Professor Kazem Kazerounian, University of Connecticut, USA
Iran is once again in uprising. Streets fill with people. Voices rise despite fear, surveillance, and violence. What we are witnessing today is not a sudden or isolated event. It is the continuation of a long and painful struggle. Fifty years of resistance against the current regime, and more than a century of struggle for freedom, dignity, and popular sovereignty.
From the Constitutional Revolution to the fall of the Shah, the Iranian people have repeatedly demanded control over their own destiny. From early resistance to clerical rule to the mass uprisings of recent decades, this demand has never disappeared. Every generation has paid a heavy price. Prison, exile, torture, and execution are woven into modern Iranian history. Yet the will to resist has endured, carried forward from one generation to the next.
This uprising is powered by something the regime fears deeply. Hope. Hope that change is not only necessary but possible. Hope that this time the movement will not be crushed, diverted, or stolen. Hope that Iranians can finally break free from the cycle of dictatorship, even when that cycle presents itself with different symbols and different rhetoric.
That hope is now under systematic attack. The Islamic Republic attacks it openly through bullets, batons, arrests, and executions. But there is another assault that operates more quietly and more insidiously. It comes from a media operation tied to Reza Pahlavi’s inner circle, a network many activists describe as a mafia structure. This network appears to work in parallel, and at times in alignment, with the psychological warfare efforts of the IRGC.
The tactic is calculated. Videos from inside Iran are taken and manipulated. Footage of protesters chanting against dictatorship, repression, and the Supreme Leader is stripped of its original sound. It is then layered with fabricated slogans praising the Shah or Reza Pahlavi. These chants were never heard in those streets. They were never spoken by those risking their lives under the guns of the regime.
The manipulated videos are then pushed aggressively through coordinated social media accounts, satellite television channels, and influencer networks. They are presented as organic expressions of the uprising. They are not. The objective is not to strengthen the movement. It is to deform it at its core.
This manipulation manufactures a false leadership and a false alternative. It reframes a grassroots struggle for freedom as a nostalgia driven restoration project. It deepens divisions among protesters and activists. It gives the Islamic Republic propaganda material to discredit the uprising as undemocratic, reactionary, or foreign engineered. In doing so, it undermines the moral clarity of the movement.
Most dangerously, it drains hope. Hope depends on authenticity and trust. When people see their voices stolen and rewritten, confidence collapses. Suspicion replaces solidarity. Momentum fades. This is how uprisings are neutralized without tanks or mass arrests.
Authoritarian systems understand this logic well. They survive by controlling narratives and narrowing the imagination of the future. The Islamic Republic does this through terror and repression. The Pahlavi media machine does it through distortion, branding, and the illusion of inevitability. Different faces, but a shared function.
If the uprising is derailed, both benefit. One retains power. The other preserves relevance and funding while offering no democratic vision. Iran does not need a return to the past or imposed figures. It does not need edited chants or manufactured consent. It needs truth, collective ownership of its struggle, and a form of hope that is real, lived, and impossible to hijack.