alt Hacker News>That’s millions of Iranians. My in-laws who lives in Tehran are anti-regime, along with every single person on my wife’s side of the family: aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody.
How do you square this with the absolutely massive pro-government rallies that we've seen all across Iran for the entire duration of the conflict? Millions of Iranians opposed to the regime, in a country of 90 million+, might still be a fringe minority.
If you asked some American expat their thoughts on MAGA, and they responded "China should bomb MAGA rallies so we can be free from the Republican party, my whole family in the US agrees".....that person would be considered a fringe lunatic, even if Trump's regime has record-low approval like it does now (and rightly deserves, I hope he is impeached and jailed).
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I trust the people who are close to this more than what you hear on the news. My guess is 90%+ of the readers here know nothing of Iranians except what they read or hear on the news.
How many of you have been to Iran, have family members there, etc? I'm guessing very few.
We have limited data on this. There have been surveys, but survey data isn’t always very accurate.
Here was one survey that showed 81% disapproval of the Islamic Republic: https://gamaan.org/2023/02/04/protests_survey/
In a country of 90 million, if the regime has 20% supporters, that’s 18 million supporters.
Tehran population is 9 million, 20% of that is 1.8 million.
So it’s easy to understand why you might see videos of hundreds or thousands of regime supporters in the streets. That doesn’t mean they’re the majority.