Three-minute read
The Iranian regime’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, used a three-hour, state-staged religious celebration on Thursday to argue that the decisive front facing Iran is not a renewed battlefield clash, but a struggle to control what Iranians believe about their country, their identity, and the clerical dictatorship’s legitimacy.
Speaking to a handpicked audience of pro-government religious eulogists—figures the state routinely uses to mobilize crowds and transmit political messaging—Khamenei said Iran is now “beyond the military clashes” and instead “at the center of a propaganda and media war” waged by what he described as a “broad front” led by the United States. In his framing, Washington is “at the center” of this front, with some European countries around it and exiled opponents—whom he labeled “mercenaries,” “traitors,” and “stateless” people—on the periphery.
The speech combined three politically significant moves: a rare, explicit acknowledgment of pervasive domestic hardship; a warning against public discussion of renewed military conflict; and a directive to loyalist religious networks to adopt an “offensive” posture in an information struggle aimed at “minds, hearts and beliefs.”
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— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 4, 2025
Acknowledging shortages—while minimizing what they mean
Khamenei acknowledged that “shortages and problems across the country are many,” but insisted Iran remains on a forward path. He referred to a chronic environmental and public-health problem—dust storms in the southwestern province of Khuzestan—only to downplay it, calling it among the “smallest” of the country’s problems and adding that larger shortages exist elsewhere.
The juxtaposition mattered: he conceded the breadth of hardship while refusing to treat any particular crisis as a failure of governance requiring accountability. Instead, he recast the country’s condition as proof of national endurance, praising what he described as the public’s steadfastness, sincerity, goodwill, and pursuit of justice—virtues he said build “honor and power” for “Islam and Iran.”
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— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 20, 2025
Reframing the risk of war as a tool of psychological pressure
Khamenei also warned against repeated speculation about renewed fighting to reassure his demoralized base. “Some repeatedly raise the possibility of a repeat military clash,” he said, while others “deliberately fan” the topic to keep people anxious and doubtful. He predicted they would not succeed.
A major theme was identity. Khamenei used reverse language to warn against the truth overcoming decades of state propaganda, claiming “the enemy aims to make people gradually forget the revolution, its goals, and the legacy of its founding leader.”
He portrayed the campaign as well-resourced and culturally sophisticated, claiming “billions” are spent on persuading young Iranians and naming writers, artists, and “Hollywood” as instruments of influence.
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— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) July 30, 2025
Orders to build an “information front” and go on the attack
Khamenei’s operational guidance was unusually explicit. He instructed the eulogists and religious gatherings around them to function as a national infrastructure for ideological transmission—what he called a “base” for building and spreading the “literature of resistance.” Without a sustaining “literature,” he said, any idea dies.
He urged his audience to mirror military planning in the information domain: just as Iran would arrange its forces in response to a military threat, he said, it must adopt the correct “arrangement” in the propaganda and media confrontation—focusing on “Islamic, Shiite and revolutionary teachings” that he claimed are the enemy’s primary targets.
He also warned against a merely defensive approach. “Do not suffice with defending” against what the adversary casts as doubts, he said. “The enemy has many weak points—target them and attack them.”
Khamenei Rejects U.S. Overtures, Says Conflict with U.S. Is Permanenthttps://t.co/93WEuazTdr
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 3, 2025
Institutionalizing narrative control
Khamenei’s December 11 messaging helps explain why he now frames the main confrontation as cognitive and informational: after decades and billions spent on propaganda, the clerical dictatorship is acting like a system that knows it is losing the war against the truth. His admission of widespread shortages—paired with instructions to mobilize loyalist networks for an “offensive” media fight—signals growing anxiety that the roots of today’s crises in Iran could again propel the country toward a state-wide revolt.
That shift is visible in the institutionalization of narrative control through “Balagh Mobin,” described as a “hybrid war” headquarters involving more than 40,000 clerics and seminarians. Its purpose is not conventional public relations but organized perception management: countering fear and doubt and recasting social and political dissent as an externally orchestrated security operation designed to weaken the clerical dictatorship.
These efforts demonstrate the failure of earlier messaging campaigns, notably “jihad of clarification,” to prevent the eruption of the 2022 uprising. The conclusion is blunt: faced with a public that increasingly sees through deception, the clerical dictatorship is doubling down—building “headquarters,” expanding clerical networks, and declaring an explicit war on awareness itself.