Brett Cooper

And so my point in bringing all of that up is that when you are scrolling on X and TikTok this week and you were seeing those photos, remember that, yes, that was real, but that freedom and that happiness did not exist for all Iranians.

And the Shah, while he might be better than what they have now, was still called a dictator.

He

was authoritarian.

And all of this brings us to the 1979 revolution.

Because this revolution was not anti-freedom.

They were not, you know, looking at themselves in their bathing suits and their hair showing and going, man, we all want to wear hijabs.

We don't want to be like this.

No, they were anti-dictatorship and they were anti, possibly most importantly, anti-foreign control.

They wanted democracy in Iran.

They wanted freedom and they wanted their cultural identity respected.

But after the revolution, they did not get democracy.

They got yet another kind of dictatorship.

The Shah was overthrown, but Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, hopefully I'm pronouncing his name correctly, established a theocratic state with himself as the first supreme leader.

So they essentially just, you know, did a swap.

They replaced one dictator with another, and this created what we now know as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Sharia law was imposed.

Women's rights were stripped almost immediately, and their country continued to deteriorate economically.

The Ayatollah established Islamic law as the basis for all legislation.

They put religious leaders at the top of the political food chain.