The Formula for Religious-State Tyranny

CIA Terrorist Profiler Jerrold M. Post had it right 20 years ago. And right for today, too.

Tehran, March 8 (International Women’s Day), 1979. Image: Kaveh Golestan.

On International Women’s Day, March 8th, 1979, more than 100,000 women flooded the streets of Tehran, Iran to protest new rules released by the Ayatollah Khomeini following his accession to the rank of Grand Ayatollah in the wake of his victory in the Iranian Revolution. This rally was held in protest of the new compulsory veiling laws that would soon rob their skin of Vitamin D and their lives of social freedom. Mere days after this photo was taken

female government workers were forced to observe Islamic dress code; women were barred from becoming judges; beaches and sports were sex-segregated; the legal age of marriage for girls was reduced to 9 (later raised to 13); and married women were barred from attending regular schools. Almost immediately women protested these policies. The Islamic revolution is ideologically committed to inequality for women in inheritance and other areas of the civil code; and especially committed to segregation of the sexes. Many places, from “schoolrooms to ski slopes to public buses”, are strictly segregated.

Rarehisoricalphotos.com also notes that at the time, Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan recalls, Iranian people were very “politically charged” and believed change could be effected by demonstrating in the streets. They were wrong.

And what you can’t see in the photograph is that hordes of men were hanging out the windows that line this street, jeering at the women, laughing at them. Some of them are dangling their naked genitals out of windows and yelling, “This is what you really want! This is what you really want!.”

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“The Stolen Revolution”

Iranian women soon called the Grand Ayatollah’s betrayal “The Stolen Revolution.” In fighting the Shah and attempting to redress the overthrow of the duly-elected Mohammad Mossadegh by British Petroleum and the CIA, Iranian women had—in direct insult to the wishes of Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran—donned the veil by the tens of thousands as the most visible protest they could manage. This was not a religious act: it was a political act to say they resented the Westernization that the Shah had brought to Iran because it brought with it the Shah’s vicious secret police and the gutting of the nation’s wealth, the profits from which went to foreign interests and the Shah himself (Empress Farah bathed in milk). Rampant poverty and hunger haunted the Iranian people, and the young wanted a change. Unfortunately, they embraced a very, very terrible tyrant who turned on women with a ferocity impossible to foresee.

“We will not go back to being treated like dogs!” women screamed from the streets. The Ayatollah’s response was to declare that “bad hijab” was punishable by 70 lashes and six months in prison.

It got worse from there, with gays lynched for natural sexual inclinations, Ismailis and Jews and Christians targeted, and terrorism by Hizbollah, at the behest of the Grand Ayatollah, in Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories.

In Iran, it is now 46 years later.

On the 14th of December, 2024, as the United States was waking up to its national nightmare and paying little attention to anything else, Iran passed new, draconian hijab laws 27 months after the murder-in-custody of Mahsa Amini, an atrocity that touched off the most serious protests in Iran since the Revolution.

Here’s what the new rules say, synopsized by Human Rights Watch:

The new law consists of 71 articles that not only strengthen the government’s control over women's lives but also threaten businesses and institutions that fail to enforce these discriminatory measures with fines or closure. These legal articles also drastically increase penalties for activism against compulsory hijab (article 36), including long-term imprisonment. The law specifically directs and expands the authority of the Intelligence Ministry, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (article 24), police (article 28), and judiciary (article 29) to identify and prosecute violations.

Notice that it gives new, deeper authority to the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps—essentially it gives them immunity from prosecution—and this is the group that beat Mahsa Amini to death. The article also illegalizes protest.

Why Is this Important Now?

Because this is where American is headed now.

Can We Really Wind Up Like Iran?

Yes. Why? Because Iran is a religious state, which means their religion and politics are fused. What’s being attempted in the United States right now is to turn it into a religious state. And once you get one, the “controlling authorities” limit who can run for office, so the regime can never really be changed. And it comes with other problems, too.

Jerrold M. Post, M.D.: A Theory of Religious and Ethnic States

Here's what Post said: that ethnic and religious states have a built-in legitimacy problem: they are claiming a right to rule based on the alleged supremacy of a specific religion or denomination or a discrete tribe that summarily dismisses the claims of non-adherents and/or people of other ethnicities to the same privilege.

In order to maintain a fragile "legitimacy" that doesn't actually exist, the rulers of such states, Post argued, must identify or invent two enemies: (1) an external enemy or enemies that allegedly threaten(s) the survival the state itself, and (2) an internal enemy or enemies that allegedly threaten(s) moral corrosion of the state from within. Internal enemies will be elements within the society that are too weak to fight back and will almost always include women.

One obvious example is the present Twelver Shia Islamic state in Iran. Rightly or wrongly, the candidates for external enemies include Israel and the United States all of the time, Saudi Arabia and Syria and others some of the time, and, in a pinch, the entire sprawl of Dar-al-Harb (all non-Islamic countries). Internal enemies include Sevener Shias (Ismailis), Jews, Christians, gays, foreignrs, and, most especially and always, women.

Also, over time, Post said, such states become more and more conservative. As the state has no legitimacy, and never has had, it’s constantly scrambling. Its external enemies must be said to be increasingly Satanic and evil. And all efforts by its heavily oppressed internal enemies to escape subjugation, imprisonment, surveillance, ripped-off rights, torture, and humiliation must be met with ever-increasing violence and advancing “legal” repression based on claims they pose an ever greater moral threat.

The murder of Mahsa Amini exposed in Iran a population overwhelmingly against the regime and also overwhelmingly against hijab. And protests, which have waxed and waned for sure, have never gone away. Iranians even elected an anti-hijab, pro-freedom president.

So how did these new draconian rules make it past parliament?

The mullahs changed parliamentary rules to allow a smaller group of more conservative parliamentarians to write the Articles and vote on them, sidelining the majority that would never have passed it. Because what the Ayatollah Khomenei said so, and what the supreme leader says, goes, elections be damned.

And that is what you are looking at in the United States right now.

• Elon Musk has the ability to fire vast swaths of the United States work force. He doesn’t really, but he’s getting away with it anyway.

• The president claims the ability to shut down departments controlled by Congress. The Congress, scared out of their wits at everything from constituent fury to fear their families will be attacked or killed, capitulate.

• Trump says he can utterly control the purse strings of the United States, even refusing to pay for services already rendered by USAid contractors overseas. Courts rule against them, and they do what they want anyhow, the courts be damned.

• Trump has had the armed forces illegally involved in the detainment of 52,000 so-called “illegal” migrants, which is unconstitutional and illegal.

• Trump has told the new Secretary of Education that he wants to shut down the Department of Education, which is holding $1.7 trillion in student debt. This move is applauded by the Moms of Liberty, who are anything but. This group wants the department shut down so they can ban all books pertaining to women’s rights, critical race theory, and LBGTQ+ rights or experience. This is forced by a religious perspective not observed or appreciated by other equally religious people.

Project 2025 made sure that the Radical Right in the United States is allied with the Evangelical Fascist Right religion.

Now, as Post pointed out, there’s a real problem because secular, rights-based Constitutional law has been replaced by biblical law that is subject to varying interpretations, but will have a tendency towards increasingly draconian interpretations that disfranchise religious, social, and racial minorities and all women.

And the political-religious-ethnic (pro-white) melding is dangerous because religious law is alleged to trump all secular law — AND dissent is given to be against God — and with Trump’s attitude towards the military, he may declare martial law and cancel elections claiming that the internal enemies — WOKE liberals whom he terms MARXISTS — are a threat to the security of the United States.

The Plan for Dictatorship

In July 2024, then-former U.S. President Donald Trump told a crowd of Christian activists:

"Get out and vote! Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote anymore."

He didn’t expect Cardi B to send the comment viral, but that’s what happened. What this indicates, and what is likely inside the hidden portions of Project 2025, is that martial law will be declared, voting rights will be suspended just as civil rights are being suspended, and a Christian state with Trump (or Vance) as supreme leader will be declared.

In the process, what happened in Iran will happen here:

• All women’s voting rights, financial rights, working rights, and rights to education and reproductive health care will be repealed.

• All civil rights legislation will be repealed.

• All civil protections against seizure without court review will be repealed.

And if Musk has his way, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid will be repealed to make way for tax cuts for the wealthy. He tried that yesterday, and the White House promptly freaked out. The country will have to become much, much weaker to risk that.

And that’s what they’re working out by, as Andrew Weissman says, “hollowing out” the institutions put in place to protect us. They are also destroying the economy. And as hundreds of thousands become unemployed and their ranks swell, salaries will plummet as millions search for jobs that aren’t there and are willing to take less and work more.

To Sum Up

Once an ethnic or religious group takes over a government, it becomes far, far harder to break than a convention monarchy or democracy.

That’s why, after 46 years, the Iranians are still waiting for both men and women to be free. When rulers can change the rules of legislatures, gut institutions, fire people at will, deport people at will, suspend laws at will, use the military against its own citizens, and put the entire government in the hands of an unelected rich guy, the decades can pass while a whole nation languishes … and forgets who it once was.