David McCloskey

You end up with, even at the bottom, these kind of cracks in your security apparatus that if word gets out, can dramatically change the way that the protesters themselves view the sort of resolve of the regime.

No.

The way you could probably categorize the Iranian opposition at this point is that there's probably a broadly shared consensus on kind of the reasons for outrage, right?

Everything from, as we discussed, the economic situation all the way up to...

I guess, completely authoritarian politics, right?

That sort of define the state.

And frankly, sense of like, you have a government that's deciding matters of personal intimacy, how people dress, how they wear their hair, things that many in this opposition find, you know, as I do, deeply, deeply offensive.

But what we don't see is

is a level of kind of coordination and cohesion among the opposition, right?

If you sort of look at the elite cohesion of the regime, and then you look at the opposition, it's kind of night and day.

Right.

I mean, I think at most he would be a symbolic figurehead for some portion of the opposition.

But he's not in Iran.

He doesn't have the ability to command.

He hasn't been there for years.

Yeah.

He doesn't have the command of sort of resources inside the country.

Well, still surprising, though, I think that, you know, he became that figure.

The other one, I guess, is kind of ticking into the next pillar, Gordon, is this idea that there's, even in an authoritarian system, there is a bit of a social or socioeconomic contract between the people and the government.

I would agree.