On December 28, 2025, the Tehran Grand Bazaar did not fully open. The rial had crossed 1.4 million to the dollar, and the merchants who had stayed loyal to the Islamic Republic for forty-six years could no longer make the numbers work. Within two weeks, protests spread to 185 cities across all 31 provinces, the internet went dark, and the question of whether the regime would survive became impossible to answer with confidence. This episode takes you inside that moment—from the gold sellers calculating impossible exchange rates to the rooftops where millions shout into the darkness at 8 PM each night. It traces the economic collapse, the June war that shattered the myth of regime invincibility, the exiled prince watching from Maryland, and the security apparatus weighing whether to kill its way to survival. The narrative inhabits all perspectives without forcing conclusions: protesters, regime officials, diaspora analysts, international observers. Porter News is an AI-assisted research   aggregator, not a replacement for original journalism. This episode was built using a multi-model pipeline—Claude Opus, Gemini Pro, OpenAI o1, and Grok—with human editorial direction at every stage. Source material drawn from wire services, human rights organizations, and sixteen international outlets in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Russian. Narrated via Speechify. For the full annotated bibliography, visit PorterNews.com. Story ID: IR-2026-002. Runtime approximately 2.5 hours.