For the first time in decades, peace between Lebanon and Israel is becoming a reality. In June, Lebanese and Israeli officials signed a U.S.-brokered framework in Washington, marking their first direct talks since 1983. This achievement was personally facilitated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with key diplomats — Lebanon&#8217;s Nada Hamadeh Moawad and Israel&#8217;s Yechiel Leiter — engaged in direct negotiations, alongside Ambassadors Mike Huckabee and Mike Waltz, longstanding advocates for the region&#8217;s Christian communities. When Aoun meets President Trump at the White House on July 21, these dedicated individuals are prepared to turn this fragile opening into a lasting peace.
Lebanon&#8217;s president, Joseph Aoun, is a leader, and this is a critical moment.
Aoun is a president who says out loud what timid men whisper. When Iran&#8217;s Revolutionary Guard presumed to dictate the terms of Lebanon&#8217;s peace, Aoun answered them to their faces, on television, with Christiane Amanpour: &#8220;It&#8217;s not your country, it&#8217;s our country.&#8221;
Everyone understood he was speaking about Hezbollah — the militia contrived and funded by Iran to build a colony inside Lebanon, an armed state within a state that has fomented only war, at home and across every border. The words were so plainly true they should have been unremarkable. Yet no Lebanese leader of Aoun&#8217;s stature had ever dared to say them quite so clearly on a platform quite so public. His predecessors were frightened, bought, or weak.
This is why the United States should give President Aoun his due. He inherited a state hollowed out by corruption, a currency turned to paper, a port turned to rubble, and a militia that answered to Tehran, not Beirut. A weaker leader would manage the decline and scrape what personal gains he could for himself. Instead, Aoun leads.
&#8220;I will not let my people die,&#8221; he says. But keeping people alive is the bare minimum. The harder task now is to help them thrive again — and that he cannot do alone.
If America truly has the partner in Beirut it appears to have, it should validate him with substance, not sentiment: far greater support for the Lebanese army as it meets its commitments, the Gulf mobilized to underwrite reconstruction, and Europe and the wider world rallied behind Aoun — first to deny Hezbollah the power to steal any more of Lebanon&#8217;s future, and then to speed regional peace.
Lebanon is worth it.
If Hezbollah, an enemy of Lebanon, of America, and of Israel, is no longer able to deny the Lebanese government a monopoly on force, then regional peace will be inevitable.
The geostrategic arithmetic is simple. A country cannot have two armies. A state cannot be sovereign while a foreign-funded militia holds a veto over war and peace. Disarming Hezbollah is not an obstacle to Lebanon&#8217;s freedom; it is the precondition. A majority of Lebanese now say so. The only party still betting on rockets and ruin is the one that dragged Lebanon into catastrophe again and again — and would gladly do it once more.
Now the test: words have carried Aoun to the White House, but only deeds can carry Lebanon the rest of the way. President Trump&#8217;s terms should be just as plain: disarm Hezbollah and choose peace with your neighbors, Israel among them, and the United States will be no less a friend to this new Lebanon.
Lebanon’s cedars raised Solomon&#8217;s Temple; its shores gave the world its alphabet. It remains the only Arab nation with a Christian head of state, and Christians are still nearly a third of its people, the largest such community left in the region.
St. John Paul II called Lebanon &#8220;more than a country; it is a message.&#8221; Pope Leo XIV carried that word onto Lebanese soil last winter, preaching &#8220;Blessed are the peacemakers&#8221; while calling on Hezbollah to lay down its weapons.
To achieve this would rank among the great achievements of any American president in modern history. President Trump would help restore Lebanon and finish off Iran&#8217;s most prized proxy, and the price of it all would be peace with Israel.
I can already see the Lebanon that waits on the other side of this decision. I see a Lebanon of open borders and open markets, where a young professional eats lunch in Haifa and dinner in Beirut. I see Beirut restored to its place as the jewel of the Mediterranean, a rival to Dubai and Tel Aviv. I see ancient Christian communities no longer fleeing westward but flourishing in their land. I see the cedars standing tall again — just as the Psalmist promised, &#8220;The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.&#8221;
This Lebanon is waiting for leadership.
***
Reverend Johnnie Moore, PhD, is Vice Chancellor and the head of Middle East studies at Pepperdine University. Moore was twice appointed by President Donald J. Trump to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom. The views expressed in this piece are his own.

LEBANON-VATICAN-RELIGION-DIPLOMACY-POPE

Lebanon’s Peace Means Middle East Peace – And Trump Holds The Key

DW Opinion

Foreign Policy

Joseph Aoun

Lebanon

Middle East

Trump Administration

A Mexican national pleaded guilty to smuggling thousands of illegal immigrants into the United States, including from heavily Islamic countries with links to terrorism. 
Efrain Zuniga-Garcia admitted Monday in federal court to participating in a “vast” scheme to sneak up to 3,000 foreign nationals into America, including from countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Yemen, the Justice Department said. The 38-year-old Zuniga-Garcia was involved in the scheme from November 2020 until September 2023, when he was first charged.  
The smuggling network operated stash houses in Monterrey, Mexico, and Piedras Negras, Mexico, and brought in between 2,500 and 3,000 illegal immigrants. The network also smuggled in foreign nationals from India, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Ecuador.
The scheme operated at the same time that Border Patrol agents encountered a shocking spike in individuals on the terror watchlist along the porous border that former President Joe Biden oversaw.
Zuniga-Garcia ran the Monterrey stash house where he coordinated the transportation of the illegals by turning them over to “coyotes” who would bring them across the Rio Grande and into the United States, according to the Justice Department. 
He was charged in September 2023 with conspiracy to bring an alien into the United States and three counts of bringing an alien into the United States for financial benefit. Zuniga-Garcia pled guilty to both counts and faces a mandatory minimum of three years in prison upon sentencing. 
Multiple of Zuniga-Garcia’s co-defendants have already been sentenced to prison, including Enil Edil Mejia-Zuniga and Monica Hernandez-Palma. Mejia-Zuniga, an illegal from Honduras who lived in San Antonio, Texas, was <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/illegal-alien-honduras-sentenced-prison-vast-alien-smuggling-conspiracy">sentenced</a> to 10 years in prison in July 2025 after being convicted of directing the operation. 
“In an effort to satisfy his greed, Mejia-Zuniga facilitated the illegal movement of thousands of Middle Easterners into the United States,” said U.S. Attorney Justin Simmons for the Western District of Texas at the time. “His actions put our national security at risk.”
Lawmakers have <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/on-9-11-republicans-warn-about-lingering-danger-from-bidens-open-border-policies?author=Leif+Le+Mahieu&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=On+9%2F11%2C+Republicans+Warn+About+Lingering+Danger+From+Biden’s+‘Open-Border+Policies’">warned</a> that Americans could still be facing security challenges after the flood of illegal immigrants during the Biden presidency. The House Homeland Security Committee found that from the start of fiscal year 2021 to the end of Biden’s presidency, Border Patrol agents encountered around 400 individuals on the terror watchlist at the border. From 2017 to 2020, only 14 individuals on the terror watchlist were apprehended at the border, <a href="https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/December-24-SS.pdf">according</a> to the committee. During that same time, at least two million illegals who were known “gotaways” entered the country.

Yuma Arizona Border Crossing

Feds Unravel Mexican’s Scheme To Smuggle Middle Easterners Into U.S.

Department of Justice

Illegal Immigation

Mexico

Radical Islamic Terror

Texas

Yesterday, the Republican-majority Senate joined the Republican-majority House in passing a symbolic rebuke of Republican President Trump’s Iran War. This rebuke was not spurred by the launching of a war without congressional authorization (the first bombs dropped almost four months ago). It was not spurred by President Trump threatening to escalate the conflict dramatically by putting American boots on the ground in Iran.
No, the catalyst that pushed congressional anger over the top appears to be the diplomatic breakthrough of the signing of a recent Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran. Which begs the question — has everyone lost their damn minds?
A sane soul would greet news of an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with guarded optimism, but sane souls are in short supply. In their place, a cavalcade of Cassandras pounced with delight, reading their darkest fears into 14 bullet points. Iran War supporters screeched that Trump snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Opponents seized upon the agreement as further proof that the war was misbegotten from the jump. In confusing a narrow interim agreement with an ultimate settlement, both groups committed the same category error.
For what it’s worth, I was hardly eager to go to war with Iran. Had President Trump asked my thoughts, I would have urged restraint out of fear that the risks of war outweighed potential gains. I don&#8217;t feel that way anymore: the potential upside remains immensely consequential, and the downside has been milder than any analyst anticipated. But I also won’t pretend a positive outcome is guaranteed. The enemy gets a vote, and the Iranian regime has ably leveraged its relative strengths. What I am confident of is narrower and more durable: that the unrelenting gloom is wholly unwarranted.
I offer no promise that my read will be borne out, but it is considerably more presumptuous to insist that the future will be a straight-line continuation of the present. This has been, and remains, a multi-turn process; conflict resolution is achieved by building trust in small increments, under the credible threat of a return to violence. What the MOU laid out is about the smallest increment possible to remove the most pressing constraint on the West, while surrendering none of our optionality.
Remember, a memorandum of understanding is an opening position, not a last will and testament. Substantively, the MOU amounts to little more than &#8220;Hormuz-for-Hormuz&#8221;: Iran ceases its attacks on commercial shipping in the strait, and the United States lifts its naval blockade. Considering that closing the Strait — and the resulting roiling of global energy markets — was the strongest arrow in Tehran&#8217;s quiver, this is an Iranian concession hiding under a triumphant cloak. The false triumph is both useful and telling — the more regime thugs beat their chests and proclaim victory, the more convinced I become that they’re steeling for the bitter pills hardliners must swallow on the way to a productive peace.
The reality is that a window of relief is a net loss for Iran. Every day that passes is a day where global crude and LNG reserves recover and storage gets topped up, a day of progress on pipelines bypassing Hormuz, a day that lowers prices at the pump and relieves domestic political pressures — in short, a day where Iran’s ability to slam the strait shut loses its menace. In exchange, a reprieve or relief of sanctions at this stage will give Iran, at best, a penny on the dollar for what they’ve lost in this war.
As we go forward, could the Iranian regime violate, renege, or backslide on commitments? Absolutely. In fact, assume it as your base case; the critics are absolutely right to distrust the Iranian side. Where those parsing the verbiage of the MOU go wrong is in their second, unstated assumption: that Donald Trump, of all people, will cling to the letter of any agreement the moment it stops suiting him.
That blind spot about Trump’s nature sits atop a deeper one about the war itself. The frustration among the war&#8217;s supporters rests on a flattering fiction: that the Revolutionary Guard was moments away from collapse, and simply doing more of the same would produce total victory. (This was a plausible scenario at the outset, but not proven out.) The mirror-image conviction animating the war&#8217;s opponents — that we&#8217;ve merely clawed our way back to a worse version of the prewar status quo — is no better supported. Categorical claims rooted in a single moment frozen in time are almost always wrong, and they are especially wrong with a president whose only constants are Diet Coke and long red ties.
That&#8217;s the part the doomsayers keep tripping over: they&#8217;ve misread the main actor. Trump is a fluid operator with a pragmatic, iterative style. He has no compunction about turning on a dime when a tactic isn&#8217;t working, and that very habit is what fuels critics’ suspicion that he pivoted to peace because the war was failing. That reading misses the whole trick: on a core conviction, Trump keeps the destination fixed even as he swaps his vehicle. He didn&#8217;t abandon tariffs when the Supreme Court struck down one of his tools for imposing them; he believes in tariffs, so he simply found another route. Mistaking a change of tactics for a change of strategy is the original sin of nearly every pundit predicting what Trump will do next.
Which brings us to the actual strategy. Some behavior can be coerced, and at the outset there was a Venezuela-like possibility that just sticks would do the trick. Yet the first months of the conflict made clear that reaching an acceptable end state cannot be achieved by coercion alone. The next logical turn is to the carrots, while keeping the sticks close at hand — silver, in other words, with the lead never far from reach. Critics are right that this is where Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) comparisons are most apt: both the MOU and the JCPOA contained sanctions relief and a firm commitment by Iran to neither procure nor pursue nuclear weapons. The JCPOA also held an implicit wager that drawing Iran into deeper economic integration would moderate the regime over time. October 7th showed the failure of that approach.
What’s different now is the destruction of Iran’s economy and evisceration of its industrial base to the tune of anywhere from $500 billion to $1 trillion in losses. Combining this damage with the magnitude of the potential upside, alongside a motivated Gulf committed to seeing it through, and a real change in regime direction is not just possible but a logical path for Iran to pursue.
Paradoxically, the extent to which the Iranians have removed all doubt as to their willingness to burn the region down has heightened the incentive of their neighbors to do everything possible to forestall such a future. The potential $300 billion pot of reconstruction gold at the end of the rainbow is burden-sharing by those most at risk if the strategy fails. At the risk of mixing metallurgical metaphors, that’s a hell of a lot of silver for the Iranians to consider — enough to drive a durable wedge between the true believers and those responsive to earthly incentives.
The MOU may be a narrow solution to a narrow problem, but it is a narrow solution that pries open a far wider, far grander, and strategically seismic possibility: turning Iran off its present course and speed as the foremost multiplier of malevolence in a region that remains vital to the global economy. The ultimate consequence of a malign Iran extends far beyond chaos in the Middle East: with Venezuela out and Cuba teetering, Iran is the last misfit state outside the Pacific that China could use to horizontally escalate a violent great-power conflict with the U.S. Trump and his team understand this; Iran was never just about Iran, but the axis Tehran anchors in the Gulf.
The severe domestic political consequences of this war are self-evident in polling and approval ratings; Trump acknowledged not only knowing the risks but also expecting far worse when he made the decision to go to war. There was always going to be a maturity mismatch between the short-term political cost to the Trump administration and the long-term potential strategic reward of knocking Iran off a violent course and forestalling a Great Power catastrophe. In normal times, a leader who sets out on a path he believes is right, fully aware of the electoral backlash it will bring, would be admired for their political courage.
But we don’t live in normal times, and none of this guarantees the ending. Tehran may renege; the talks may collapse; the doomsayers may yet be vindicated. But that is precisely the point — it is an ending no one has reached. Politicians bowing to cynical interests to call the war a defeat is forcing a conclusion we have yet to reach, a bewildering move while our adversary is lowering their only weapon of consequence.
***
Peter Meijer served as the U.S. representative for Michigan&#8217;s 3rd congressional district from 2021 to 2023.

Trump Signs Order Directing Customs Crackdown Amid Trade Gaps

Peter Meijer: Relax, Trump is Handling Iran

Iran Nuclear Deal

Iran war

Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

The FBI recently took out a massive internet scam network, arresting over 300 people, freeing over 2,000 people from human trafficking, and seizing over $8 billion in cryptocurrency. 
The FBI said last week that it primarily focused on taking down what it <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/fbi-seizes-record-8-billion-182232782.html">calls</a> “scam compounds” in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The scam compounds are typically guarded and filled with trafficked workers who are forced to conduct romance scams and fake investment schemes that target many Americans. Over 2,000 people were freed from the compounds. 
The operation focused on Prince Holding Group, a company in Cambodia. Authorities also took out a criminal compound in Dubai, Myanmar, and Thailand. Altogether, the FBI seized over 127,000 bitcoin from the nine scam compounds, which is over $8 billion, making it the largest crypto seizure in human history.
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The United States worked with Dubai police to arrest 275 people, six of whom will be transported to the United States to face federal charges.
FBI Director Kash Patel, said the major crackdown gives a clear message to scammers across the world.
&#8220;If you target Americans, we will find you, disrupt your network, and bring every available tool of the federal government down on you,” Patel <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-seizes-record-setting-8-billion-cryptocurrency-amid-intercontinental-scam-compound-crackdown">told</a> Fox News. 

The FBI also took down the &#8220;Democratic Karen Benevolent Army,” an armed militia in Myanmar that has ties to Chinese mobsters and has been engaging in this criminal scam network..
The U.S. seized thousands of smartphones and other office equipment in Thailand, severely crippling the scam infrastructure there.
During the whole operation, the FBI <a href="https://x.com/jacobincambodia/status/2060184532104700246">worked</a> with the Royal Thai police, the Burmese army, Dubai’s police, and some Chinese investigators. The FBI also utilized Elon Musk’s Starlink to take down over 7,000 terminals in Myanmar that criminals were using to facilitate communications.
The FBI’s 2025 &#8220;Internet Crime Report&#8221; <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/cryptocurrency-and-ai-scams-bilk-americans-of-billions">states</a> that Americans have been defrauded of $21 billion in cyber-related crimes, with AI and crypto-related scams being the costliest. 
 
Apprehending these con artists and hackers is difficult as the internet allows them to be scattered across the world, seemingly untouchable by American authorities.

FBI Makes Largest Crypto Seizure Ever In Global ‘Scam Compound’ Crackdown

Africa

Cambodia

China

Communist China

Crime

Cryptocurrency

Cyberattack

Cybercrime

Cybersecurity

fbi director

India

kash patel

Myanmar

Organized crime

scams

Thailand

All hell seems like it&#8217;s about to break loose again in the Middle East.
Let’s review the timeline. The United States entered into a ceasefire with Iran. The idea was to open negotiations for two weeks and then move toward a solution on nuclear weapons, with Iran giving up its nukes, ballistic missiles, and support for terrorist proxies.
It seemed as though there was some pretty significant movement. The president deployed JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner to Islamabad, Pakistan. They came back and said there was no deal to be made.
Then it appeared as though there might be some movement after all, because the United States imposed a blockade on Iran&#8217;s blockade. Iran had basically put a blockade on goods in the Strait of Hormuz, harassing shipping and preventing oil from exiting the Persian Gulf.
But in the aftermath of the failed first round of talks, America blockaded Iranian ships entering and exiting the Strait of Hormuz.
That put the Iranian government in significant economic trouble, which led to backchannel negotiations. On Friday, both the United States government and the Iranian government announced that the Strait of Hormuz was open.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></div>
President Trump said that a deal was very close, that Iran would ship its nuclear dust out, making a deal with the United States to permanently end their nuclear program, that they would stop supporting foreign terrorist organizations, etc.
This led to what appears to be a pretty open split between some of the negotiators and the people actually in charge, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is essentially the Praetorian guard for the mullahs. There have been a lot of rumors about the split. In fact, one of the reasons why the negotiations in Islamabad led by Vance didn&#8217;t succeed, according to Vance and members of the American side of the negotiations, was that the Foreign Ministry was making promises they couldn&#8217;t keep. They would go back, and the IRGC would then pretend that none of that ever happened.
Iran tried to tie its own ceasefire with the United States to Israel stopping its attacks on Hezbollah in retaliation for Hezbollah firing thousands of rockets into northern Israel. They tried to claim the reason that they had opened the Strait of Hormuz was because Israel had stopped its action in Lebanon, as opposed to the real reason, which is because the United States was blockading all of the oil going in and out of Iran.
On Saturday, things got heated again because the Iranian navy informed ships that Hormuz was shut.
President Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116433000897070863">noted</a>:
<blockquote>Today, an Iranian-flagged cargo ship named TOUSKA, nearly 900 feet long and weighing almost as much as an aircraft carrier, tried to get past our Naval Blockade, and it did not go well for them. The U.S. Navy Guided Missile Destroyer USS SPRUANCE intercepted the TOUSKA in the Gulf of Oman, and gave them fair warning to stop.
The Iranian crew refused to listen, so our Navy ship stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engine room. Right now, U.S. Marines have custody of the vessel. The TOUSKA is under U.S. Treasury Sanctions because of their prior history of illegal activity. We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!</blockquote>
What is likely to happen next is that Iran will remain intransigent. The president is likely to authorize further military action to both significantly hamper or destroy Iran&#8217;s economic capacity, and to either bomb every possible nuclear facility into complete rubble, unleash special operations in line with the Israelis, and go get the nuclear material, or both.
That is the most likely next step, and it will probably happen sooner rather than later if the Iranians do not get on the clock and start negotiating rapidly.

President Trump Departs Washington For Charlottesville

Deadline Tehran: All Hell About To Break Loose

Donald Trump

Iran

Jared Kushner

JD Vance

Opinion

Pakistan

Strait of Hormuz

You&#8217;ve been lied to.
You&#8217;ve been hearing for weeks now from all of the doubters, all of the so-called “panicans.” But here is what you are not going to hear anywhere else: not just that President Trump is winning in Iran, but why he is winning.
He came in with four goals. He has now achieved three of them, and the fourth is on the way.
Iran had three methods of resistance. President Trump has basically eliminated two of them. And the third is about to end.
People keep assuming that the goal of the war in Iran was regime change. No. Regime change is a means; it is not the actual end. In a certain sense, if the regime were to change its behavior dramatically, you wouldn&#8217;t need to change the regime.
Yes, if there were to be a regime change, it would pretty much achieve all the goals all at once. 
But you don&#8217;t have to achieve all of the goals of the war with regime change.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2408?elementPosition=2&amp;row=5&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
The president and Secretary of State Marco Rubio <a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2039408073039630728?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2039408073039630728%7Ctwgr%5Eb81529da64e58116a12923b7165a9b8bf97313a6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2Freleases%2F2026%2F04%2Fpresident-trumps-clear-and-unchanging-objectives-drive-decisive-success-against-iranian-regime%2F">laid out the goals</a>:
<ol>
<li>Destroy the vast majority of Iran&#8217;s forward military capacity. Done. We have defenestrated their foreign military capacity, their missile base is basically gone. Their air force, gone. Their navy, gone.</li>
<li>Wipe out their defense industrial base. Done. The United States and Israel have wiped out their steel foundries. They have hit all of their missile factories. They have hit their missile launchers.</li>
<li>Keep Iran’s economy in a stranglehold, while depriving it of the means to rebuild. Done. The Iranian economy is defunct. Nothing has been getting in.</li>
<li>End the Iranian nuclear threat. Pending. </li>
</ol>
Three of those four have basically been done. It&#8217;s the Iranian nuclear threat that remains on the table.
Okay, say the panicans and the liars, but somehow Iran has gotten stronger.
This is what we might call the Obi-Wan Kenobi theory of foreign policy: “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”
It doesn&#8217;t work that way in real life. When you strike someone down, they usually stay down. And if they recover, you can strike them down again. 
The spirit of Iran is not going to teach Luke Skywalker how to blow up the Death Star. That&#8217;s not how this works. It is not clear how you get stronger by being alienated from every single country in the region, from Jews to Muslims, or how, somehow, you&#8217;re getting stronger if all your leaders are dead and you&#8217;re walking around as a regime pretending that an impotent, comatose dude with no leg is your actual leader: “Weekend at Mullahs.”
Or how you get stronger when your missile launch capacity has been so degraded, so radically degraded, that you&#8217;re being forced to physically unbury the missile launchers you buried. 
They buried a bunch of missile launchers to hide them, and now they&#8217;re being forced to unbury them just so they have something to shoot.
We can see them doing that; if there&#8217;s another round here, we will just blow those up, too.
How do you get stronger if your navy is at the bottom of the sea or if your Air Force, which was a bunch of Vietnam-era crap, is now a bunch of shrapnel? How are you stronger when your economy is totally nonexistent, when in a few weeks you&#8217;re not going to have money to pay your IRGC thugs?
Okay, fine, say the panicans and the liars; The Iranians will still win. They will win by outlasting us.
Staying alive isn&#8217;t winning unless we&#8217;re doing “The Hunger Games,” which we&#8217;re not.
To take a similar example: Is Cuba winning right now?
The Cuban communist regime has survived. Are they winning or are they on their last legs? It’s pretty clear they are losing.
And so is the regime in Tehran. The regime in Tehran had three methods of resistance, and they’ve been building all three for years and years.
First, the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” This included all the terror proxies they placed throughout the region, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis to terror groups in Iraq. All of those members of the “Axis of Resistance” were supposed to be Iran’s forward army. That was their forward capacity.
But since October 7, 2023, Israel has steadily degraded or destroyed that forward capacity.
Hamas is stuck in a small section of Gaza. They may be trying to rebuild, but it won’t matter. Israel will go in and blow them up again. Hezbollah has been greatly reduced as a power in the region, and now it is in danger of complete evisceration. The Houthis could have acted at any time during this war, but they didn’t, and they didn’t for a reason. They knew that if they had, they would have been obliterated.
So the terror proxies Iran had been funding for generations were basically defenestrated. That was their first mode of striking back.
Second was the nuclear program, which they were attempting to develop. They were racing toward a nuclear bomb to protect their regime. That is what caused all of this to happen. If they had given up their nuclear program years ago, they would have had normalized relations with a lot of different countries. The sanctions would not be on them. But they decided they were going to race forward with their nuclear program, and they got the hell bombed out of them.
Third: the Strait of Hormuz. Shutting that down was supposed to be their trump card. That was supposed to stop everything.
And this is where all of the panicans and all of the liars and the people who hate Trump and hate Israel and all the rest started saying, “The Iranians really showed you. They shut the Strait of Hormuz!”
It’s open now.
Remember that time when they said that we would never be able to open the Strait?
What did we do? We said if you close it, we are going to stop all ships going in and out of Iranian ports, and then you won&#8217;t have an economy, and you’ll be dead in the water.
Guess what? Within a week and a half, they opened the strait.
They stopped messing around in the strait because they didn&#8217;t have the forward operating capacity. Their navy was, in fact, at the bottom of the sea. The Persian Gulf was littered with the hulks of their ships. The reality is that they used their pathetic mine-laying capacities — and I say pathetic because they were actually just putting mines in the water and losing them out there — and we are now de-mining the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump wrote, “I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help. I told them to stay away unless they just want to load up their ships with oil. They were useless when needed. A paper tiger.”
Fact.
What really happened here is that the Strait of Hormuz closing hurt the Chinese far more than it hurt us. The Chinese presumably brought pressure to bear via Pakistan on the Iranians, and the Iranians decided to open the Strait.
Not only that, oil prices have now plunged dramatically. We&#8217;ve been told that that was the chief element that was somehow going to undermine the war.
Nope.
President Trump is winning, big-time.
And don’t let the panicans and liars convince you otherwise.

President Trump Departs Washington Enroute To Miami, Florida

Trump Crushes Doubters On Iran 

Ben Shapiro

Marco Rubio

America is breaking down into two parties.
I’m not speaking of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
I’m speaking of the American Exceptionalist Party and the bipartisan Grievance Party.
The former believes in American exceptionalism, that America is awesome, that we have historically been awesome, and that we will be awesome again if we do the hard things that we must do.
Conversely, the Grievance Party believes America is not awesome, never was awesome, and will only be awesome if we fundamentally rewrite the American bargain — and also retreat from the world for our great sins.
That battle between the American Exceptionalist and the Grievance Party — Left and Right — will define our future as Americans.
And right now, that battle is being fought over Iran.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></div>
The American Exceptionalist Party may argue over tax rates. We may argue over the prosecution of particular wars, whether it&#8217;s to do them or how to do them. But we generally agree that America has the best constitutional system, the strongest and best free-market economy, and the most powerful military in all of human history.
We know that America, in order to preserve the freest and most prosperous nation in world history, sometimes has to do the tough stuff — but doing the tough stuff is part of what makes America great.
Then there are the members of the Grievance Party. They&#8217;re on the Left, and they&#8217;re on the Right. They&#8217;re the people President Trump calls “low IQ,” and they&#8217;ve become largely indistinguishable from one another, from Hasan Piker on the Left to Tucker Carlson on the Right.
They seem to believe that America&#8217;s constitutional system is a mockery and a sham, that our free market economy is actually a rigged oligarchy created by nefarious and evil elites at the expense of the poor, that our military is a gigantic terrorist operation, and that the world would somehow be better off if America abandoned the international playing field.
The Grievance Party is gaining adherents because the world feels chaotic.
And when the world feels chaotic, there is comfort in grievance.
When you feel like nothing is in your control, it is easy and politically productive to blame mysterious forces beyond your control. That also happens to be a recipe for failure, both individually and nationally, which is what the propagandists for the Grievance Party members are openly rooting for. They root for the United States to fail in its battle to stop the world&#8217;s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran —an apocalyptic death cult that cries “Death to America” — from obtaining nuclear weapons.
They want America to lose. They want America to give up power to China and to Russia. They openly say so.
But here&#8217;s the thing: America is not losing. And that is because American Exceptionalists know that in a chaotic world, the only answer is to stand up for American values and to do that without apology, with strength, and with courage.
President Trump is doing that right now in Iran.
If you listened to the low-IQ Grievance Party propagandists and their left-wing legacy media counterparts over the course of the last week, you might have thought that President Trump was caving in, that the ceasefire was Trump chickening out, that it was TACO time.
But it wasn’t.
Over the weekend, it turned out some of us were right, and some people were wrong, because he didn&#8217;t cave in.
And now, he is holding Iran&#8217;s feet to the fire, and they have really, really serious problems.
The United States still has a lot of cards left to play. We could embargo all of the oil that is coming out of Iran. We can blockade it. We could also just blow up Kharg Island and create a permanent problem for Iran. The Israelis could do a special operation and grab the nuclear materials right now.
And, as the Iranian economy collapses, the regime is in very, very serious trouble.
This raises the only possibility Iran has left, and that is to convince members of the Grievance Party that if they complain loud enough, the president will stop.
The reality, always and forever, is that Americans don&#8217;t like wars until we win them. That&#8217;s it. Even the wars that we do like at the very beginning, if we start to lose them, Americans don&#8217;t like them anymore.
Americans like winning. And we don&#8217;t like losing. It is that simple.
Americans are willing to undergo this for a temporary period of time, as they have said over and over and over.
But members of the Grievance Party refuse to understand any of this, and spend all of their time trying to trot out the propaganda of our enemies.
There are many pragmatic questions we can ask about whether particular measures in an intervention are good or bad, productive or unproductive, or even counterproductive. But the main difference that we are seeing emerge in American politics right now — and this will decide the future of the country — is between the American Exceptionalists, who believe that America was good, is good and will be good again, and the people who believe that America was never good fundamentally, gave up the ghost decades ago, and that the only cure for the United States is, as Barack Obama once suggested, fundamental change.
This has been a battle long in coming. The fact that it has infused a little part of the Right, a splintered fragment of the Right, is not a great shock in a time of social media brainwashed algorithmic nonsense.
But it is the fight. It is the fight.
And President Trump has no intention of losing.

UFC 327: Procházka v Ulberg

Trump Fights For America’s Future

Hasan Piker

Israel

Tucker Carlson

An American journalist has reportedly been freed after being held captive for more than a week by an Iran-backed militia, with the group demanding she &#8220;leave the country immediately&#8221; as a condition of her release.
In late March, Shelly Kittleson was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-video-shows-moment-american-female-journalist-is-kidnapped-in-iraq?author=Nathan+Gay&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=WATCH%3A+Video+Shows+Moment+American+Female+Journalist+Is+Kidnapped+In+Iraq">stopped</a> in the middle of a road in Baghdad by a group of armed men who then threw her into a van and fled the city. The kidnappers were later identified as members of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shiite Iraqi militia.
Kataib Hezbollah said in a Tuesday statement on Telegram that it had decided to release Kittleson following productive discussions with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. The militia said they had an “appreciation of the patriotic stances” of the prime minister, and released the journalist &#8220;on the condition that she leaves the country immediately.”
Middle Eastern outlet Al-Monitor, which Kittleson worked for prior to her kidnapping, <a href="https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2026/04/us-journalist-shelly-kittleson-released-iran-backed-kataib-hezbollah-iraq">reported</a> that two Iraqi officials confirmed Kittleson&#8217;s release, and according to one official, Kittleson was in the Iraqi prime minister&#8217;s office on Tuesday.
The officials declined to give further details on her release, and neither the Iraqi nor U.S. government has verified Kittleson&#8217;s release at the time of publication.
Alhurra, an Arabic outlet based in Washington, D.C., <a href="https://alhurra.com/en/17856" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> Monday, citing Iraqi intelligence sources, that Kittleson had been moved to a militia-controlled area in Iraq&#8217;s Babil province — which is known as a hub for smuggling operations and attacks on U.S. forces — where she was believed to be held as a &#8220;human shield&#8221; against American strikes. The outlet also reported that Kataib Hezbollah was seeking the release of four of its members detained by Iraqi authorities for their role in attacks on Syria. It is unclear if the Iraqi government met this demand.
Kataib Hezbollah released footage purporting to show Kittleson earlier Tuesday, with her supposedly admitting to gathering intelligence on Iranian-backed militias for the U.S. government. The unverified video would be the first sign of life of Kittleson since her abduction.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Iraqi Hezbollah releases footage of American journalist Shelly Kittelson in captivity, showing her “admitting” she gathered intelligence on Shia militias for the U.S. consul in Baghdad.
They say she will be freed and must leave Iraq immediately. <a href="https://t.co/M8nTZaFNRC">https://t.co/M8nTZaFNRC</a> <a href="https://t.co/bUiqbTiCCm">pic.twitter.com/bUiqbTiCCm</a>
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) <a href="https://twitter.com/Osint613/status/2041561782574084606?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 7, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Kittleson, a journalist specializing in the Middle East who has reported for the BBC, Foreign Relations, and POLITICO, was in Baghdad reporting on Iraqi politics for the outlet Al-Monitor at the time of her kidnapping.

TOPSHOT-IRAQ-MEDIA-SECURITY-KIDNAPPING

American Journalist Released By Iran-Backed Militia, Sets Exit Deadline

Iraq

kidnapping

World

Ignore those who are preaching doom. America rocks.
America is experiencing a totally exceptional moment.
This country just kicks ass.
We are sending human beings around the moon for the first time in decades.
We are performing some of the most extraordinary military operations in all of human history, killing terrorists, delivering the most targeted strikes from the most sophisticated weaponry ever built.
We are rescuing pilots in Mission: Impossible-style operations.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2402-sub?elementPosition=3&amp;row=5&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
On Monday, the Artemis II astronauts made history by traveling farther than any human being has ever gone.
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/artemis-astronauts-are-going-where-no-human-has-gone-before-99962e92">According</a> to The Wall Street Journal:
<blockquote>Just before 2 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, the astronauts on Artemis II steered their Orion craft into the record books, flying more than 248,655 miles from Earth, which is the furthest that human beings have ever gone.</blockquote>
Human beings are doing unbelievable things because America kicks absolute ass.
President Trump called the Artemis crew to congratulate them.
“Tell me, what is the most unforgettable part of this really historic day?” he asked. “The whole world is watching and listening. Please tell me.”
“Mr. President, this call is certainly special to all of us, and we really have a lot of faith in our administrator, Jared Isaacman, who is with you,”  Commander Reid Wiseman responded. “We appreciate his leadership in NASA and in the international community. We are doing great things and we are proud to be a part of &#8230; I have to tell you, as we came around the near side of the moon, seeing all the sights that we&#8217;ve seen from Earth for all of our lives, but we&#8217;re seeing them from a different perspective, and then we started to get a glimpse of the &#8230;  And we saw sights, oriental sights that no human has ever seen before, not even in Apollo, and that was amazing for us. And then the surprise of the day: We just came out of an eclipse where the sun, moon and the entire dark moon, about that big, right out the window that we were watching, we could see the corona of the sun, and then we could see the planet train line up, and then Mars, and all of us commented how excited we are to watch this nation and this planet become a two-planet species.”
America rocks.
And you know what? It&#8217;s part and parcel of an inspiring vision for the United States. I know we don&#8217;t talk about the United States that way, or haven&#8217;t in recent years, but America is an unbelievably inspiring place.
That&#8217;s the reason why everyone is clamoring to get here, not just because we can put human beings 250,000 miles away going around the moon, but also because when people come here, they are inspired to create and to build and to build better lives for themselves and their families.
It’s because the American system offers them that opportunity, and because America is, in fact, the guarantor of security on planet Earth. It’s because the United States, the same United States that takes humans and puts them 250,000 miles away around the moon, is the same United States that stands up to the thuggish, theocratic tyrants in Iran who want to develop nuclear weapons and develop into intercontinental ballistic missiles, and who wish to spread terrorism all over the region against us and our allies.
We stand up to them.
What President Trump is providing is an inspiring vision of what the United States should be.
And guess what? We are making it happen in real time.
The president has provided the Iranian regime an off-ramp over and over and over and over again. This is the part that everyone seems to just ignore: If Iran did not wish to be in the gun sights of the United States military, all they would have to do is stop developing nuclear weapons, stop developing long-range ballistic missiles, and stop funding terrorism.
That is all they would have to do. That&#8217;s it. And they could have done this at any time for 47 years.
They could have done this at any time. They would have been reintegrated into the world economy. They would have been treated as a member of the family of nations. Their concerns would have been heard.
Instead, they decided that they were going to double down on their theocratic tyranny, that they were going to rush toward a nuclear weapon, that they were going to back every major terrorist group in the region and beyond.
They decided to do that. That was their decision.
The difference now is that this president understands that it is not in the interest of the United States to allow that cancer to fester, that the gangrenous limb that is the Iranian cannot be allowed to poison the entire region and beyond.
That&#8217;s why the president took the stand that he is taking right now.
And guess what? We are kicking the hell out of the Iranian military. We are. There is no standard in military history by which we are not kicking the hell out of them. We have put their entire navy underwater. We have taken their entire air force out of the sky. We have taken their ballistic missile launcher capacity to near zero. We have destroyed their steel factories. We have been hitting specific Basij checkpoints in Tehran. We&#8217;ve been bombing every nuclear facility we can find. 
And still, President Trump is offering them an off-ramp; all they would have to do is open the Strait of Hormuz and give up their nukes.
Do it, and we’re done. The war would be over. That&#8217;s all.
They won&#8217;t do it.
Ask yourself: Why? We would give them a permanent cease-fire if they opened up the Strait of Hormuz and gave up their nukes.
They won&#8217;t do it.
And the reason they won&#8217;t do it is because they must terrorize their people. They must rush toward a nuclear weapon to preserve their tyrannical regime, and they must harass the countries around them to gain power. They have regional ambitions not restricted to Iran in their philosophy.
This notion that radical Islam is restricted to a small portion of the world, that if only we would leave them alone, they would leave us alone, ignores the entire history of radical Islam going back roughly 1300 years.
President Trump was asked if God supports the United States’ actions.
“I do, because God is good, and because God is good and God wants to see people taken care of, God doesn&#8217;t like what&#8217;s happening,” he said of the violence perpetrated by the Iranian regime against their own people. “I don&#8217;t like what&#8217;s happening. Everyone says I enjoy (waging war)? I don&#8217;t enjoy this.”
When the president says that he thinks that God supports the United States as we take out tyrannical dictators, when we kill Ayatollah Khomeini, a mass murderer, when we try to destroy the forward function of terror groups, he is correct.
We are a great and moral nation. Whether it’s going farther than Man has ever gone before or removing evil from the world’s midst, we are a unique force in world history.
And Americans should feel justly proud of that.

President Trump Attends Opening Night Of Chicago At The Kennedy Center

Note To America Haters: Sorry, We’re Busy Kicking Ass

Artemis II

NASA

Space

U.S. Military

In the days ahead, the direction of Operation Epic Fury will become unmistakable in the targets the United States and Israel choose to strike.
The U.S.-Israeli air campaign has already delivered historic results. Our losses to enemy fire have been dramatically lower than in past major operations — far below the roughly one aircraft per day suffered in the run-up to Desert Storm. Precision strikes combined with air superiority have severely damaged Iran’s missile forces, air defenses, and naval capabilities.
The extraordinary rescue of the downed F-15E pilot and weapons systems officer — the latter extracted on Easter Sunday after going missing on Good Friday — further showcased unmatched special operations skill and real-time intelligence fusion, with operators inserted near Isfahan and a small team sortieing to a 7,000-foot ridge to recover the injured colonel under enemy pressure.
These successes set the stage for the critical phase now unfolding.
President Donald Trump’s remarks on Monday included both talks of negotiations and a threat to hit dual-use infrastructure, but the clearest indicators will be the strikes themselves in the coming hours and days.
For America and its allies, the central goals remain eliminating Iran’s nuclear and missile threat, neutralizing its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, and cutting off support for its terror proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. These elements have long formed the regime’s capacity to destabilize the region and threaten global energy security.
<div id="attachment_1059641" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1059641" class="size-large wp-image-1059641" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2242929815-864x576.jpg" alt="Strait of Hormuz (Photo by Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2242929815-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2242929815-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2242929815-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-2242929815.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Strait of Hormuz (Photo by Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025)</div>
Iran’s center of gravity is more existential: the survival of the revolutionary regime itself.
Animated by a messianic death cult ideology that seeks to hasten the end times and the return of the 12th Hidden Imam — the Mahdi — the regime views its stockpile of 60% enriched uranium as vital insurance for that apocalyptic mission.
But preserving custody of that material increasingly forces a confrontation with the regime’s very existence, even if full regime change has not been the publicly stated goal.
Watch the target sets carefully. 
If strikes concentrate on tactical assets around the Strait of Hormuz — anti-ship missiles, coastal batteries, fast-attack craft, and related naval infrastructure — the immediate priority will be reopening vital shipping lanes and safeguarding global oil flows. This approach would focus on restoring freedom of navigation while building on gains already achieved. But, as operations against the Houthis to safeguard the Red Sea showed, it’s not easy.
But targeting dual-use infrastructure, such as bridges, power plants, and logistics nodes, would indicate sustained pressure on the regime’s ability to move forces and maintain domestic control. Such targets squeeze the theocrats’ sustainment without committing to large-scale ground operations, potentially accelerating internal strains on a population long weary of repression.
The most telling sign, however, would be systematic attacks on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij militia leadership, command nodes, and control networks. If the campaign pivots decisively in this direction, it will mark the abandonment of meaningful negotiation and a clear intent to drive this terror regime toward collapse. Air power that degrades the mullahs’ tools of internal repression — especially amid existing domestic discontent — could burst open the door for rapid regime collapse.
Only the last option — going after the regime — would likely lead to the United States recovering Iran’s enriched uranium.
Ultimately, the regime faces a binary choice: recognize the futility of defiance or cling to its apocalyptic ideology at ever greater cost. The Iranian people, long oppressed by a corrupt theocracy, could prove decisive once the regime’s instruments of control are sufficiently shattered.
Operation Epic Fury has already reshaped the battlefield in America’s favor. The strategic decisions made now — guided by a clear grasp of centers of gravity as Carl von Clausewitz described them, the hub of all power and movement — will determine whether this campaign delivers not just tactical success but lasting victory: a Middle East more secure, global commerce protected, and a dangerous regime consigned to history’s garbage pile.
What unfolds in the coming days will turn on those target choices and the intent behind them.
* * *
Chuck DeVore is the Chief National Initiatives Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

TOPSHOT-US-ISRAEL-IRAN-WAR-POLITICS-TRUMP

Why What Comes Next In Iran Will Decide Everything

What Comes Next In Operation Epic Fury: By Sea And By Land, Watch The Targets Closely

Operation Epic Fury

Pete Hegseth

U.S. Navy

Do you consider yourself in a living hell right now?
We are in a war. Everyone in our country is temporarily suffering from somewhat higher gas prices. The other country has no functioning government, and is a terrorist state that shoots people in the streets.
But you can always count on the useful idiots, people who truly hate America. They think America should be less powerful in the world.
I can&#8217;t think of a single military conflict — including military conflicts with which I disagreed — where I hoped America would lose. I might have thought that the involvement was not correct, but the idea that it would be better for America to lose is anti-American.
Period.
Ryan Grim, a favorite on the horseshoe Right — the grievance party which has decided that isolationism is the way — comes from Drop Site News, which is a left-wing misinformation site. He responded to investor Shaun Maguire, who <a href="https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/2040599408094667233">asked</a>, “How did we get to the point where so many Americans are rooting against America?”
“If this is an honest question, I&#8217;d say Americans are rooting against America because we facilitated a genocide,” Grim <a href="https://x.com/Aakar__Patel/status/2040622155894026514">declared</a>.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2401-sub?elementPosition=1&amp;row=5&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Presumably, this would be Israel&#8217;s action against Hamas, which was not even remotely close to a genocide.
He continued:
<blockquote>&#8230; and followed it with a surprise attack on a girls elementary school followed by attacks on universities, medical centers, more schools, a world famous pharmaceutical research center, a volley ball team, an unfinished bridge we claimed was transporting weapons and then a nuclear power plant &#8230; we are now promising endless attacks on civilian infrastructure.</blockquote>
Every single thing he states is a lie. We have hit those sites because they are dual-use sites, except for the ones that we hit by accident.
If you truly believe that the American military is so evil that we target girls’ schools for the fun of it, that there are no mistakes made, that we just decided to get up one morning and murder a bunch of schoolgirls, get the hell out of the country.
You hate the country, and you hate the military. There&#8217;s no other way to explain what you are saying. There&#8217;s no other way to explain it.
Do you think Pete Hegseth and President Trump are sitting around drawing up a target list, and they say, “You know what? Just for good measure, let&#8217;s kill a bunch of Iranian schoolgirls”?
Is that what you think? If you think that you despise America.
You can oppose the war. You can oppose the way that the war is being fought. You can have problems with the overall strategy. You can have honest questions about the war.
But that&#8217;s not what we&#8217;re talking about here.
We&#8217;re talking about people openly hoping that America loses because they do not like America, because they think a more powerful America in the world is a bad thing. 
And Iran is counting on these people to undermine support.
This is nothing new. This happened throughout American history. If you go back to the Vietnam War, the Vietcong were counting on university students to claim we were the real bad guys, not the communists who were murdering hundreds of thousands of people. That&#8217;s why you had the students chanting in solidarity with Ho Chi Minh.
We have the same sorts of people now: a large swath of the Left and a significant part of the online Horseshoe Right.
Tucker Carlson put out a tape over the weekend celebrating the end of the American-led world order. He said a bunch of untrue things, which is what he does for a living now, while selling nicotine made in India. He said:
<blockquote>What&#8217;s happening in Iran is the end of American empire as we understand it. And that&#8217;s sad. Boo-hoo. Empire&#8217;s dying, but it&#8217;s not the end of the United States. It&#8217;s not the end of our influence on other nations, hopefully positive influence. It&#8217;s not the end of our economy. It&#8217;s the beginning of a very rough time in our economy, of course, but it&#8217;s hardly the end of it. What we&#8217;ve been doing, for likely your lifetime, if you&#8217;re under 80, is, well, it&#8217;s not working anymore. It hasn&#8217;t actually helped the United States long-term.
Your grandkids at this point don&#8217;t have the promise of a better life than you had. So it&#8217;s not actually a successful experiment. And now it&#8217;s ending because we&#8217;ve reached the limits of our demonstrated power. We can&#8217;t open the Straits of Hormuz. The president of the United States said that last night. Someone else do it. So we&#8217;re done. That&#8217;s okay. It was always going to end. Hopefully you can get out without a nuclear exchange, but now it is ending.</blockquote>
“It was okay. It&#8217;s okay if that happens. And it would probably be good if that happens because you&#8217;ve been lied to for generations.”
He is a liar. He&#8217;s a liar on economics, on military power, all of it. He&#8217;s gotten all of it dead wrong.
Remember this schmuck was telling you last year we were going to be in World War III if the United States struck a nuclear facility with one B-2. Has he been right on a single thing all along the way here? What has he been right on?
Also, why not just say what you really mean? He went even further. 
He called President Trump a <a href="https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2040946336657236274">war criminal</a> over the weekend: 
<blockquote>Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, shows up at the White House yesterday to pray over the president so he will have wisdom and restraint? No. To endorse the murder of civilians, which is a war crime. But more important, it&#8217;s a moral crime. You can&#8217;t kill people who have committed no crime, who did nothing wrong. You can&#8217;t murder the innocent.</blockquote>
We should point out that Tucker Carlson is perfectly fine with Vladimir Putin killing people who have committed no crime. He literally said so. He said, “That&#8217;s what leaders do.” Tucker Carlson has been super pro-Russia throughout the entire Russia-Ukraine conflict as Russia targets civilians. He has been extraordinarily pro-Iran throughout this entire conflict, after Iran murdered tens of thousands of people in the streets and has facilitated the murder of civilians all over the Middle East.
As to his generalized argument, which is that somehow the last 80 years of history have been a giant failure for America, do you know how ignorant of American history you have to be to actually argue that? Destroying the Soviet Union, building the single most powerful economy in the history of planet Earth, is somehow a giant loss?
That is a lie. The statistics prove it&#8217;s a lie. A new story from the Wall Street Journal states, “America&#8217;s middle class is becoming wealthier as more families scaled the economic ladder into higher earning groups. New research shows the ranks of the affluent have grown markedly over the last 50 years or so.”
This would be the period that Tucker says was terrible.
Meanwhile, former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who doesn&#8217;t have two neurons connecting in her brain, put out this <a href="https://x.com/FmrRepMTG/status/2040789438494585175">statement</a> on Easter morning:
<blockquote>Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness.</blockquote>
Listening to Marjorie Taylor Greene lecture everyone else on morality is a hell of a thing, knowing her personal history.
She continued, “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this. The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel.”
Yes, Israel does have nuclear weapons. Do any of our allies feel threatened by Israeli nuclear weapons? If so, I would love to hear how.
These are the people that Iran is counting on to help out.
Candace Owens put out her usual mirage of insanity. She <a href="https://x.com/RealCandaceO/status/2040918596239446051">tweeted</a>, “This is a satanic administration. We all realize that satanic Zionists occupy the White House, and Congress needs to move to have the Mad King Trump removed. All of our lives may depend upon other countries realizing Trump is deeply unwell and surrounded by religious fanatics who have convinced him that he is a messiah.”
What in the world is she even talking about?
Tim Miller of the anti-Trump group The Bulwark echoed her, writing, “The Satanic Zionist Clause undermines an otherwise compelling critique of Trump.”
Selling your soul for a salary at The Bulwark is a hell of a thing to do.
Pod Save America&#8217;s Jon Favreau endorsed the Candace tweet with a retweet.
Here&#8217;s the thing. The president is not listening to them, and he shouldn&#8217;t listen to them. Why would you listen to people who believe that it is a good thing for America to be weaker in the world? Why would you listen to people who believe that the president of the United States is deliberately targeting civilian schoolgirls?
The answer is you shouldn&#8217;t. The answer is you wouldn&#8217;t.
That’s because those people don&#8217;t like America very much. They will say, “I like a different form of America, an America in my head.”
Thankfully, that America doesn&#8217;t exist. The America that does exist is the America that you live in right now. The one where President Trump is the president. The one that ensures the freedom of the seas and the free flow of commerce, the America that fights off terror nations, the America that protects our allies, the America that does not wish to see the world&#8217;s worst people with the world&#8217;s worst weapons.
That&#8217;s the America you live in right now. Do you like that America, or do you hate that America?
When Joe Biden was president, I still loved America because America is awesome. I didn&#8217;t like Joe Biden as president very much, but I still loved America.
I wasn&#8217;t rooting against America.
Real Americans don’t.

Tucker Taylor Owens

The Haters Who Want America To Lose

Candace Owens

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Vietnam

An American journalist was kidnapped off the streets of Baghdad, Iraq, by armed men in an abduction likely carried out by an Iranian-backed militia — and Iraqi security forces scrambled in their unsuccessful attempt to intercept the kidnappers.
A group of armed men stopped Shelly Kittleson&#8217;s car in the middle of the street, pulled her out, and quickly fled the scene with her in tow. Iraqi security forces immediately pursued, but were unable to stop the kidnappers,
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
CCTV video shows the moment American journalist <a href="https://twitter.com/shellykittleson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@shellykittleson</a> was taken in Baghdad. <a href="https://t.co/JqJcdW7TOb">pic.twitter.com/JqJcdW7TOb</a>
— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) <a href="https://twitter.com/TreyYingst/status/2039047721001095275?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
CNN National Security Analyst and former Pentagon official Alex Plitsas <a href="https://x.com/alexplitsas/status/2039036851046990259">stated</a> via X that Kittleson was likely taken hostage by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Kittleson, a journalist specializing in the Middle East who has reported for the BBC, Foreign Relations, and POLITICO, was in Baghdad reporting on Iraqi politics for the outlet Al-Monitor at the time of her kidnapping.
The Iraqi Ministry of Interior said in a statement that efforts are underway to track down the perpetrators and rescue Kittleson.
&#8220;Security forces immediately launched an operation to apprehend the perpetrators, acting on precise intelligence and through intensive field operations, tracking the kidnappers’ movements,&#8221; a translated statement from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior <a href="https://moi.gov.iq/?article=20535">reads</a>. &#8220;The pursuit resulted in the interception of a vehicle belonging to the kidnappers, which overturned as they attempted to escape. Security forces were able to arrest one of the suspects and seize one of the vehicles used in the crime.&#8221;
Assistant Secretary of State Dylan Johnson said in a <a href="https://x.com/ASDylanJohnson/status/2039068022451613858">statement</a> on X that the State Department was &#8220;aware of the reported kidnapping&#8221; and that Kittleson had been warned of the dangers of continuing to work in Iraq.
&#8220;The State Department previously fulfilled our duty to warn this individual of threats against them and we will continue to coordinate with the FBI to ensure their release as quickly as possible,&#8221; the statement reads. &#8220;An individual with ties to the Iranian-aligned militia group Kataib Hezbollah believed to be involved in the kidnapping has been taken into custody by Iraqi authorities.&#8221;
&#8220;Iraq remains at a Level 4 Travel Advisory and Americans are advised not to travel to Iraq for any reason and to leave Iraq now. The State Department strongly advise all Americans, including members of the press, to adhere to all travel advisories,&#8221; the statement concludes.

Baghdad

WATCH: Video Shows Moment American Female Journalist Is Kidnapped In Iraq

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