Episode 75: Power, fear, and the survival of the Iranian regime, with Roya Hakakian
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Iran’s streets are in tumult. The latest protests are of a scale not seen before. New sections of Iranian society are in the streets — middle class merchants, the elderly and others. The protestors have more strident demands than in the past. And a regime that knows its legitimacy has been compromised by rampant corruption, systemic state failure, the collapse of the currency and economy and the 12-day war in June against Israel.
Our guest today is Roya Hakakian, a writer, poet and human rights advocate who grew up in Tehran and fled with her family to the US at age 18 several years after the 1979 revolution. Her book Assassins of the Turquoise Palace traces the Islamic Republic’s decades-long war on dissent both inside Iran and across the globe. Her earlier book, Journey from the Land of No, relates her personal journey from a hopeful 12-year-old during the revolution to a refugee, writer and fierce advocate for democracy. A fellow at Yale University’s Davenport College and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she has written for leading outlets including the New York Times, New York Review of Books and the Atlantic and has contributed to CBS’s 60 Minutes and ABC Documentary Specials.
We discuss the evolution of the protest movement, whether this latest round of protests is different, whether Iran really is on the brink of collapse, what Israel should do (or rather, not do), and how Khomeini’s revolution was the seed for the so-called “red-green alliance” that now defines so much of the Western left.
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This episode is sponsored by Max and Susan Reichenthal in honor of the work of Friends of the IDF (FIDF), which works to ensure that the soldiers of the IDF have the support they need during their service. Max and Susan asked to dedicate the episode in honor of the IDF soldiers who put their lives on the line to protect the people of Israel.
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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. |
| 0:08.2 | We are recording on December 31st in the middle of some of the most amazing and terrifying |
| 0:13.7 | news coming out of Iran right now of mass protests driven by a whole different host of |
| 0:20.5 | it began with small shopkeepers in the bazaar apparently, |
| 0:23.6 | specifically importers of gadgets and people who are very dependent on currency exchanges because the Iranian currency collapsed again in the last week and in the end of December. |
| 0:36.6 | But then we've seen elderly people come out to protest, |
| 0:40.1 | people whose pensions are fixed income |
| 0:42.1 | and the collapse of the currency is actually hurting them very much. |
| 0:45.3 | Iran is going through terrible collapse of infrastructures, electricity, water. |
| 0:49.6 | The regime has mismanaged this country into the dirt. |
| 0:53.1 | One of the wealthiest countries in the world in |
| 0:55.0 | terms of natural resources, gas and oil especially, is among the poorest and worst managed |
| 1:02.0 | countries in the world. We are used to talking about Iran as a great adversary of Israel, as |
| 1:07.0 | a builder of proxies, as a regime with an ideology to destroy the Jewish state, I think |
| 1:13.9 | too few people shine the spotlight on Iranian civilians and on their experience and on the |
| 1:19.7 | lives they've lived under a regime that really thinks that its own sort of redemptive struggle |
| 1:25.2 | and funding with billions upon billions for decades |
| 1:30.2 | that it doesn't have of proxy systems and revolutions throughout the Middle East and advancing |
| 1:34.4 | the great revolutionary agenda, the terrible cost that that has exacted from Iranians. |
| 1:39.3 | And so our guest today is Roya Hakakyan or Hakakyan, that was an Israeli pronunciation, a writer, |
| 1:46.4 | a poet, a human rights advocate who grew up in Tehran, fled with her family to the U.S. at |
| 1:52.2 | the age of 18 a few years after the 1979 revolution. |
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