Khamenei returns to his hole and issues a message full of lies

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. Today is Friday, 7 Azar 1404, 28 November 2025. Khamenei was supposed to speak to members of the Basij on the occasion of Basij Week, and they had gathered them at his residence so that he could come and address them. But, probably because of an operation by Israeli aircraft over Iraqi territory near the Iranian border, he did not show up for the event at all, and the honorable Basijis were left sitting there idle. Instead, the following night, he delivered a televised message from the hole. The fact that His Eminence

0:56 the Supreme Leader got scared once again and went back into the hole shows the extent of his fear, since for some time it had been said that he had come out and was back at his desk in his office. He is worried that the Israelis will kill him. It is also clear that he delivered his televised message from the hole and not from his office, with its furnishings and décor, because of the virtual studio they build for him. Whenever he is in the hole, the curtain and the virtual desk in front of him make it quite obvious that he is speaking from one of those 17 or 18 holes that they keep moving him between, like a homeless wanderer.

1:51 In any case, in this televised message, broadcast last night on the Islamic Republic's television, he said things that really make one doubt his sanity. On the one hand, he said that America and Israel got beaten and left, and that we defeated them. On the other hand, he said that the claim that we sent a message to America through a third country seeking negotiations is a pure lie. Yet various reports indicate that Mohammed bin Salman, in his meeting with Mr. Trump, delivered the Islamic Republic's message and asked for negotiations to resume. For this very

2:48 reason, Mr. Trump, who likes to break hot news himself and get ahead of every story, said right after that meeting: yes, the Iranians want to talk to us, they came and sent messages, and so on. But it is said that Trump's response to Mohammed bin Salman, which has also been passed on to Iran, is that the three conditions America previously set as preconditions for negotiations still stand: a complete halt to uranium enrichment and the dismantling of enrichment from the root; shutting down the proxy forces and dismantling them throughout the region; and reducing the range of missiles to under 500 kilometers. The third of these in particular is a demand of both

3:46 Israel and the other countries of the region. In my view, Mr. Khamenei, who with anything he does immediately distances himself if it goes wrong, says "it wasn't me," and refuses to accept responsibility, was certainly aware of Mr. Pezeshkian's message, which he sent to bin Salman through his deputy right before the trip, and it was done with his permission. And now that America's answer is the same as before, and you have effectively hit a stone wall, he comes out and says the whole affair is a pure lie, when in fact he is the one lying.

4:40 But why does Khamenei say things that, in the age of satellite television, social networks and modern communications, are easily exposed as lies? Take the 12-day war, for example, in which he suffered a blatant military and intelligence defeat. A war in which Israel killed more than 30 of his commanders, his generals, while not a single Israeli soldier was killed. A war that in fact involved a bizarre operation in which several thousand Israeli commandos had been working inside Iran for a long time, even had a drone factory, and what they did also shows the intelligence failure. Why

5:37 does he come out and tell obvious lies, when, for example, the Americans in a single operation came and leveled Fordow and buried it? The same with Natanz and Isfahan; they wrecked everything that had been spent on this ill-fated nuclear project. Why does he falsely say we won, we defeated them, and so on? I have said before that he is stuck in a position where he is worried about the consequences of defeat in war. Generally, in countries that become involved in a war, nothing may happen during the war itself, and people are mostly worried about their own situation, their livelihood, finding a safe place and so on. But after a defeat,

6:34 signs of discontent gradually emerge among the rank and file of the armed forces that were defeated and humiliated, because they see the problem as coming from the commander-in-chief and the senior generals. The effects of the defeat then spread to the pillars of the regime and to society. This is what happened, for example, in Argentina after the extremely brutal and murderous military junta was defeated by the British in the Malvinas, or Falklands, War. Two or three months later, the rank and file of the army and of the generals' repressive forces became deeply troubled, the matter reached the people, and there were popular protests. Or in Serbia and the Balkan war, it was Mr. Milošević's defeat that created an opportunity in which not

7:36 only did his own people lose faith in him, but the Otpor students, who led and guided the movement, took advantage of this opportunity and, with Milošević's defeat, turned the war back against his government and regime, and ultimately brought him down. In Iran too, Mr. Khamenei is now extremely worried about his own supporters, from the Basij, the IRGC and the intelligence services to the rank and file and even his own office. I have said before that his supporters have become deeply troubled for three reasons. The first is a loss of faith in Khamenei personally, whose words

8:29 have proven wrong and whose projects have failed; he is a wretched, failed leader, a collection of failed projects. The second is poverty, corruption and discrimination. Inflation has affected the lives of the rank and file of the regime's repressive forces too, and when they see that a small few at the top have fabulous wealth, they naturally become troubled. The third, which is more important than both of these, is that the regime's supporters, even in its most trusted inner circles, are, as Natan Sharansky put it, thinking twice. Fear of the future, and the feeling that the regime will not last and will fall, is what has made them hesitant to continue

9:29 on their path and has led them to try to stand in the middle. That is why Khamenei comes out and claims a false victory, hoping that he can wrap some tape around the broken tent pole, which is himself, and put on a show of so-called authority and victory, as he used to claim. Yet his main defeat, although it is true that he has been defeated on the battlefield against Israel and in the proxies' plans in the region and so on, his main defeat is inside Iran. The great defeats the regime has suffered in the economic arena: it has failed to provide people's livelihoods, it has failed

10:29 to provide water, electricity, gas, even breathable air, or to deal with problems like land subsidence. The sum of these domestic failures, which has fully exposed the regime's crisis of incompetence to the light of day and which every ordinary citizen feels daily, has caused the pillars of his regime to start shaking. Of course, Khamenei has other constraints too, such as the mafia gangs that make up the structure of his regime, whose interests lie in the current situation and the sanctions, so that they can pocket billions of dollars with no accountability. Mafias

11:23 that are also accomplices of the Russian mafia. Khamenei's dependence on Russia, and the influence that Russia's overt and covert agents have within his apparatus, is another factor. These gangs and this Russian influence do not allow him, even if he wanted to, to de-escalate with the West, and especially with America, to normalize relations, or, for example, to take the destruction of Israel off the table. That is also why attacks by Russia's supporters on those they consider supporters of the West, such as Mr. Rouhani, Zarif and others, have intensified, to the point that Mr. Ghazanfarabadi, a representative of the people, a member of the Majlis, said that people are waiting to see the noose around Rouhani's neck.

12:22 On another front, the instructions that the Leader's office sends to the Friday prayer leaders every Wednesday or Thursday, telling them "this week at Friday prayers, talk about these themes," were today that all of them, in lockstep, should talk about hijab: that this situation of women going without hijab is bad, that it must end, that it is against religion, and so on. But interestingly, all of them spoke rather cautiously, since they do not dare to threaten the brave women and girls of Iran, and mostly talked about how the government needs to do something, and so on and so forth.

13:16 As for Australia, its government, after the operations that the IRGC's intelligence organization carried out in Australia, plotting to attack and set fire to a Jewish synagogue as well as a Jewish restaurant in Australia, finally designated the IRGC a state sponsor of terrorism. This will of course have many consequences for Iranians' travel. From now on, the Australian government, like Canada and America, will have to check Iranian nationals to make sure they are not, and have not been, connected to or associated with the IRGC, along with various other consequences that will arise.

14:09 In Washington, a 29-year-old Afghan national shot two members of the US National Guard, killing one of them; the other is in critical condition, and the shooter himself is in hospital in critical condition. This led Mr. Trump to announce that the green cards of nationals of 19 countries will be reviewed. Iran is among those 19 countries, and one can say that among these 19, Iranian nationals make up the largest population. Meanwhile, Naser Masoudi, the nightingale of Gilan and one of the guardians of Gilaki and Iranian culture, passed away early Thursday morning at the age of 90 in a hospital in Rasht. He leaves behind more

15:09 than 250 Gilaki songs and more than 200 Persian songs, the great legacy of one of the guardians of the culture of Iran. Hoping for the victory of Iran and Iranians.