By now, people in the United States and around the world are accustomed to the current U.S. regime being compared to the rise of the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany. But there is a much more recent example that offers just as many chilling lessons, and it happens to be one I witnessed firsthand: post-revolution Iran. 

There are many dangerous parallels between the Islamic Republic’s repression and what’s currently happening in the U.S., though this is not a one-to-one comparison. The U.S. isn’t Iran, but for those of us who’ve lived through a shift from a somewhat repressive system to a full-blown authoritarian crackdown, the warning signs are flashing.

I have seen what happens when rights vanish overnight, when culture and community are weaponized, and when fear becomes a governing force. I am also amid a chorus of people who have been sounding the alarm for years about the impending return of the imperial boomerang—the same force that has wreaked havoc across the globe, including when the U.S. meddled in Iran, which ultimately forced me to flee. 

When I moved to the U.S. when I was 14, I never expected to encounter echoes of post-revolution Iran, but the echoes are loud and clear. Amid such political instability, it is time to mobilize, get creative, and resist.

Autocracy Is Here. What Now?

I was 6 when Islamic fundamentalists seized power in Iran in 1979, launching a reign of terror that began with many of the actions currently happening in the Trump administration. The revolution’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, kept an ever-growing enemies list, systematically dismantled cultural institutions, and rapidly eroded personal freedoms to an extreme degree. Sound familiar?

Within months of Khomeini coming to power, my childhood was over. Women’s rights that had been painstakingly built for more than five decades were shredded overnight. As a girl, I could no longer move freely in public, play, or even ride my bicycle. The newly imposed morality laws forced me to cover my hair and body, and disappear into the background as my rights were systematically stripped away, one by one. The morality police also began raiding birthday parties and kidnapping people off the streets without due process. 

Similarly, families in the U.S. are now canceling quinceañeras out of fear of ICE raiding them, arresting their relatives, and deporting them without so much as a court hearing. Much like in Iran, plainclothes agents are now abducting people in broad daylight. Religious dogma is bleeding into public schools and lawmaking. Even education is under siege, just as it was in post-revolution Iran, where textbooks were rewritten and ideology replaced learning.

Shortly after the revolution, Iran’s government began mass-firing professionals deemed ideologically impure. My relatives, teachers, doctors, and civil servants lost their jobs. A CIA memo declassified in 2003 confirms that anyone tied to the previous regime or the West was systematically pushed out. 

“The original purge after the Shah’s fall sought to rid the ministries of senior-level holdovers from the former regime and to provide the revolutionary faithful with jobs,” the memo notes. “This was accomplished rather quickly. The second wave of purges began… after a series of Khomeini speeches. Lower-level individuals who had been part of the Shah’s bureaucracy, those with Western training, or those who were deemed to lack full Revolutionary fervor have been retired or fired on an increasingly large scale since then.”

A similar purge is currently underway in the U.S., with a particularly focused assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the public and private sectors. The absurd fixation on DEI mirrors the Islamic regime’s relentless pursuit of oppressive homogeneity. I now personally know educators, federal employees, and experts who’ve lost their jobs. The brain drain has begun. Scientists are fleeing. The nightmare I escaped is unfolding again—this time in the country I chose as my refuge.

Despite stark ideological differences, Iran’s Islamic regime and the Trumpist movement share similar tactics: wielding fear, relying on religious extremism, and eroding civil liberties. Both distort truth, punish dissent, and strive to remake the world in their image. Yet, amid repression, resistance flowers.

The Power and Creativity of Resistance

In Iran, once the shock wore off, defiance bloomed in large street protests as well as small, resistant acts that friends and I took part in: flashing strands of hair, dancing quickly in public, and wearing colorful socks that sent the morality police scrambling after us. 

Within one year of Khomeini’s takeover, Saddam Hussein, the then leader of neighboring country Iraq, took advantage of the internal turmoil and started a bloody eight-year war with Iran. At the same time, the regime grew more brutal, and soon, every schoolmate of mine knew someone who had been executed, imprisoned, or lost to war. My friend Roya, just a teenager, was among the thousands executed. 

Over the years, many more have been executed, imprisoned, and tortured. But despite the immense repression, the power of persistence and solidarity keeps transforming, adapting, and finding new ways to challenge the oppression.

Unlike the oppressors, people who resisted were never confined to a single ideology. It was born from necessity and lived experience. For more than four decades, Iranians have resisted through mass protests, underground clubs, labor strikes, and other everyday acts of defiance.

The 2022 uprising, sparked by the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, reignited women’s defiance. Many still refuse the hijab today, and despite the crackdowns, they have changed the look and feel of Iran’s public spaces. Iranians also engage in creative compliance: Women wear their hijabs in loose, fashionable ways. Men wear them in solidarity to mock the regime. Workers slow down to frustrate the regime. Some officials, including police officers, look the other way and refuse to enforce the regime’s rules when they can. 

Iranians create underground art, subversive poetry, and encrypted communication. Families teach banned history at home. VPNs and messaging apps bypass censorship. Having enjoyed a robust culture of hospitality and mutual care, Iranians tend to be generous with their time and resources. Acts of solidarity—shared meals, safe houses, whispered encouragement—create webs of resilience. Every act matters.

The Fight Is Ours Now

Oppression in Iran didn’t begin with Khomeini—and it didn’t end with his death in 1989. Just like in Iran, the road to our current predicament in the U.S. was laid brick by brick by those in power long before this moment. 

After all, the Nazis took much of their inspiration straight from the United States, particularly from its laws on eugenics, racial segregation, and the systematic disenfranchisement of marginalized communities. Hitler and his inner circle studied Jim Crow, the displacement of Native Americans, and the treatment of non-citizens as models for implementing racial purity laws. 

Some of the groundwork was laid more recently: The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling gave wealthy interests outsized political influence, the overturning of Roe v. Wade erased five decades of protected reproductive rights, and campus crackdowns have helped restrict freedom of speech. Meanwhile, many communities, including Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities, have been experiencing systemic oppression in the U.S. for decades. Now, that oppression is spreading wider and becoming more normalized. It’s unsettling, but the reality is authoritarianism is here. 

The good news is that, unlike Iranians, Americans have a longstanding tradition of free speech, making it much harder to silence dissent. The sheer size of the U.S. population also presents logistical challenges for any regime seeking to control its people. And while Trump’s tactics have been brutal, they have not reached the draconian extremes of Iran’s ruling regime.

Still, resistance is not only born from freedoms we have; it’s forged in the fire of what we’ve survived. The Iranian resistance movement has deeply shaped my work with marginalized groups and frontline workers here in the U.S. We learn from each other—those who have long shouldered systematic oppression continue to defy it in creative ways, proving that joy is both an act of resistance and the fuel that sustains it.

I’ve learned not to think of resistance as a sprint or even a marathon. It’s a relay. We rest, we care for each other. We pass the baton, and we keep going. The 3.5% rule shows we don’t need a majority—just a small, committed group to spark meaningful change.

So now we face the real question: Are we willing to act? Are we willing to build and expand our communities of resistance?

Because no one is coming to save us. We can’t put our faith in politicians or institutions that have already failed so many. Overwhelm helps no one; we’re not meant to do everything, and certainly not alone. But we do have to save ourselves—together—using vigilance, solidarity, and relentless imagination. This is our moment to rise or risk losing what remains of our freedoms.