Iran Prism
Data, stories, and the Iran you haven't seen.
Start Here
The picture most Westerners carry of Iran is missing most of Iran.
The Iran Story: What You Haven't Been Told
A government researcher was hired to count the Shah's victims. He expected 60,000. He found 3,164. The regime that paid him imprisoned him for publishing it. That gap — between what you've been told about Iran and what actually happened — runs through everything.
Why Iran Matters
A thirteen-year-old shoemaker was shot dead during a protest. The regime offered to sell his body back for $5,000 — or return it free if his father would declare his son a loyal Basij member killed by foreign agents. The father refused. This is a story about ninety-three million people. It matters because they matter.
The Way Out
The Islamic Republic is failing on every structural pillar that sustains authoritarian rule — simultaneously, and at historically unprecedented levels. For the first time, someone has drawn the blueprints for what comes next. The question is whether a plan written in exile can outrun a collapse unfolding in Tehran.
What's Happening
The 2026 crisis and the questions it raises.
January 2026: The 48-Hour Massacre
In forty-eight hours, the Islamic Republic killed more of its own citizens than it lost in twelve days of war with Israel. The world almost missed it.
What Iranians Actually Want
The regime claims 90% support. Two independent research teams found something very different. The data vs. the narrative.
The Grief Factory
Inside the regime's machine for manufacturing martyrs and laundering atrocities — from bullet fees to forced confessions to the industrial repackaging of the dead.
The Minab Test: A School Strike Forensic
Applying the forensic framework to the February 2026 school strike: what is now verified, what is still contested, and what an institutional vetting failure on one side and a four-decade pattern of inflation on the other have separately produced.
Six to One: Was This Campaign Indiscriminate?
The forensic case for and against the headline ratio. Hengaw's Day-40 numbers say one civilian was killed for every six combatants. The historical band, the expected-ratio counterfactual, and the Bayesian convergence on whether 6:1 is honest.
The Dead Children Calculus
The moral math that nobody wants to do — but dead children demand. Inside the targeting cell, the game theory of human shields, and the question the regime is counting on you not to ask.
What Comes Next: Iran's Transition Plan
For the first time in history, an opposition movement has produced a detailed operational manual for post-regime transition before taking power. Whether it survives contact with reality is the question that will determine the fate of ninety-three million people.
How We Got Here
Four articles that need no background knowledge.
Farrokhroo Parsa and the Women Iran Forgot
She was Iran's first female cabinet minister. They shot her in a sack. This is the story of three generations of women who fought for Iran — and the thread that connects 1906, 1968, and 2022.
The Number That Changed Everything
A government researcher was asked to count the Shah's victims. He expected 60,000. He found 3,164. What happened next threatened the regime.
Two Koreas, Two Irans
In 1977, Iran's economy was larger than South Korea's. Today, South Korea's is seven times bigger. This is the data-driven autopsy of the Asian Tiger that wasn't.
The Sanctions Paradox
Why catching tankers works but butterfly children still die — and how 'smart sanctions' destroyed Iran's middle class while enriching the Revolutionary Guards.
The Iran Test
Ten questions. Ten surprises. How much do you actually know about Iran?
What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened
The history behind the headlines
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The First Try: Iran's 1906 Democracy
In 1906, Iran built the first indigenous democracy in the Middle East — a constitution more radical than Japan's, more popular than the Ottomans'. Then the world let it die.
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The Number That Changed Everything
A government researcher was asked to count the Shah's victims. He expected 60,000. He found 3,164. What happened next threatened the regime.
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The Coup That Wasn't
On August 16, 1953, the CIA believed it had failed. Headquarters sent retreat cables. The Shah fled to Rome. Four days later, Mossadegh fell anyway. The real story of 1953 is more complicated — and more Iranian — than the version you've heard.
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How a Spy's Memoir Became a History Textbook
The CIA called Kermit Roosevelt's memoir 'essentially a work of fiction.' It became the foundation for how the world understands Iran's 1953 coup.
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Two Koreas, Two Irans
In 1977, Iran's economy was larger than South Korea's. Today, South Korea's is seven times bigger. This is the data-driven autopsy of the Asian Tiger that wasn't.
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The Revolution's First Victims
Five factions helped overthrow the Shah. Within four years, four of them had been purged, imprisoned, or executed. The revolution was designed to devour its own.
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The Nuclear Pursuit
Both the hawk frame ('rogue state builds bomb') and the dove frame ('self-fulfilling prophecy') erase the regime as an agent. The actual record shows a state that pursued nuclear weapons capability through every external condition — partnership, abandonment, sanctions, diplomacy, sabotage, and war. The pursuit is the constant.
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The Greatest Bait-and-Switch in Modern History
In Paris, Ayatollah Khomeini gave 132 interviews promising democracy, freedom of speech, and women's rights. Not once did he mention the system of absolute clerical rule he had published nine years earlier — and intended to build.
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48 Hours: The Collapse of the Shah's Military
On February 9, 1979, Iran had the world's fifth-largest military — 413,000 troops, 79 F-14 Tomcats, $20 billion in American weapons. By the afternoon of February 11, it had ceased to exist. The collapse reveals how autocracies designed around one person guarantee their own destruction.
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Everyone Thought They Were Using Khomeini
His hands had been broken during interrogation. He kept them hidden under the table. The Tudeh First Secretary had supported every purge, every ban, every execution — and now it was his party's turn. The Islamic Republic eliminated its revolutionary allies in 36 months, faster than the Bolsheviks. Each faction believed it was using Khomeini. Each was wrong.
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The Architect of His Own Destruction
The Shah's corruption was real — and an order of magnitude smaller than what replaced him. His development record was genuine: 8.2 percent growth, literacy doubled, an economy larger than Turkey's. He fell because he built a system designed to prevent any threat to his power — which meant preventing any institution from functioning without him. Every decision was individually rational. Collectively, they built the machine that consumed him.
Iran Today
Power, violence, and daily life under the Islamic Republic
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Inside the Machine
How a revolutionary militia born in 1979 consumed the Iranian state — becoming simultaneously a military, a government, a criminal empire, and the greatest threat to its own people.
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The Summer of 1988
Three men sat behind a desk and asked prisoners a single question. The wrong answer meant death within the hour. The man who oversaw the killing became president of Iran.
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The Sanctions Paradox
Why catching tankers works but butterfly children still die — and how 'smart sanctions' destroyed Iran's middle class while enriching the Revolutionary Guards.
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The $3 Billion Idea Factory
Two hostile machines — one run by the Islamic Republic, one by its 'mortal enemy' the MEK — flood Western policy circles with competing disinformation. Both serve the same function: preventing a unified, secular, democratic Iranian opposition from emerging.
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Operation Rising Lion
On June 13, 2025, Israeli jets flew over Tehran with total impunity. Twelve days later, a ceasefire was signed. Six months later, the people whose economy the war destroyed walked into the streets.
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January 2026: The 48-Hour Massacre
In forty-eight hours, the Islamic Republic killed more of its own citizens than it lost in twelve days of war with Israel. The world almost missed it.
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When Proxies Become Executioners
How the Islamic Republic imported 8,000 foreign fighters — Iraqi militiamen, Afghan mercenaries, Pakistani paramilitaries — to massacre the Iranian people when its own forces refused to shoot.
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The Digital Siege
How the Islamic Republic cut the internet for 90 million people — timed to the minute with the order to open fire — and what the twelve days of silence were designed to hide.
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The Shield and the Schoolyard
The IRGC's use of schools, hospitals, and stadiums as military positions is not improvisation — it is a doctrine refined over four decades of proxy warfare, now deployed on Iranian soil against Iranian civilians.
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The Grief Factory
Inside the regime's machine for manufacturing martyrs and laundering atrocities — from bullet fees to forced confessions to the industrial repackaging of the dead.
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The Dead Children Calculus
The moral math that nobody wants to do — but dead children demand. Inside the targeting cell, the game theory of human shields, and the question the regime is counting on you not to ask.
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Six to One: Was This Campaign Indiscriminate?
The forensic case for and against the headline ratio. Hengaw's Day-40 numbers say one civilian was killed for every six combatants. The historical band, the expected-ratio counterfactual, and the Bayesian convergence on whether 6:1 is honest.
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Forty Seconds: The Strike That Killed Iran's Supreme Leader
At seven o'clock on a Saturday morning, thirty missiles ended thirty-five years of theocratic rule. What the Islamic Republic looked like fourteen days later tells you whether it will survive.
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Five Fractures: Why the Islamic Republic Is Collapsing
Military decapitation. Financial destruction. Intelligence penetration. Popular uprising. Desertion cascade. No modern regime has survived all five at once. The question is not whether the Islamic Republic falls — but whether it falls into democracy or into chaos.
How the Media Gets It Wrong
The filters between you and the truth
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Ten Filters: How the West Misreads Iran
A field guide to how the West misreads Iran — not through conspiracy, but through ten structural filters that turn professional incentives into systematic distortion.
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Why Your Iran Expert Might Be Wrong
The academy's blind spot isn't ignorance — it's structure. When the people who study Iran share one worldview, and the regime knows how to exploit it, expertise becomes its own trap.
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The Transparency Trap
Why you know more about American sins than Iranian ones — and why the gap in your knowledge isn't a gap in American villainy. It's a gap in information architecture.
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The Professors and the Prophet
In October 1977, Saeed Soltanpour — fresh from prison — read poetry to thousands at the Goethe Institute. Abrahamian: 'The Iranian Revolution can be said to have begun in poetry-reading sessions.' The Shah built the university system that destroyed him — enrollment grew sevenfold to 154,000, with 100,000 studying abroad. Foucault visited twice, wrote fifteen articles celebrating 'political spirituality,' and never read Khomeini's published blueprint for theocracy. An anonymous Iranian woman named Atoussa H. wrote a letter that now reads as prophecy. The women saw it first. The men who didn't listen were the ones with the platforms.
Looking Forward
What Iranians want, who they were, and what comes next
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What Iranians Actually Want
The regime claims 90% support. Two independent research teams found something very different. The data vs. the narrative.
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Farrokhroo Parsa and the Women Iran Forgot
She was Iran's first female cabinet minister. They shot her in a sack. This is the story of three generations of women who fought for Iran — and the thread that connects 1906, 1968, and 2022.
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What Comes Next: Iran's Transition Plan
For the first time in history, an opposition movement has produced a detailed operational manual for post-regime transition before taking power. Whether it survives contact with reality is the question that will determine the fate of ninety-three million people.