Iran and the USA: Voiding reality

On Jan. 7, Renee Good, an American citizen and mother of three, was shot to death by one Jonathan Ross, an agent of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Anyone in the world who doesn’t live under a rock knows that the shooting happened shortly after Good and her wife brought their six-year-old to school in the morning.

Place and time deserve sustained attention. It was a killing in plain sight with children nearby, hardly the optimum setting for concealment. And indeed, the quick event was video recorded by witnesses.

Last week, the Iranian government continued killing protestors against a theocracy that has been in place with draconian methods since 1979. The protests escalated since the first week of 2026, driven by two sides of hope: economic hopelessness and glimmers of hope that the rule of the ayatollahs might actually be ended.

In early January, the casualty estimates from protests all over Iran numbered in the hundreds. By mid-January, reliable estimates upped the figure to the thousands. At this scale of resistance, the threat to the durability of the status quo, like in the US, is real in Iran at this time.

Both the governments of Donald Trump and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini voided digital circulation of what is really going on.

TWO WAYS
Imposing a nationwide digital blackout is the obvious way to cut off news circulation. This tack, Iran’s, amputates living use of digital media. Eyes on the ground are lopped off from the macro nervous systems of the world.

The comparably savage US government at this time is darkly novel in its ways with despotism. It circulates lies at a scale of brazenness outclassing even the Third Reich.

Trump and his officials, confronted by images of their depravity, inflict on their citizenry an alternate reality version of an event that video recordings clearly show to be murder. Rolling Stone magazine, on Jan. 17, described other forms used in the fire hosing away of what is plain to see.

“In the immediate aftermath, of course, both MAGA and staunchly anti-Trump social media users attempted to use AI to their best advantage. The far right circulated artificial images that appeared to show an overhead view of Good’s car on the street where she was confronted by ICE, which made it appear as if she was trying to run over Jonathan Ross, the federal agent who killed her. They also disseminated a phony video and pictures that purported to show Good and her wife Becca Good celebrating the assassination of the conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk last September.”

And among efforts to push back on Trump’s baldfaced swipes to blind Americans: “….before Ross had been publicly identified, some ICE critics asked AI models to ‘unmask’ him based on footage in which the lower half of his face was covered. Since the technology is fundamentally unable to perform this task, it merely produced faces at random, sowing further confusion.”

This last week ended with the outcomes of confusion-production for both countries, and consequently, the world. From as far away as the Philippines, it is all a blur of bodies under duress in separate vivid instants, the images immediately flipped by shamelessly false interpretation or outright deletion.

TWIST
Since both the US and Iran have installed tyrant leaders who visit savageries on their citizens in the name of fierce religions, it is quite a twist for President Donald Trump to posture as a human rights advocate in ultimatums issued to Iran.

Trump threatened to invade Iran if the present Ayatollah executes one more protestor. Having de facto invaded Venezuela in his own curious way — abducting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores without, preliminarily, territorial occupation — President Trump imagines himself astride a moral high horse.

The public hangings in Iran increased as the protests intensified during the digital black-out. Through clandestine channels, the word is that the executions decreased before this weekend.

As for moral high horses, the Iranian steeds continue to lift this country’s leadership above the ground where slaughter can restart any minute.

Trump’s posturing as a compassionate humanist this one time — the twist in these immense spectacles of cruelty — show up the cultural infrastructure holding up 21^st Century barbarism. In a word, religion.

White Christian Nationalism drove a fringe movement into National Government in the US and Trump savvily, if infrequently, signals moral ascendency to amplify the culture of this racist group. Signaling to Iranian protestors that American help will be available to them, says that a similar moral purpose is shared by the US government and the Iranian anti-theocracy fronts.

While the clerical establishment of Shi’a Islam in Iran is separate from the government of the Islamic Republic (and in fact, there were government crackdowns on the leading clergy), this country may be and has been called a theocracy.

It may also be regarded as Medieval in certain important respects. The unflinching attitude towards public execution is one such medievalism.

Like the America Trump is creating to realize a white Christian Nationalist fantasy, the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini brooks no dissent to the superiority of its beliefs.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.