How and why do cultural issues incentivize conservative mobilization? Cultural grievances, some social movement scholars argue, are the subject of conservative mobilization. The ascent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the local election of 2001 and his subsequent victory in the Iranian presidential election of 2005 caught many Iran scholars off guard. Though numerous studies have focused on the liberal movements in Iran from 1997 (i.e., the electoral Reform Movement of 1997 and the Green Movement of 2009), less has been known about cultural activism of Iranian conservatives in the years before the rise of Ahmadinejad to power. Previous studies on the state politics in Iran were focused on the entire formal polity rather than conservative politics (i.e., Moslem 2002). Other Iran experts (i.e., Rahnema 2011) are concerned with ideational shifts within conservative preachers’ language rather than cultural mobilization and its relation to the state politics. Albloshi (2016), however, has made sense of the Iranian conservative politics (known in Iran as the principlist politics) regarding salient issues in their political discourses in the context of post Iran-Iraq War. Liberally-perceived cultural and social policies of the mid-1990s had tremendous impacts on the conservative politics in the country, which gave rise to various conservative identity movements from 1994 onward. The cultural grievances of conservatives before and after the rise of the Reform Movement, as I will discuss, is necessary to understand their contentious political behavior. Through a textual analysis of Sobh, a conservative weekly magazine, from 1994 to 2000, I attempt to show the relationship between perceived cultural policy threats and the rise of new conservative movements in the country. I seek to answer these questions: how and why did Iranian conservatives mobilize the socio-culturally marginalized base through a cultural politics and populist political discourse from the mid-1990s? And what have been some of the consequences of this cultural mobilization for the state politics in Iran?