David McCloskey

My analytic progeny all over the intelligence community.

Protests began in late December.

They began in two major markets in downtown Tehran.

And the very, as is quite common, as we'll see in these types of situations, the protests begin not from a desire for, or a stated desire for regime change or revolution, but

but because of economic pressures and stressors, right?

So the protests really begin after the Iranian rial currency plunges to, I believe, its most devalued state ever, which is 1.42 million rials per US dollar, which obviously has inflationary pressures.

It pushes up the price of food and other daily necessities.

So you have these kind of immediate economic concerns that kind of get things going at early December.

I think what also distinguished this period of protest and unrest is how quickly the protests spread and the geographic extent of that, which again shows...

something very real about the economic pressures that ordinary Iranians are feeling.

So by the end of the first week of January, demonstrations had reached over 280 locations and touched almost all of Iran's 31 provinces.

So this is a massive, peaceful protest movement that is building.

And of course, as the momentum builds,

again, also typical in these situations, the demands start to shift from purely economic to more political.

That becomes much more acute because the Iranian regime cracks down and cracks down brutally on the protests.

Compounding the uncertainty is...

President Trump has been, I think, a bit of a wild card, it's fair to say.

He's certainly raised the stakes of the situation.

I think, quite honestly, I think he has given Iranians who went out to protest false hope about what the US's intentions really were.

Because on the 2nd of January, Trump writes on his Truth Social account, if Iran violently kills peaceful protesters...