[ifwinterco]

Not puppets of the monarchy per se but at least some of them may be puppets of foreign actors who are backing the monarchy.

Honestly very hard to say, I don’t know what to believe about the Iran situation. I think it’s pretty much impossible to get a good understanding of it from a western country

[JumpCrisscross]

> Honestly very hard to say

It really isn't. Inflation at a fraction of Iran's prompts governments to change in any democracy.

[ifwinterco]

What I mean is two things are true at once:

1) Iran's government has not done a good job of running the country and is therefore genuinely unpopular among a significant percentage of the population.

2) Iran's current government has powerful enemies (US, UK and of course a country in the Middle East all really hate the Iranian regime) and those enemies are actively trying to destabilise it.

So it's really hard from the perspective of being in a western country to work out how much of the protests are genuinely endogenous to Iran and how much is an intelligence operation, because it's clearly not 0%