Domestic Reflections On The Iranian Situation

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

As the military conflict with Iran has progressed to its current state it has been quite revelatory concerning our domestic politics.  It is not just that is widened the left/right divide, blah, blah, blah.  We need to think about it in far more serious terms. Although…

Reflection number 1 is just how biased the legacy media have become.  Look, I get it, Donald Trump’s style makes covering something like this war difficult.  But with the right effort placed in the right places, it is not really that hard.  This has been a decisive military victory – but you could not tell that from the coverage.  Why? Because legacy media cannot give Trump credit for anything.  Being a citizen in this nation is a lot harder than it used to be – we just have to work harder to actually know what is going on.

Reflection number 2 is what started me writing this post to begin with.  Consider this excerpt from the host’s interview of the president on Monday:

HH: Do you want the people of Iran to come out, yet? Or do you want them to stay inside?

DT: Well, look, the problem is you can’t, if you have five people with a gun, and 250,000, the five people with a gun, assuming it’s used fast enough, which they do, the five people, they’re going to win. They have to, they don’t have weapons. They lost 42,000, to be exact. 42,000 people in about a two week period. Protesters, innocent, unarmed protesters. You know, they killed the wrestlers, actually a world-class wrestler.

The military victory in Iran is won, but the political victory is yet to be secured – the regime remains.  The reason, as cited by the president in this excerpt is that the Iranian populace is unarmed.  This permits a tyrannical few to hold power over the massive population of the nation that actually wants nothing to do with those tyrannical few.

Why do we have the Second Amendment?  There it is – in spades – so that we are never in that position.

And so we loop back to the first reflection.  This is a reflection no one is willing to talk about.  No, they still think guns ought to be controlled in this country, so they would not dare notice that the current state of the situation is precisely an argument for an armed populace.  And notice the president even discusses rate of fire, pointing out that manual weapons versus automatic weapons is a losing proposition.  Thus controlling automatic weapons defeats the purpose of the Second Amendment.

Which brings me to the third reflection.  We throw around words like “tyranny” and “dictatorial” in our domestic political discussion and when we do so we deeply cheapen the reality of those things in places like Iran.  As the president cited – 42,000 people gunned down, randomly, for the act of protesting.  A very few protesters in this nation have died at the hands of law enforcement when they were interfering with law enforcement doing its job.  The first is indeed tyranny, the latter is at worst a regrettable mistake – but even that remains for a court to decide.  (Which is due process, the exact opposite of tyranny.)

The people that throw around those words in this nation do so in the name of compassion.  But when they use those words in situations where they do not truly apply they are ultimately selfish and completely lacking compassion.  They place their argument above the real and deep suffering of the people of Iran and other places like it.  And so they turn words like “compassion” on their head as well.

This conflict with Iran is a mirror, if we will but look in it.