Welcome back to the re-education. I'm Eli Lake. First, let me apologize for our two-week hiatus here at the re-education.

Me and my family took a much-needed vacation on the first week of the new year. And this week,

I've been engaged in a few other projects, but we're back, and we've got a great show. On today's show,

my guest is Mariam Memar Sadehi, a founder and director of the Cyrus

Forum, and she discusses what 2023 will mean for the revolution in Iran. Meanwhile, I'm looking

at how 2022 showed us that the dictatorships that seem so strong in 2020 sit atop castles made of sand.

Stay tuned, this is a good one.

Remember 2020, that year when we all locked down, when our schools closed the year of Zoom and Netflix.

There were anti-police riots in the streets of our cities and the sitting president,

and as many fans didn't accept the results of the election that year that Donald Trump, of course, lost.

And in China, we were getting headlines like this.

China, the origin of the virus, is celebrating victory over COVID-19.

Beijing is taking a victory lap as billions of people around the world continue to suffer the economic health and social impact of the

pandemic that shows no sign of subsiding. It was dispiriting on many levels. But the longstanding

assumption expressed by people like Francis Fukuyama at the sunset

of the Cold War at the end of the 20th century was that with the collapse of the Soviet Union

and the Iron Curtain, the only viable model for societies was the liberal democratic one in the

West. And, well, it left many of us to just assume that the spread of freedom could be put on

autopilot as we focused on other things.

Well, for some at least, 2020 was kind of a profound refutation of that Fukyian and rosy optimism.

The liberal democracies in 2020 at least were unraveling, demonic illicit drugs like fentanyl and very, very strong methamphetamines.

They flooded into our heartlands, and it wasn't just in America.

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