Benham Ben-Taliblu

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.

Ultimately, Khamenei's legacy was about preserving, protecting, and defending the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution.

Abroad, he kept that government's disposition focused on exporting the revolution, on exporting terrorism, of seeking to pursue destabilizing weapons, including missiles and weapons of mass destruction, and continuing a foreign policy of death to America and death to Israel.

even at the peak of American military superiority and unipolarity, even when it came near its borders.

At home, it was a reign of fear, a reign of terror.

He basically institutionalized the Islamic Republic after it was founded.

He had strict dress codes that were always there from the

basically deflected blame from him for the mass repression and the institutionalization of Islamism.

But ultimately, the Iranian population rightly held him accountable.

So Khamenei's reign at home was a reign that did not budge, did not offer representative government, and really continued to push for the institutionalization of their own perverse brand of Twelver Shi'ism.

Well, unfortunately, in the 47 years of the Islamic Republic, one of the biggest social losers have been women, which is why one of the first and earliest protests against the Islamic Republic, which was about the hijab issue, was led by women just months after this regime was established in 1979.

So it's not a shocker that as things go on and the Islamic Republic continues to really tout this brand of Islamism, that not just women but really all strands of society begin to push back.

But there's no doubt that one of the most –

Biggest losers of 47 years of an Islamic Republic across two similarly hardline and fundamentalist supreme leaders who have been instituting that version of Islamism have been women.