unable to ensure normal operation under these conditions.
It's worth noting that China and Russia actively assisted in jamming Starlink in Iran.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10311234.html
Google Translator
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Revealed: The CIA-Backed Think Tanks Fueling the Iran Protests
January 16, 2026
In this photo obtained by The Associated Press, Iranians attend an anti-government protest in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 9, 2026. Photo: UGC via AP.
By Alan Macleod – Jan 15, 2026
As waves of deadly demonstrations and counter-demonstrations hit Iran, MintPress examines the CIA-backed think tanks helping to stir the outrage and foment more violence.
One of these groups is Human Rights Activists In Iran, frequently referred to as HRA or HRAI in the media. The group, and its media arm, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) have become the go-to group of experts for Western media, and are the source of many of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their assertions have provided much of the basis for stories in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others. And in a passionate plea for leftists to support the protests, Owen Jones wrote in The Guardian Tuesday that HRAI are a “respected” group whose death toll proclamations are “probably significant underestimates.”
Yet what none of these reports mention is that Human Rights Activists In Iran is bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency, through its cutout organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
“Independent” NGOs, Brought to You By the CIA
Established in 2006, Human Rights Activists in Iran is based in Fairfax, Virginia, just a stone’s throw away from CIA headquarters in Langley. It describes itself as a “non-political” association of activists dedicated to advancing freedom and rights in Iran. On its website, it notes that, “because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from neither political groups nor governments.” Yet, in the same paragraph, it notes that “HRAI has also been accepting donations from National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit, non-governmental organization in the United States of America.” The level of NED investment into HRAI has been substantial, to say the least; journalist Michael Tracey found that, in 2024 alone, the NED had apportioned well over $900,000 towards the organization.
The huge death tolls in Iran being splashed all over the media are sourced to an outfit in Fairfax, VA called "Human Rights Activists in Iran" that is overwhelmingly funded by the US government. What is their methodology? Is it credible? Who cares? Just pump the big numbers out pic.twitter.com/9No2e7n1Dw
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 12, 2026
Another NGO widely cited in recent media reports on the protests is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABCHRI). The group has been quoted widely, including by The Washington Post, PBS, and ABC News. Like with the HRAI, these reports also fail to disclose the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center’s proximity to the U.S. national security state.
Although it does not mention it in its funding disclaimer, the center is supported by the NED. Last year, the NED described the center as a “partner” organization, and awarded its director, Roya Boroumand, their 2024 Goler T. Butcher medal for democracy promotion.
“Roya and her organization have worked rigorously and objectively to document human rights violations committed by the regime in Iran,” said Amira Maaty, senior director for NED’s Middle East and North Africa programs. “The work of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center is an indispensable resource for victims to seek justice and hold perpetrators accountable under international law. NED is proud to support Roya and the center in their advocacy for human rights and tireless pursuit of a democratic future for Iran.”
In addition to this, sitting on the center’s board of directors is controversial academic, Francis Fukuyama, a former NED board member and an editor of its “Journal of Democracy” publication.
If anything, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has gone further than HRAI or the ABCHRI. Widely cited across Western media (e.g., The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today), the CHRI has been the source of many of the goriest and most lurid stories coming out of Iran. A Monday article in The Washington Post, for example, leaned on the CHRI’s expertise to report that Iranian hospitals were being overwhelmed and had even run out of blood to treat the victims of government repression. “A massacre is unfolding. The world must act now to prevent further loss of life,” a CHRI spokesperson said. Given President Trump’s recent threats about U.S. military attacks on Iran, the implications of the statement were clear.
And yet, like with the other NGOs profiled, none of the corporate media outlets citing the Center for Human Rights in Iran noted its close connections to the U.S. national security state. The CHRI – an Iranian human rights group based in New York City and Washington, D.C. – was identified by the government of China as directly funded by the NED.
The claim is far from outlandish, given that CHRI board member, Mehrangiz Kar, is a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the NED. And in 2002 at a star-studded gala on Capitol Hill, First Lady Laura Bush and future president Joe Biden presented Kar with the NED’s annual Democracy Award.
A History of Regime Change Ops
The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, after a series of scandals had seriously damaged the image and reputation of the CIA. The Church Committee – a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into CIA activities – found that the agency had masterminded the assassination of several foreign heads of state, was involved in a massive domestic surveillance campaign against progressive groups, had infiltrated and placed agents in hundreds of U.S. media outlets, and was carrying out shocking mind control experiments on unwilling American participants.
Technically a private entity, although receiving virtually all its funding from the federal government and being staffed by ex-spooks, the NED was created as a way to outsource many of the agency’s most controversial activities, especially overseas regime change operations. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, the NED’s longtime president, said in 1986. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.
Part of the CIA’s mission was to create a worldwide network of media outlets and NGOs that would parrot CIA talking points, passing it off as credible news. As former CIA taskforce leader John Stockwell admitted, “I had propagandists all over the world.” Stockwell went on to describe how he helped flood the world with fake news demonizing Cuba:
We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”
Mike Pompeo, former CIA director, alluded this being active CIA policy. At a 2019 talk at Texas A&M University, he said, “When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on] it!”
One of the NED’s greatest successes came in 1996, when it successfully swung elections in Russia, spending vast amounts of money to ensure U.S. puppet ruler Boris Yeltsin would remain in power. Yeltsin, who came to power in a 1993 coup that dissolved parliament, was deeply unpopular, and it appeared that the Russian public were ready to vote for a return to Communism. The NED and other American agencies flooded Russia with money and propaganda, ensuring their man remained in power. The story was cataloged in a famous edition of Time magazine, whose title page was emblazoned with the words, “Yanks To The Rescue: the Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win.”
Six years later, the NED provided both the finances and the brains for a briefly successful coup d’état against Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. The NED spent hundreds of thousands of dollars flying coup leaders (such as Marina Corina Machado) back and forth to Washington, D.C. After the coup was overturned and the plot was exposed, NED funding to Machado and her allies actually increased, and the organization has continued to fund her and her political organizations.
The NED would have more luck in Ukraine, playing a key role in the successful 2014 Maidan Revolution that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with a pro-U.S. successor. The Maidan affair followed a tried-and-tested formula, with large numbers of people coming out to protest, and a hardcore of trained paramilitaries carrying out acts of violence aimed at destabilizing the government and provoking a military response.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (and future NED board member) Victoria Nuland flew to Kiev to signal the U.S. government’s full support of the movement to oust Yanukovych, even handing out cookies to protestors in the city’s main square. A leaked telephone call showed that the new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was directly chosen by Nuland. “Yats is the guy,” she can be heard telling U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, citing his experience and friendliness with Washington as key factors. The 2014 Maidan Revolution and its aftermath would lead to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine eight years later.
Just across the border in Belarus, the NED planned similar actions to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko. At the time of the attempt (2020-2021), the NED was pursuing 40 active projects inside the country.
On a Zoom call infiltrated and covertly recorded by activists, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko were trained by her organization. “We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,” she said, noting that the NED had made a “significant contribution” to the protests.
On the same call, NED President Gershman noted that “we support many, many groups, and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile,” boasting that the Belarusian government was powerless to stop them. “We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out,” he said, comparing the NED to other U.S. regime change organizations.
The attempted Color Revolution did not succeed, however, as demonstrators were met with large counter-demonstrations, and Lukashenko remains in power to this day. The NED’s actions were a key factor in Lukashenko’s decision to abandon his relationship with the West, and ally Belarus with Russia.
Just months after their failure in Belarus, the NED fomented another regime change attempt, this time in Cuba. The agency spent millions of dollars infiltrating and buying off pliant musical artists, especially in the hip hop community, in an attempt to turn local popular culture against its revolution. Led by Cuban rappers, the U.S. attempted to rally the people into the streets, flooding social media with calls from celebrities and politicians alike to topple the government. This did not translate into boots on the ground, however, and the fiasco was written off sarcastically as the U.S.’ “Bay of Tweets.”
So many of the most visible protest movements the world over have been quietly masterminded by the NED. This includes the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, wherein the agency funnelled millions to the movement’s leaders to keep people in the streets as long as possible. The NED continues to work with Uyghur and Tibetan separatist groups, in the hope of destabilizing China. Other known NED meddling projects include interfering with elections in France, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Poland.
It is precisely for these reasons, therefore, that accepting funding from the NED should be unthinkable for any serious NGO or human rights organization, as so many that do have been front groups for American power and clandestine regime change operations. It is also why the public should be extremely wary about any claims made by organizations on the payroll of a CIA cutout organization, especially those that attempt to hide the fact. Journalists, too, have a duty to scrutinize any statements made by these groups, and inform their readers and viewers about their inherent conflicts of interests.
Targeting Iran
Apart from funding the three U.S.-based human rights NGOs profiled here, the NED is spearheading a myriad of operations targeting the Islamic Republic. According to its 2025 grant listings, there are currently 18 active NED projects for Iran, although the agency does not divulge any of the groups they are working with.
It also refuses to divulge any hard details about these projects, beyond rather bland descriptions that include:
Empowering” a network of “frontline and exiled activists” inside Iran;
“Promoting independent journalism,” and “Establishing media platforms to influence the public;”
“Monitoring and promoting human rights;”
“Fostering internet freedom;”
“Training student leaders inside Iran;”
“Advancing policy analysis, debate, and collective actions on democracy,” and;
“Foster[ing] collaboration between Iranian civil society and political activists on a democratic vision and raise awareness on civic rights within the legal community, the organization will facilitate debate on transition models from authoritarianism to democracy.”
Reading between the lines, the NED is attempting to build up a widespread network of media outlets, NGOs, activists, intellectuals, student leaders and politicians who will all sing from the same hymn sheet, that of “transitioning” from “authoritarianism” (i.e., the current system of government” to “democracy,” (i.e., a U.S.-picked government). In other words: regime change.
Iran, of course, has been in American crosshairs ever since the removal of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Pahlavi himself had been kept in place by the CIA, who engineered a coup against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh (1952-53). Mossadegh, a secular liberal reformer, had angered Washington by nationalizing the country’s oil industry, carrying out land reform, and refusing to crush the communist Tudeh Party.
The CIA (the NED’s parent organization), infiltrated Iranian media, paying them to run hysterical anti-Mossadegh content, carried out terror attacks inside Iran, bribed officials to turn against the president, cultivated ties with reactionary elements within the military, and paid protestors to flood the streets at anti-Mossadegh rallies.
The shah reigned for 26 bloody years between 1953 and 1979, until he was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution.
The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, who almost immediately invaded Iran, leading to a bitter, eight-year long conflict that killed at least half a million people. Washington supplied Hussein with a wide range of weapons, including components for chemical weapons used on Iranians, as well as other weapons of mass destruction.
Since 1979, Iran has also been under restrictive American economic sanctions, measures that have severely hindered the country’s development. During his first term, Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal and turned up the economic pressure. The result was a collapse in the value of the Iranian rial, mass unemployment, soaring rents and a doubling of the price of food. Ordinary people lost both their savings and their long-term security.
Throughout this, Trump has constantly threatened Iran with attack, finally following through in June, bombing a host of infrastructure projects inside the country.
A Legitimate Protest?
The current demonstrations began on December 28 as a protest against rising prices. Yet they quickly ballooned into something much bigger, with thousands calling for an overthrow of the government, and even the reinstatement of the monarchy under the son of the shah, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
They were quickly supported and signal boosted by the U.S. and Israeli national security states. “The Iranian regime is in trouble,” Pompeo announced. “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…” he added. Israeli media are openly reporting that “foreign elements” (i.e., Israeli) are “arming the protesters in Iran with live weapons, and this is the reason for the hundreds of dead among the regime’s people.”
The Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope.
Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege — Mashed, Tehran, Zahedan. Next stop: Baluchistan.
47 years of this regime; POTUS 47. Coincidence?
Happy New Year to every Iranian in the…
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) January 2, 2026
The Israeli intelligence services confirmed Pompeo’s not-so-cryptic assertion. “Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the spying agency’s official social media accounts instructed Iranians: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”
Trump echoed those words. “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price,” he roared, adding that American “help is on the way.”
Any debate about what Trump meant by “American help” was ended on Monday, when he stated that “If Iran shots [sic] 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.” He also attempted to place an all-out economic blockade, announcing that any country trading with Tehran would face an additional 25% tariff.
All of this, added to the increasing violence of the protests, makes it much harder for Iranians to express themselves politically. What started as a demonstration about the cost of living has spiralled into a huge, openly insurrectionist movement, backed and fomented by the U.S. and Israel. Iranians, of course, have every right to protest, but a wealth of factors have raised the very real possibility that much of the anti-government movement is an inorganic, U.S.-orchestrated attempt at regime change. While Iranians can argue about how they wish to express themselves and what sort of government they want, what is undebatable is that so many of the think tanks and NGOs called upon to provide supposed expert evidence and commentary about these protests are tools of the National Endowment for Democracy.
(MintPress News)
https://orinocotribune.com/revealed-the ... -protests/
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Iran – The ‘Ragtag Network Of Activists’ Run By The State Department
As the recent ‘regime change’ operation in Iran has now evidently failed the media are allowed to revile some details of the powers behind it.
Inside the Fight to Keep Iran Online (archived) – NY Times, Jan 16 2026
Activists spent years preparing for a communications blackout in Iran, smuggling in Starlink satellite internet systems and making digital shutdowns harder for the authorities to enforce.
Iran’s communications blackout last week seemed complete. Internet and cellular networks had been shut down by the authorities. Online banking, shopping and text messaging services stopped working. Information about the growing protests was scarce.
Yet a ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers pierced Iran’s digital barricades. Using thousands of Starlink satellite internet systems that they had quietly smuggled into the country, they got online and spread images of troops firing into the streets and families searching for bodies.
A ‘ragtag network’ of ‘activists’ … Let’s see who, according to the piece, belongs to it:
“You need to plan to have that infrastructure in place,” said Fereidoon Bashar, the executive director of ASL19, a digital rights group focused on Iran. “This is because of years of planning and work among different groups.”
ASL19 is an Iranian ‘regime change’ group in Canada. Its website says:
We build innovative solutions to advance human rights and civil liberty in Iran
Its ‘About’ page says nothing about who is behind it or how the group is financed. A Wikipedia page about the organization leaves some doubt about the its integrity:
ASL19 (Persian: اصل ١٩) is an independent technology organisation that works toward practical responses for online access to information. Their work has been mired in allegations of sexual abuse and workplace harassment.
Based in Toronto, ASL19 was founded in 2012 with the support of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
The University of Toronto has sought to distance themselves from the organisation since controversy about the organization was raised in 2017.
…
An investigative reportage by The Verge and an open letter from anonymous former female employees alleged workplace abuse and harassment existed within the organization. A freedom of information request from Ontario human rights tribunal demonstrated that an allegation of abuse and sexual assault had occurred within the workplace, while ASL19 managing staffs were allegedly complicit in covering up the alleged abuse. In the one reported case the organisation reportedly sought out a non-disclosure agreement.
Digital rights organisation Access Now terminated their partnership with ASL19 for their RightsCon summit series in December 2017.
Back to the NY Times piece:
“This is the most severe internet shutdown that we have experienced,” said Ahmad Ahmadian, an exiled activist who was also involved in smuggling the satellite internet systems into Iran. “Starlink is a lifeline.”
Hmm…:
Ahmad Ahmadian is President and CEO of Holistic Resilience, a U.S.-based nonprofit that develops technologies to deliver uncensored information and counter state surveillance, with a primary focus on Iran. …
Holisticresilience.us has a one page website with some blubber but no real information on it. None of the projects Ahmad Ahmadian claims to lead is mentioned. There is a contact form without any name on it.
There is also a ‘donation’ page leading to a fundraisup.com page which says that it has ‘$17,392.70 raised of $1M USD goal’ to buy Starlink antennas. An Ahmad Ahmadian Twitter account, launched in 2009, follows 995 person but is itself followed by only 650 other users. A related joinNASNET (NasNet l استارلینک برای ایران) tweets a lot about Starlink in Farsi. It is following 49 others and has about 10,100 followers.
Onto a another ‘ragtag activists’ in the NY Times piece:
[O]n Jan. 8, as mass protests swelled, Iranian officials turned off the internet altogether, sending the country of 90 million people into a digital blackout. VPNs stopped working. Iran’s internet traffic dropped 99 percent, according to the monitoring group Netblocks.
The government “panicked,” said Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert with Miaan, a digital rights group focused on Iran.
Miaan.org has at least some pages on its website. Its About page says that:
Miaan is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit entity headquartered in Austin with staff and activities across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
It mentions 11 people working for it. There is zero information on how Miaan is financed.
But we do not have to guess much about that. We are now down at the 18th paragraph of NY Times piece on a ‘ragtag network of activists’ which finally hints to who is organizing and financing it:
The State Department coordinated with SpaceX on the sanctions exemption for digital communication tools in Iran. It also provided support to civil society groups about how to hide the systems from government detection, according to a Biden administration official involved in the plans.
It is the U.S. government which provided the various regime change groups with the money to smuggle some 50,000 Starlink terminals into Iran.
But the whole costly endeavor did not play out as planned. Starlink terminals use GPS to define their own position which they need to know to be able to find and connect to Starlink’s satellites. GPS signals are weak and easy to fake. The Iranian government is spoofing GPS signals giving fake locations which confuses the Starlink terminals. They can not find and connect to the satellites they need. (There are additional ways to detect and locate single active Starlink terminals. But to disable a large number of them GPS spoofing is currently the best way to go.)
With Starlink out the foreign coordinators of the armed rioters on the ground in Iran have no longer the means to control them.
The media ‘regime change’ influencers no longer receive the fresh ‘horror’ videos to keep the public anti-Iran campaign going. AI created fake videos spread by bot-accounts are only a sad replacement (archived):
The internet blackout in Iran has stanched the flow of reliable information about the political unrest roiling the country. Filling the void has been a deluge of propaganda, disinformation and influence campaigns from countries or parties trying to shape the outcome of the conflict.
Inauthentic accounts online — also known as bots — have spread false and conflicting narratives on X, Instagram and other social media platforms in recent days, according to several experts in disinformation flow and the Iranian information ecosystem. The bots have shared misleading or artificially generated photographs and videos, further muddling what is actually happening on the ground.
…
A report published in October by the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group, concluded that a network of more than 50 inauthentic profiles on X, the social media platform, was organized by the Israeli government or a closely supervised subcontractor. The network, according to researchers, started ramping up its use of artificial intelligence early last year to spread narratives encouraging Iranians to revolt.
…
A separate campaign on X has sought to bolster support for Mr. Pahlavi, the scion of the dynasty that once ruled Iran, according to Philip Mai, senior researcher of the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. (Other researchers and journalists have recently linked Israeli influence operations to online content that is written in Persian and supportive of Mr. Pahlavi, a figure known to have close ties with Israel.)
Having watched several regime change attempts over the years I find interesting and somewhat surprising that communication is the major weak point for such operations. Iran has proved that by shutting that it down, temporarily, can stop the immediate action.
Posted by b on January 16, 2026 at 15:55 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2026/01/i ... tment.html
- Iranian state-affiliated media reports that since nationwide protests began in Iran, rioters have damaged or vandalised nearly 25 mosques and religious institutions. pic.twitter.com/6dO9c6v3Xe
(@Pak_Osint) January 10, 2026
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