Transcript
Golnar Nikpour on Iran, History & the Current Moment (Hour 1)
Nite Lite with Pete Schwaba and Greg Bach · Tue Apr 28, 2026
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It's Night Light with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
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sharp humor, and plenty of personality.
You know, I really expected more professional behavior from you.
It's news and culture without the noise.
Yeah, come on!
Here's Pete Schwabba.
Dude.
And Greg Bach.
Dude!
Welcome to Nightlight, folks!
Happy Tuesday, everybody!
It is great to have you here with us tonight as we commence another
Yet another edition of Nightlight with Peachwaba and Gregbock.
I am Peachwaba coming to you live from northeast Wisconsin, and my compadre Gregbock is live from Radio Park and Racine, just down the coast, as we like to call it, and Dom Lee is holding down the fort in Madison.
Gentlemen, how are we?
Pretty good.
Not too shabby.
too
Pretty good.
Tom has the floor apparently.
He's younger.
was
say it's true.
It's Taco Tuesday.
Your roommate must be so excited.
He
Does he even know that you talk about him on the air?
He has no idea.
Not a clue.
Take that Trevor or Brendan or Skyler, Kyler, Tyler.
He's not a
regular listener.
needs to be.
You
you know?
I love him like a adopted brother who I don't see often, maybe Christmas every
few years.
Well, happy Taco Tuesday, everybody.
It is Taco Tuesday in Dom's house, and he's gonna feed his roommate, even though he's not a regular listener, because that's the kind of guy, that's the kind of guy Dom is.
What is happening?
He feeds people.
There you go.
This is great.
We got a really fun show for you guys tonight.
I
was, I was in a weird mood last night because I got off the air and then I had like a whole bunch of errands to run.
And I have this old Land Cruiser.
It used to belong to the director, David Mamet.
I'm very proud that I own his car.
Yeah, honest to God.
He bought it, gave it to his nanny to cart his kids around Beverly Hills or wherever.
And then I got it from an auto auction.
I wanted, I wanted to buy it from her.
But she had just traded in, I tracked it down and I thought maybe David Mamet's writing skills would rub off on me.
That really never happened.
But I have this awesome Land Cruiser.
So anyway, now it's 26, 27 years old and it still runs like a champ.
It's perfect.
But I have a slow leak.
So you ever drive around and look for air?
Like I haven't done that in so long.
But I go to this gas station.
There is a line three cars deep for air in your tires.
Yeah.
it was like a 30 minute wait for air.
If
you take it to a tire place though, they would, they usually a lot of times they'll take care of you.
I know there's a place, there is a place called discount tire here down by me.
They got a couple of locations and you just take it there.
They'll fill it up and on your way.
Well, I'm going to drop it at my mechanic.
I have a great mechanic.
I've gotten lucky with mechanics my whole life.
And I got an outstanding one here in Christmas city, USA.
So.
I don't do anything because I, every time I feel like I take my car somewhere, whether it's like a Jiffy Lube type place or somewhere, they always find something else that you need to fix.
And I've had it, Dom.
What do you mean?
oil change
I
that's when you said, okay, guys, all right, let's have a moment here.
Let's, no, no, let's have it.
Well, first of all, they, they, they should not be touching your carburetor.
Let's have a moment, the three of us.
First of all, they can't do any repairs without your say so.
They say, we found this thing, just say no.
And if you're taking your car to a place like that, Dom, and I'm not.
I'm not disparaging the company.
All that stuff you should learn to do yourself.
save so much money.
two
I change my own oil.
I change my filters.
The filters alone, the filters are so cheap to buy.
But if you go to a place,
it's the labor cost that kills you.
They'll charge you twice as much as you can buy for, and then they'll charge you on top of that for the labor.
All of that stuff, oil changed, checking your fluids.
I mean, I'm this summer most likely gonna learn how to do break jobs because I am- Good Lord.
The more and more I look at it, the less and less I want to give these companies more money than they deserve, because it's no longer just like-
Oh, bring it in for a realignment and a break job or blah, blah.
And it's an it's amount of money where you save yourself.
Okay, I get that.
That makes sense to me.
Now it's just so expensive that right.
And they count on you not knowing how to do it yourself or even more so.
They count on you saying to yourself, I can't do that.
I got to let I have to let in a professional
do that.
I think when I was like your age, Dom, I would say
you know, it was a fear thing.
And I was young.
I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, change the air filter.
If you think I don't want to get caught with a dirty air filter, but then I realized I always say no, everything I do is through my mechanic, but it wouldn't kill me to learn how to change my own oil.
So
we'll all meet at a place.
I'll change.
I'll show you how to do some basic stuff.
It will save you hundreds of dollars a year.
Wow.
Great.
Wow.
Ladies
and
gentlemen.
And you know what?
Let's do this because this is a perfect segue.
That leads us into our question of the night.
It is National Superhero Day.
You can list Greg Bach if you want based on what he just said, but let's get to the question of the night.
Oh, yeah, you probably guessed.
Who is your favorite superhero?
Let us know 855-752-4842-855-756.
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Or if you're listening, watching the stream that's available tonight, drop us a stream comment and be part of the show.
Be part of Nightlight, folks.
We want to call this show eventually Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach and all of you.
And list
all of the names.
But here's the thing, you all have to go to our meetings.
So anyway, let us know what your answer is to the question tonight.
We have an outstanding show tonight, folks.
Golnar Nikpor will be here after the news at the bottom of the hour.
She is a scholar of modern Iranian political history, and she will be here to talk about her perspective on the war that's happening right now.
She was a lot of fun to talk to.
And then Kristen Leidy, very funny comedian, Northeast Wisconsin based comic.
Kristen Leidy will be here.
The second hour so there you go.
We got some some insightful Iranian stuff some laughs also folks Nightlight movie club.
We are in full swing, baby.
This thing is happening Thursday night again second hour this week's movie is good fellas another classic with a lot of quotable lines Famous scenes iconic actors.
Yep, it's gonna be a blast tune in second hour Thursday night.
Hopefully you can join us for the whole show, but
If you get a chance, watch the movie, refresh your memory a little bit and join Nightlight Movie Club, all kinds of fun stuff.
So that's a good one.
I'm looking
forward
to that, guys.
Yeah.
That was a very good one.
I will say this.
If you're interested in watching it, I would also go online.
YouTube has some great breakdown videos about the truth of that story, the truth of the characters.
Yeah.
All of them.
All of them.
Like we got a shiny version.
We'll talk more about this on Thursday.
But the real lowdown of, of the people who were, who were, you know, the characters who were played essentially and the history that was told that we watched versus the reality.
So
that's awesome.
I think, I know Henry Hill is real.
And I think Jimmy Conway, right?
After that, I don't really know.
They were all real.
They just have different names.
Yeah.
Well, it's a great movie.
It's Martin Scorsese at his finest and we'll break it down and talk about some of those.
great lines and scenes and Scorsese directing, all kinds of stuff.
So
be part of the Nightlight Movie Club.
It's going
to be
a fun hour, if you will.
So what do you think, guys?
Should we get to some news?
Let's get some news.
Let's do the news now.
Stand up comics under attack, Greg.
As a former stand up myself, you are a current stand up.
Am I?
Yes.
This will not stand.
Jimmy Kimmel is being attacked for not knowing there was going to be an assassination attempt two days after he did a skit on his show.
Kimmel said the joke was a light roast.
Basically, he said that... I'm trying to find it right here.
He made a joke about Melania saying she had the glow of an expectant widow.
That's
what it is.
You
have the glow like an expectant widow, our first lady.
that says nothing about assassinations or murder.
It's a talk show joke.
Well, it was
also 48 hours before the event happened.
And they're blaming Kim.
The press secretary today, Carolyn Levitt, added the word murder to it, which is totally misleading.
And what I love about this too is Melania said, his monologue about my family isn't comedy.
His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.
Let's talk about that.
Here are just some of the words the president has used to describe the left, speaking of political sickness.
Enemy within, scum, vermin, lunatics.
Enemy of the people, treasonous animals, degenerates, Jew haters, lowlives, Marxist, fascist, lunatics.
I mean, where did this come from, Greg?
And Kimmel said nothing that was
close to any of that.
No, exactly.
Kimmel went on to say that, you know, he is, he is not, he has a no way shape or form, you know, saying it should have happened.
He has talked about the fact he has spoken out against gun violence for years.
And he said this too in this BBC article, I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject.
I think great, a great place to start would to be to dial that back as having a conversation with your husband about it.
And here's what I really love too is
She went on to say Melania or as Dom calls her Melonia.
My Melonia has her first name.
My Melonia.
She said, quote, people like Kimmel shouldn't have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.
Well, I'd also talk to your husband and say, stop letting ICE agents enter people's home to spread hate and disgust and, you know, it's that kind of thing.
I mean, it all goes back, you know, Patricia Heaton from everybody loves Raymond posted something a couple of days ago saying, you know, I didn't like when Obama and Biden and Clinton were elected, but I didn't say.
It's like, you got to stop doing that because the moment you post that, you can find 200 examples of people on your side saying the same thing or worse.
And again, what he wasn't even the same thing.
Jimmy Kimmel didn't do anything, but a roast joke two days before the event.
And oh, and by the other thing too.
is now the FCC is looking at ABC's license, which aren't even up for renewal until 2028.
But now they're going to take another look because they feel, and here's the really funny part, guys.
It's not so much about Kimmel.
It's a whether or not that ABC is violating anti-discrimination rules based on their corporate diversity policies.
And here's the other thing too, whenever this was a joke, there was no mention of anything.
It was just her outliving her husband because they have an age gap.
That is where
the joke
was targeted.
And that was a joke.
But whenever the president says something distasteful or stuff about grabbing women in a certain area or making fun of handicapped people or
plenty
of instances where he suggested death,
They all have issues taste-wise with a late night talk show.
Those were, what they claimed were jokes, but they were hateful thing.
I mean, horribly.
And okay, maybe you even say that's a joke and I don't agree with it, but you can't come after Kimmel after the president has said stuff like that.
It just makes no
sense.
Well,
of course
they can.
They have no other choice.
They've been, they wanted to.
Yeah.
And they want to fire him.
They want, they want to show Disney that even though Disney has cowed out of them already by the tune of like $16 million, like this is just, it's just, it's boring.
And it's, it's like you're going after a late night host.
Like tell me you have thinner skin.
My God.
Take your ball and go home.
Yeah.
We're at war right now.
And you're upset about a guy making a joke.
Get out of my face.
Exactly.
Well said, Greg Bach.
All right, we are coming right back with two more stories, folks.
One of them is extremely important and deals with movie prices.
You don't want to go anywhere.
This is Nightlight with Pete Schwab and Greg Bach on the Civic Media
Network.
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All right.
Welcome back tonight, folks.
I'm Pete Schwabba.
Greg Bak is here tonight.
Dom Lee is here tonight.
We're usually all here tonight.
Did you play that like to soften my mood because I get ticked off when
politicians and their wives attack comedians.
Do you think I needed to dial it back a little bit?
I thought he played it for me.
It was for
show.
I hear songs like that.
I want to slow dance.
I love that song so much.
Oh, I
love that
song so dearly.
We got a text Greg just pointed out from Andrew, who says, what are the chances we can find more than one comedic, comedic attempt or joke by Kimmel about Biden's age while he was president?
I would bet greater than 50%.
I would bet 100%.
Yeah.
And same thing with the Daily Show.
They made fun of Biden's age all the time.
And that's what this joke by Kim was.
Anyway, we do have other stories to get to, guys.
I think we should probably go on.
Let's go.
This just in from the hill folks go my goodness gracious Stake and shake you know that restaurant you pass on the highway and go I didn't know they were still around has hired a new Employee the chief maha officer.
I am not making this up quote his we're going to We're going to
We're going back to the glory days of fast food.
I can't even read it.
This is real.
We're not lowering
prices though.
This isn't the onion.
I'm not making this up steak and shake is revamping its ingredients and has hired a chief make America healthy again officer and he is going to restore.
the restaurant to quote the glory days of fast food.
His name is Michael Bose.
He appeared on Fox and Friends.
He said, quote, our message is simple.
We want Americans to eat food and we want to go back to the glory days of fast food when that occurred.
First of all,
I don't know what the glory days he's talking about.
One, two, you didn't, if you didn't say we're going to make fast food great again, you missed an opportunity.
And also third, Michael Bose just happens to be the guy who previously served as senior advisor at the department of health and human services.
So you went from Trump's office to steak and shake.
Is that a lateral or is that up or down?
I don't know.
Probably a little better if you're working for Steak and Shake.
However, I used to love Steak and Shake.
And you know what?
Frankly, I don't have a problem with this if they really mean it.
They're going to serve the Mexican sugar cane coax.
Okay.
That's not really health food.
It's better than high fructose corn syrup.
If I have soda, I try to do that.
But what can you do to fast food to truly make it healthy unless you swap it all out for veggie
burgers?
Well, and here, and I'm glad you asked that question because this story in the hill is really just littered with all sorts of these conspiracy theories as far as like what kind, what food is good and what isn't good.
And one of the things they cite is that they went from vegetable oil to beef tallow.
We're talking about like beef fat, if I'm not mistaken.
Also, I'm sorry, but if I drink one Coca-Cola with high fructose corn syrup and I'm fine.
If I drink 10 sodas with pure cane sugar, that's not good.
Again, this is not about the ingredients per se, especially in fast food.
It's about your moderation.
It's about how much you're actually eating.
But the other thing too, they said in this story,
is I want to find this real quick.
Yeah, Steak and Shake has also begun transitioning away from seed oils and microwave use in its restaurant.
Seed oils are like one of the biggest things.
If you go on social media and you find an influencer who talks about seed oil, they talk through there, took us so hard on this.
Seed oils are not bad for you.
That is not proven.
And when people tell you it's bad for you,
They don't know what they're talking about.
So this whole, this whole move from steak and shake is to suck up to the Trump administration, in my opinion.
And also to say like, oh, we're going to, we're going to still serve bad for you food.
We're just going to change a few ingredients, which button, and one more thing before I, and then I'll get off my soapbox.
I swear to God.
Everything that these companies have been doing in the past few years, like, you know, putting in like high fructose corn syrup or, you know, bad.
chemicals or whatever, the stuff that's in our food every single day.
Those companies fought for years in lobbying and laws to get that done so they could loosen the regulations so they could put whatever they wanted in there and charge more.
Like this is just the biggest ridiculous story to me.
They are sucking up to the Trump administration and they just sound like a restaurant.
Like I swear to God, Joe Rogan will plug this place soon.
Well, I was just, oh, that's so funny you said that.
I see grift all over this like a guy is leaving This is like the lobbyist that leaves his government job and then cash is in as a lobbyist and is a high-powered lot This guy is doing that for steak and shake and now it's you know people will beef tail.
Oh, they got beef tail We got to go there.
Okay.
Why don't you look up what all this stuff is first?
But and you know, whatever, both sides do it when they leave government, they make money lobbying money.
But this is kind of like, you're right, Joe Rogan is going to do it.
They'll be selling beef tallow and they'll be buying stock and steak and shake.
Yeah.
It's like free advertising.
I mean, whatever.
It's this
is it's
it's just to get a story.
It's just to suck up like the fact they hired a guy from Health and Human Services to help us better.
It's just so absolutely insane.
I cannot chief maha officer.
God, how come I'm not more like I should be rich.
I'm smarter than that.
My goodness.
Sorry.
So frustrating to me.
You're gonna have to
play some seals and Croft again, Dom.
Cause Greg is all riled up.
So let's get to our third story before he pops a stitch.
Greg, very simply movie prices.
Recently movies went up to 50 bucks.
I should, this is not, I'm not trying to use the fear issue here, but.
People that wanted to see dune 3 on opening night in new york city paid 50 bucks to see it on 70 millimeter That's that's a high and they sold out in minutes now I like I don't mind paying a little bit extra for my movie tickets So I can go and sit down whenever I want to and when you pay a little more You don't have people being allowed around you typically they're better patrons, but this is crazy However, the good thing is regular movie prices are still 1275 at your local cineplex and I got that kind of money
Okay, is there okay?
Is there a movie though you okay really quick?
We got to go really quick.
Yeah, really quick.
Yes or no Is there a movie you'd pay a new one not a classic?
No Q&A just a movie is there any movie you pay 50 bucks to see
it's hard to say because you don't know that until I have to see the movie sinners one battle after another I would have paid 50 bucks to see okay, all right Yeah, but you know if you know that going in you never do
Alright, Golnar Nikpur will be here, folks.
Our Iranian scholar, resident Iranian scholar, she will be here after the news.
This is Night Light with Pichuaba and Rekba.
Welcome back to Night Light, ladies and gentlemen.
I am Pichuaba.
Coming to you live from northeast Wisconsin just down the coast is Mr. Greg Bach coming to you from a radio park in Domli holding down the fort in Madison producing the show.
We are the Otterhay Triangle and it is great to have you with us tonight.
It is my pleasure to welcome our first guest of the night.
She is a scholar of modern Iranian political and intellectual history with a particular interest in the history of law, incarceration, revolution, and women's rights.
Golnar Nikpur joins us now at Nightlight Over the Stream.
Good evening.
Hi
there.
Thanks for having me, Pete and Greg.
Well, it is our pleasure.
I hope you're having a great day and I'm looking forward to having you enlighten us and give us a perspective we might not have had yet regarding the Iran conflict here.
So just jumping right in, can you give us a little bit of your background?
And I know you were born in Iran, but
Tell us how you got to this point in your life in a thumbnail, if you could.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's right.
I was born in Iran in the early 1980s, so amid the Iran-Iraq war.
And I spent the first several years of my life there before my family came to the US, where we lived around New York state, eventually settled on Long Island.
professionally got interested, or I should say intellectually got interested in Iran as a college student.
I didn't think I would be a historian when I started college, but I took a class and then another class.
I was interested in the politics of the world and in US politics, but also interested in Middle Eastern history, Iranian history, sort of going back further than the modern period too.
and just got sort of passionately interested in the topic of history.
I realized at some point that history at the higher level is not like, you know, I never liked history as a high school student because you just have to learn, you know, kind of memorize names and dates.
But once you get a little bit further along, you see that it's a lot about reading and analysis and critical thinking and trying to figure out
what things actually mean.
You know, there's not one concrete answer sometimes, but you try to work through the details and figure it out in a way that makes sense.
So that's still what I do.
I just kept taking one, putting one foot in front of the next until I got to this point where I'm now at Dartmouth College.
And I have to say, since you've given me this opportunity to talk a little bit about myself, I'm particularly gratified to be on this show because I lived in Madison for a few years.
I was
a
postdoc at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and I love
I love Wisconsin.
So I'm
really happy to be on
the show.
I was going
to
ask you about that.
So I'm glad you mentioned that.
That's great.
Well, that's lovely.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate that.
And really, you know, we appreciate you being on the show because, you know, I am, I am a child of the late, I am born in the late seventies and I grew up with the presence of Iran in my life, but always being fed information, whether it's from politics, whether it's from the news, whether it's from.
family or whatever that may be.
But as far as Iran now, what is modern life in Iran like right now versus what we are told it's like, our perceptions versus the reality, even in the face of this war happening right now?
But what are the things that Americans need to know about Iran and Iranian life?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, in some ways, that's my own interest in studying Iran and has been since I was in my teens.
It's trying to get an understanding of what's really true about this place that I spent part of my childhood in, but that once I came to the US, I got a very different sort of...
upbringing and education on the country.
So I would say that the first thing that I always tell people who are interested in learning about Iran beyond the headlines is that it's a big country and it's an extremely diverse country in a way that I don't think that most people in the US have a clear sense of.
In the first place it's 92, 93 million people total.
and that's not including a diaspora outside of the country of some six or seven million to the best of our ability to count it.
So I mean 100 million people who call themselves Iranians all over the world, but those people are enormously diverse.
They have dozens of different linguistic backgrounds.
So Persian or Farsi, that's the same language, is the main language of the country and the one spoken by its government and in schools.
But only about 50% of the Iranian people speak Persian at home because the country has historically been
extremely diverse, many different dialects, many different languages, some of the ones you may have heard of, Ozeri Turkish or Arabic or Kurdish, but there's so many small sort of groups that speak different languages, even if they have a common cultural.
heritage they're still distinct distinct sort of ethnic linguistic religious and certainly political identities throughout the country so there's you know I'm always suspicious or skeptical when people say Iranians want this or Iranians are like that because you know we're talking about lots of it's it's a country maybe not quite as as big and diverse as the US but on some level we should think of it more like that than like a model if right where you can really get
radically different views depending on who you're talking to, depending on their class background, their ethnicity, but also just their worldview if they're a city person, a country person, you know, so you have this very distinct kind of diverse place.
The other thing I would say that is extremely sort of important to understand is that I think a lot of people in the U.S.
don't quite grasp is that, for whatever we may think of, Iranian government, which
is indeed authoritarian.
It has invested a great deal into the development of the country and its infrastructure.
So that's why this sort of, that would be something to talk about when we get into the war is this kind of war on infrastructure that we've seen.
I've seen Americans and my students even say over the course of the last several weeks that they're surprised to see all the things, when they see the images of what has been bombed or what has been sort of targeted,
they're surprised at how sort of modernized the country is because the impression that people have is of this very sort of religious and maybe even um you know sort of steeped in the past
of place but it's it's it's invested in you know like Tehran has beautiful subways and streets and cafes where you can go get you know like
complicated coffee drinks just as you would
hear like third wave
kind of life.
Oh, thank goodness.
Are they as expensive?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just like any country that has, you know, sort of big cities and country life, what you have, what you see is going to depend on where you are.
So there's rural Iran, there's mountain Iran, there's big city Iran, and Tehran is a big global cosmopolists, some 20 million people.
So
Again, it's one of the things I think people are least accustomed to thinking about is just that it's an incredibly rich in terms of cultural heritage, artistic heritage, literary film heritage place.
And it's incredibly developed in ways that I think we don't quite always take into account.
And it is a highly educated country.
in terms of literacy rates, in terms of education rates, all these things are part of the social fabric of the country over the last decades.
Our guest is Golanar Nikpur.
She is a scholar of modern Iranian political and intellectual history with a particular interest in the history of law, incarceration, revolution, and women's rights.
She joins us here on Night Light and is sort of enlightening us a little bit about what's happening in Iran during this war and her background.
I think for me, just the most horrible thing about this conflict so far, Golnar, is the bombing of the girl's school in Manav, or the Israeli airstrike.
The news cycle changes so much, and it's the Strait of Hormuz.
Is it open?
Is it not?
I can't believe that's not still, and maybe it is in Iran, but how if people, are they still talking about there?
Is there outrage over that one incident?
Because I'm not seeing on the news, at least not in the American media, that much outrage from Iran.
And I can't tell if that's from our news media or where people are at with that.
Yeah, that's a great question.
The bombing of the girl's school in Minot was absolutely foundational to how Iranians are perceiving this war.
Country is absolutely still mourning the deaths of those children.
It's been in the news in Iran constantly, consistently, including memorials to each child and their names have been circulated and so forth.
And I think that it was...
a sort of foundational moment.
I should note that to the best of our ability to know, the sort of military experts who look into these things believe it was a U.S.
airstrike and not an Israeli one because it was a U.S.
Tomahawk missile, which the Israelis don't have.
So yes, I think there's a huge gap between how people in the U.S.
have experienced the trauma of that girl's school being bombed and people in Iran.
I've even seen people who were maybe
you know, because of their opposition to the Iranian government to some extent and their exhaustion with, you know, not knowing how to move forward, they were
sort of not certain how they felt about the bombing initially but as soon as that girl school was hit there was a sense okay war actually means the death of ordinary people civilians little kids you know so this is these are images that are circulating and when the iranian national soccer team played a match just a few weeks ago they they held little backpacks to signify and that was
from from the reporting their own decision.
I mean, they wanted to sort of say that they were playing on behalf of those little ones who had been killed.
And so I think, yeah, that's one of those things that has made an enormous impression in Iranian's hearts across the political and social spectrum and has really hardened, you know, you see a rally around the flag effect with with things like war and and the Minaab bombing allowed made that happen right away where people were really quite
disturbed and and grieving the loss of that of those lives and that hasn't been quite as you know even on the first couple of days after the bombing there was not first page there was not quite as much first page news about this mass casually incident as you think that there would be and really one of the worst sort of mass civilian death incidents
instantiated by the US military in decades.
I saw some people say the worst in Vietnam.
I saw other scholar myself.
I won't say definitively which
one that
is the case, but I could certainly, you know, one would certainly like to see more.
And one of the things that I'm, you know, I hope as a scholar to be able to do is to keep a kind of, you know, the memory of those civilian lives lost.
on the table because I mean you know hopefully for us to understand what happened and to learn from it we have to look at the what actually happened quite closely and I'm not sure that we've publicly done that as you know the broader American citizenry but on the Iranian side yes that is and it's been used by the government as well so on the one hand it's been sort of
Effective propaganda for the government, but I think also genuine kind of outpouring of rage and grief from all walks of life among Iranians about People who very clearly are innocents right like small children who
have no
way to protect themselves
We only have about a about a minute before we have to go to break them and I'm gonna piggyback off of something Pete says What is something that the that our media often gets wrong about Iran where it's misconception or just the way it's presented?
Well, I think the kind of the things I said about the Iranian populace holds true But as far as the government itself, which of course has been an enemy of the United States government since 1979 We tend to think of it, you know, we'll hear American leaders or media call it like the Ayatollah the regime Whatever and they'll often talk about the Ayatollah the Ayatollah, but in fact you're on government Rick again regardless of what your position on it may be is actually quite
complex.
And it's not about one guy.
It is about one person at the top, but it's actually quite systematic.
And many, many people have responsibilities, military, security, civilian, state building responsibilities.
And it's for that reason that you can't just decapitate it and expect the whole thing to collapse.
So I think that's very clear that our current administration doesn't quite grasp that about the system in Iran.
Uh, very well said.
We'll have more after a very short break with our guest.
She's a former Madisonian, folks.
Uh, Professor Bollinar, Nick Cora.
We are coming right back on, uh, with more Nightlight with Peach Waba and Greg Bach on the Civic Media Network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website,
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Nikpur, who is a, she is a scholar and a professor, and she's even spent time in Madison, Wisconsin.
She's enlightening us on the Iran war.
Professor, tell us about your book, and you could probably spend a long time on this, but I mean, why have prison situations, why has that gotten so much worse in
Iran?
really what my book is about is about the making of the modern prison system in Iran.
And what really surprised me, and the sort of, if I could say that there's one thing that the book is about, I mean, I spent 10 years on it, so I could probably say it's about
more.
But
if there's one thing that it's about is that, you know, I found that we all know, you know, we hear about Iranian prisons all the time.
And even now, as the war continues, there are
a quarter of a million people incarcerated in the country, although that's everyone.
I mean, that's the full carceral sort of group.
But what I've learned is that if you go back even to the 1920s, which is really, I mean, just a century ago, right?
We're talking about a place that had only a few hundred people in forced confinement.
And if you go even just a little before that, a decade or two before that, it would have been
a tiny number, you know, dozens
or
even 100 or 200.
So how do we go from Iran being a place where prisons are really not a big part of the punishment apparatus?
There's no such thing as sort of long-term forced confinement.
Of course, there's punishment and there's executions, but there's not really modern prisons as we understand them, to being a country where there's now, as I said, about a quarter of a million prisoners.
So my book tries to uncover how that infrastructure gets built.
And what I'm trying to make the case for in the book is that Iran has over that 100 plus years that I study, three really distinct different governments, two different monarchies, and then a revolution that brings about the Islamic Republic.
There's coups, there's two coups, there's two revolutions.
It's an enormously...
sort of transformative era in Iranian politics but all the same the sort of prison infrastructure undergirding those governments only increases in size and expands and sort of grows regardless of what type of government is in power right so there's exponential numbers of prisoners beginning when the Iranians start building the modern prison system in the 1910s and 20s and 30s until today and
What I uncovered is that a lot of this is being done in conversation with these trends happening all over the world and with models coming first from European context and then from the American context.
So a number of the prisons in Iran today are built on blueprints based on actually a prison in the Midwest, a prison called USV Marion in Illinois.
So that was something that I found as well.
I mean, those prisons were built before the revolution with sort of Ed and Eric Hyde.
era of aid and help and technical help between the U.S.
and Iran.
But basically Iran's story is not unlike other carceral states.
This is not actually very different from the U.S.
story either.
Prisons are a modern phenomenon all over the world.
Of course there's forced confinement, dungeons and so forth at earlier times, but not these big sprawling carceral sort of systems.
Once you build the system, once you put laws on the books that mandate that you have to incarcerate people for certain periods of time, the prison system expands and grows.
And so my book is trying to make sense of the ways in which we shouldn't think of Iran as an exceptional space that it has these prisons because of its medieval kind of Islamic politics, but rather as a quintessential modern cultural state that uses prisons, surveillance, policing to control
Trouble populations now in the context of contemporary Iran Some of that process or much of that process has the veneer of Islamic legitimacy But the technology and the or they're trying to give it that veneer right but the technologies and the the The practices are actually global right so I'll give you one quick example to illustrate what I mean Iran started about during
the pandemic actually in 2020 using traffic monitoring cameras to issue tickets and summonses for the typical things that that happens here like traffic cameras might catch you speeding or running a red light but also added to that sending tickets to people to women who were alleged to have violations of the hijab law so you see the way in which
When I say that this is a global process, it doesn't mean that it's identical to other places in the world, but that the technologies, whether it's the prison itself, so USP Marian model being used, or technologies like ankle monitors, traffic surveillance cameras today, those are used for the specific needs of the government in that moment.
But if you only look at what's happening internally, you miss a bigger picture of
carceral economies of you know private companies that are selling surveillance tech of all sorts of things that are happening around the world and that if we exceptionalize Iran and sort of imagine that
what's happening over there is only because of something pathological about Iranians or Islam or whatever.
We actually miss all of these connections that help us see the way in which our struggles are linked, the way in which these histories are linked, and miss the connections that can help us imagine a different future together, one that's more free for everyone.
Boy, this has been great stuff.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Thank you so much.
Check out Golnar Nipur's book.
It's the incarcerated modern prisons and public life in Iran in like 20 seconds.
Do you get back there ever?
And do you have plans to go back?
Well, I'm not sure when I'll get to go back
given the
current context of war.
I mean, people
in general there's difficulty going in and out and that might be the case especially if bombing begins again.
I haven't had a chance to go back since before the pandemic and I'm not sure if and when I'll get to go back but I do hope I can.
Iran is a beautiful country and I miss it.
It has untold numbers of natural beauties and
human
beauty too so
hopefully I'll get
a chance to go back there at some point soon.
Well, please come back here anytime you want.
I'm happy any time.
It's been really insightful and fun talking to you and great meeting you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Greg, Pete, and Dom.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
You got it.
All right.
We are coming right back for hour number two of this edition of Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
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