Iran’s self-blinding: How governance by narrative manufactures the pretexts it fears

“Death to high prices”—the slogan was unglamorous, but on 28 December 2017 it lit a fuse in Mashhad that quickly outran its economic frame, mutating into leaderless, nationwide defiance that left at least 50 dead, dozens injured and thousands detained. In the background sat a telling figure: the rial had just cracked the 42,000-per-dollar threshold, a number that quickly became a shorthand for everyday dispossession. Eight years later, on 28 December 2025, the calendar repeated itself: merchants in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar again pulled down their shutters as the rial lurched toward roughly 1.44 million per dollar—about thirty-four times the late-2017 benchmark. By 1 January, 2026, rights groups were reporting the death toll in double digits. The following day, Donald Trump […]