Benham Ben-Taliblu

Pleasure.

Always good to be back with you guys.

Thank you.

Well, largely the reaction is felicitation and jubilation.

You know, Iran just went through its biggest nationwide anti-regime uprising in the month of January with 30,000 to 40,000 killed just in a matter of days.

That was coterminous with one of the nation's largest Internet blackouts.

And among one of the many chance that we've heard was death to Khamenei.

And the Iranian population is quite literally no longer filtering itself when it comes to its views, values and intentions here.

They rightly hold the supreme leader supremely accountable for the state that their country has been in.

Well, it was quite a bit of musical chairs at the top.

Khamenei occupied the position of supreme leader, or more aptly put, guardianship of the jurisprudent.

And that religious title is a manufactured title that Iranian officials said only senior clergy, only ayatollahs, basically the equivalent of a religious PhD could have.

But religiously, Khamenei has a religious version of an eme.

He's a hojat al-Islam, so he was kind of promoted overnight and pushed forward in the elite infighting after the death of the founding father of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.

I know that the Ks can get confusing.

I'm a first-generation Iranian-American myself, speak fluent Persian, but at the same time, Khamenei and Khomeini can be sometimes confusing.

I've made this slip up before, but trust me, we know who they are here.

After the death of Khomeini, Khamenei was pushed forward by some of Iran's political elite, thinking that he would be a pliant cleric.

But in his three and a half decades in power, Khamenei had really consolidated the security services and brought in the military to politics, to society, and to the economy, and relied on them for his three and a half decades of terror.

To be brutally honest, if Khamenei had died on October 6, 2023, I think you really could have made the case that this individual would have been among one of the most successful anti-American and anti-Israeli autocrats of the modern Muslim world.