The Islamic revolution seized control of Iran and use their wealth to fund terrorism around the world.
The 47-year empire of sand collapses with the ghost of a hereditary supreme leader.. beyond pathetic
An Empire of Sand
Ruhollah Khomeini stepped off a plane at Mehrabad 47 years ago, looked at the crowds weeping at his feet, and promised them a republic for the dispossessed. The dispossessed are still waiting, and the state he built has arrived at the end of its life in worse shape than anyone who cheered him that day could have imagined.
The Islamic Republic of September 2026 is a military junta hiding in bunkers and signing its orders on clerical letterhead. It has handed the top job to an unelected son, the way a shah passes on a throne, which is the one thing the revolution of 1979 was supposed to make impossible. And it cannot even confirm that the son is alive.
The Assembly of Experts ratified Mojtaba Khamenei 6 months ago in a remote vote taken behind blast doors. Since then the Iranian public has never heard his voice. State television has been reduced to circulating crude AI-generated video to stand in for him. He did not appear at his wife's burial. When millions were bussed to Mashhad to bury his father, his brothers walked behind the casket and he was not among them. In the seminaries of Qom and at the intelligence desks of foreign capitals, people who follow this closely say the same thing... the country is being run in the name of a man who is either lying wounded on a ventilator or already dead, with generals stamping his name onto decrees they wrote themselves.
The security establishment that was supposed to guarantee the regime's survival has been killed off in 2 rounds. In June 2025, on a single Friday morning, the men who built the modern security state died over breakfast... Bagheri, Salami, Hajizadeh, Rashid. 8 months later, on the 10th of Ramadan, the bunker busters returned to Pasteur Street and killed their replacements, Mousavi, Pakpour, Shamkhani and Nasirzadeh. Nobody rallied the nation afterward. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has privately admitted that the leadership sat on the Supreme Leader's death for 12 hours because they had just learned that their communications were compromised, that their underground shelters were visible to the enemy, and that they no longer controlled their own airspace.
The regime then left the corpse of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a refrigerated mortuary for more than 4 months. It would not hold a funeral for its own leader, because a funeral would put the surviving leadership in one place in daylight, and everyone in Tehran understood what happens next when that occurs.
This is the government of a country sitting on the second-largest natural gas reserves on earth, where ministries now work in the dark because the grid has failed. Motorists wait 5 hours for fuel because the refineries cannot supply it. The Energy Exchange has quietly set premium gasoline at 84,600 Tomans a liter, which for an ordinary commuter is a ruinous number. State propagandists answer this with clips of European pump prices. Economists inside the regime's own parliament are warning of "bloodshed at the pump," and Mojtaba's office has responded by forbidding state media from using the word "shortage."
Since the regime cannot reach the aircraft above it, it has spent its violence on the people below it. Its answer to January's currency collapse was to fire machine guns at grocers in Fouladshahr, chase students through provincial alleys, and hang men in their 20s at dawn in Shahroud Prison while air-raid sirens covered the sound of the trapdoors. In Kurdistan the army's best commandos are stuck pursuing armed dissidents through mountain ravines. In Baluchestan its convoys get ambushed in the middle of the day. In the Gulf, the IRGC navy has taken to firing at Qatari gas tankers and Saudi crude haulers, which accomplishes nothing except to announce that the regime has run out of better ideas.
The Axis of Resistance, a 40-year project costing many billions of dollars, was meant to ring the region with Iranian proxies. It has been reduced to wreckage from southern Lebanon to the Yemeni ports. What passes for foreign policy now is a fire sale to Beijing. China takes sanctioned Iranian oil at a steep discount, pays in yuan that cannot be converted, and gives Tehran a photograph at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and a communiqué nobody reads.
Police states with deep stocks of tear gas, rifles and working gallows do not fall on schedule. They decay from the inside until the shell cannot carry the weight of the apparatus sitting on it. What is different about Iran right now is that the people inside the shell are describing the decay themselves. Ministers go on live television to deny they have resigned. Generals are afraid to turn on their radios. Local administrators are rationing drinking water drawn from a riverbed that has gone dry. None of them are describing a state that still has something left to lose.
The money is gone. The martyrs are gone. The commanders are in their graves. The mandate expired decades ago, and the throne is occupied by a cardboard silhouette.
Look past the fresh banners of Mojtaba hanging over the debris of Pasteur Street. Look past the murals of Soleimani fading under the summer smog. What stands in Tehran today is an empire of sand. Every pillar that held it upright has turned to dust. The collapse already has a date. Nobody in the bunker knows it yet. Everybody in the streets is waiting for it.