Iran’s currency crisis has ignited a firestorm of unrest across the nation, with demonstrators taking to the streets in numbers not seen in years. The rial’s plunge to historic lows against the dollar triggered shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar to shutter their businesses in protest, a move that echoed the 1979 revolution when similar actions helped topple the shah. Now, those same bazaars have become battlegrounds where ordinary Iranians confront security forces, chanting “don’t be afraid, we’re all together” as they push back against the regime’s grip.
Students at Tehran University and other campuses have joined the fray, clashing with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Armed with little more than their voices, they forced guards out using whatever was at hand, while female protesters defiantly removed their mandatory headscarves and waved them like banners of defiance.
“You [the regime] are a slut, I am a free woman,” one declared in a moment captured on video.
Nafas, a student from Tehran University, told The Telegraph, “Students have been chanting since last night. They [security forces] surrounded the campus last night and rode their motorcycles around it – they returned today with batons, stun guns, and tear gas. Students clashed with them and forced them out, but the gates are now closed. Students at many universities have said they will not attend classes and will continue protesting. What’s the point of studying when there is no future, and the regime gives our money to Gaza and Lebanon?”
The protests, which began on earlier this week, have spread to at least 17 of Iran’s 31 provinces, reaching cities like Kermanshah, Shiraz, Yazd, Isfahan, Fasa, and Kuhdasht. In Fasa, crowds tore down the entrance gate of a government building, while in Kuhdasht, clashes at Imam Khomeini Square turned deadly. Reports confirm police fired live rounds at protesters there, and similar violence erupted elsewhere.
By January 1, the toll included a 21-year-old civilian killed amid the chaos, a Basij paramilitary member slain in Lorestan province, and another security officer dead with 13 wounded. State media acknowledged these losses, but the regime’s response has only fueled the anger, with mass arrests and brutal crackdowns failing to quell the crowds.
Economic despair lies at the heart of this uprising. Inflation has soared above 42 percent, eroding savings and making basics unaffordable. The central bank head resigned amid the rial’s collapse, which has lost nearly 50 percent of its value this year alone. Protesters point fingers at Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s policies, accusing the government of squandering resources on foreign proxies in Gaza and Lebanon rather than addressing domestic needs. Chants of “No Gaza, No Lebanon, my life is sacrificed for Iran” ring out in places like Noorabad in Lorestan, highlighting frustration over funds funneled to Hamas and Hezbollah while Iranians struggle.
President Masoud Pezeshkian has urged unity and promised to listen, even to “harsh voices,” but his words ring hollow as strikes spread through Tehran and beyond. Businesses, universities, and government offices remain closed in 21 provinces under official orders, effectively paralyzing much of the country. Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described Iran’s economy as “in ruins,” a sentiment echoed in reports of widespread shortages and desperation.
Flight-tracking data reveals a surge in Russian Il-76 cargo planes landing in Tehran over the past 48 hours, raising questions about Moscow’s role in bolstering the regime during this vulnerable moment. Some observers speculate these undeclared deliveries could include weapons or aid to suppress the dissent, especially as Israel braces for potential Iranian strikes amid the internal turmoil. The Jerusalem Post reported Israeli concerns that Tehran might lash out externally to divert attention from domestic woes.
These events unfold against a backdrop of long-standing oppression, where women face draconian restrictions and dissent is met with force. Protesters compare the IRGC to ISIS, calling for “death to the dictator” in a direct challenge to Khamenei’s authority. In the face of such tyranny, the courage on display recalls biblical stories of the oppressed rising against pharaohs, trusting in a higher justice to guide their path to freedom.
Through it all, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has emerged as the popular choice to have his family returned to power, which they lost in the 1979 revolution.
A message to mainstream media regarding the recent Iran protests. #جاويدشاه pic.twitter.com/7Ft4h9CBkB
— Tara تارا (@Tarakb0) December 31, 2025
As the protests enter their fifth day, the world watches. The U.S. has called on Tehran to respect human rights, but real change will come from Iranians themselves. If history teaches anything, it’s that regimes built on fear eventually crumble when people refuse to live in chains any longer. For now, the streets of Iran pulse with a demand for dignity, prosperity, and an end to the mullahs’ rule.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Backed by Mossad.
Here’s where the 2nd Amendment makes a big difference.
Those flights from Russia could be bringing in Russian mercenaries and/or Chechens to turn loose on the people.
Now is the time to help the rioters and not act like obama did when ignored their request for help.
I pray that is the case. We should aid them with supplies, arms and ammunition and let them remove the scumbags.