Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz bluntly laid out the case for President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, describing the regime as the leading global state sponsor of terrorism. Appearing on Fox News, Cruz laid out a staggering indictment of Tehran’s financial reach, noting that for 47 years, the radical Islamist leadership has been the “number one state funder of terrorism worldwide.” Cruz praised what he called the military’s “clear-eyed” strategy, saying the strikes targeted Iranian missile capacities and anti-aircraft defenses. He characterized President Trump’s decision to authorize the strikes — including the elimination of top military leadership — as the “most consequential” of his presidency because, in Cruz’s view, Tehran “posed a significant danger to the United States.” He noted that prior to the intervention, the Iranian regime was churning out 100 missiles a month and maintaining a clandestine nuclear weapons program. .@SenTedCruz: "The reason @POTUS made the decision to go in and take out the Ayatollah, take out the military leadership… is because they posed a significant danger to the United States." pic.twitter.com/GP45feoMoM — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 2, 2026 Cruz argued that Tehran’s influence stretches across nearly every major flashpoint in the region, pointing to longstanding U.S. assessments of Iranian funding for proxy groups: Hamas: Receives an estimated 90% to 93% of its military budget from Tehran. Reports indicate this surged to $350 million annually by early 2026. Hezbollah: Iran funnels between $700 million and $800 million a year to the Lebanese group. The Houthis: Annual aid is estimated at up to $300 million, providing the “bang-for-buck” investment that fuels Yemen’s instability. Cruz noted that the Iranian regime bears responsibility for the deaths of nearly 1,000 Americans, referencing U.S. military casualties linked to Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. He also asserted that, before last year’s U.S. strike, Iran operated “a major underground nuclear weapons facility,” which he said Trump took out. While the IRGC’s official budget is estimated at roughly $8.2 billion, experts say it likely controls billions more through illicit enterprises and “off-the-books” oil sales. This massive expenditure comes at a time when the Iranian economy — one-fiftieth the size of the U.S. economy — is cratering under inflation and unemployment. As the United States maintains its posture of “robust military deterrence,” Cruz argued the goal remains simple: forcing the regime to choose between domestic stability and its global terror franchise.

Visiting the site of the synagogue in Beit Shemesh — where an Iranian strike murdered nine Israelis, including four young teenagers, three of whom came from the same family — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the effort President Trump made to attack Iran was no less than to “save the world.” “If this regime, this terrorist regime of the kind we’ve never seen in the world, if they get nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, ballistic missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, they will threaten all of humanity,” Netanyahu declared. “We set out to protect ourselves, but in so doing, we protect many others. I want to say special thanks to our great friend and a great leader of the world, Donald Trump, for joining us in this crucial effort to save the world.”

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** One day before the Trump administration ceased negotiations with the Iranian regime in Tehran, Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth offered an ultimatum to another entity, Scouting America, in hopes of avoiding a conflict. Hegseth announced that the Pentagon was prepared to use its leverage to force what was formerly the Boy Scouts of America to remove DEI from its programming, ensure biological sex as the basis for participation in its boy and girl tracks, and institute some pro-military reforms including a new merit badge and waving fees for service members’ children. Scouting America opted for peace.  I’m an Eagle Scout and currently serve as an assistant scoutmaster and chaplain for a troop in Virginia, and I see every week where Scouts BSA has gone astray since I was a teenager. But I’m also the proud dad of a teenage girl working on her own Eagle.  Amid all that contradiction, I couldn’t be happier about Hegseth’s strong-arm tactics. In addition to my history with Scouts, I’m a Christian and a conservative. I get a lot of flak for being involved in Scouts BSA at all, to say nothing of having a daughter in the program. Let’s start there and then address the DEI insanity that Hegseth just helped wipe out. “Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” This is what Scouting has always been about. I was raised on those virtues as a Scout. When I became a “girl dad” — father to what we used to call a “tomboy” — she wanted to be in Boy Scouts from the first moment she found my BSA uniform in the bedroom closet. Of course, that wasn’t an option until 2017 when the Boy Scouts announced their intent to rebrand as Scouts BSA and allow for girl-only troops. Joining back up was a no-brainer for me, and enrolling my daughter was exciting.  I preferred that she adopt the ethics of BSA rather than those of the Girl Scouts. It’s nothing against the Girl Scouts, but raising a tomboy in the 2010s demanded extra caution from any parent. The tidal wave of gender ideology that drowned America during the Biden years was just beginning to swell in 2018 when we were checking out Scout troops to join. We found one that had a large, well-established program just for girls — with boys in their own part of the building doing separate activities.  Fully co-ed troops are rare. In all of my travels scouting, I have yet to see a troop that mixes boys and girls. Critics of girls in BSA tend to have an overblown conviction that they’re camping and tenting together; they are not.  Part of this stems from a frustration over the war on boyhood happening across the world. I understand why critics of Scouting see girls’ presence as crowding out space for boys to mature in peace.  But it has to be said that girls coming aboard didn’t put BSA on life support; the decades-long sexual abuse cover-up did. Trust between Scouting and its constituency is irrevocably broken. Girls didn’t make Boy Scouts membership drop from 6.5 million boys in 1972 to 1 million in 2024. BSA lacks the power to make modern boys want to play outside and forsake their screen time for weekend campouts. Two generations of Fortnite-addled boys is the larger problem.  The girls I see in BSA are some of the best scouts that I’ve ever seen in action. They’re serious, smart, interested in its virtues, and quick to pick up the skills. This is something we’re seeing everywhere from academia to the workplace — girls mature faster and are outperforming boys.  We need to help young men, but we can’t make them want to be Scouts. BSA is downstream of boys’ interests, not the other way around.  Many wonder how the Pentagon has leverage over Scouts, and it’s as simple as access to secure military sites and personnel for activities such as weekend lock-ins, merit-badge retreats, and jamborees. Hegseth gave Scouting America six months to comply with Executive Order 14173. That means protecting intimate spaces such as tenting, showers, and overnight accommodations. The wildcard has always been if a scout claimed to be trans.  Before Hegseth’s move, it’s unclear how a troop would have been required to respond. Now, it’s unambiguous. All kids are welcome in Scouts BSA, but biology comes first if Scouts want to have a relationship with the U.S. military.  Another Hegseth target was the Citizenship in Society merit badge, something that did not exist when I went through Boy Scouts in the early 2000s. Citizenship in Society is often called the “DEI merit badge” — because it is. Citizenship in the World and the Nation already exist and together promote a patriotic duty to country and an understanding of globalist institutions (WHO, UNICEF, and the U.N.) and other models of government. Rolled out in 2021 at the peak of cultural insanity following the death of George Floyd, Citizenship in Society was instituted as a mandatory merit badge for acquiring the rank of Eagle. The program was as flowery and ostensibly non-threatening as DEI itself. Diversity, equity, and inclusion all sound nice until you interrogate what they require of organizations.  On more than one occasion, I sat through struggle sessions of teenagers, 90% white, ranking their privilege and their experiences being discriminated against based on elements of their identity — however real or contrived. Conversation between the teens broached sexual topics, class, gender, and racial identity, and included education on fringe religious practices, including Wicca.  The merit badge was a victimhood-mentality machine. That’s what went on in those merit badge sessions, and adults were told not to participate in the conversations or help guide them — only listen. When it came time for my daughter to take the class with an outside merit badge instructor, I was actively discouraged from attending the sessions, as it could “make the kids uncomfortable.”   It’s a sad summary of what has gone wrong with Scouts in the last decade, which is that adults are not expected to shape and mold the youth who go through the program. Your Scoutmasters are meant to be mentors, teachers, and guides, and they are supposed to impose upon you a way of seeing the world. Because Scouting has become afraid of its own shadow as a result of the abuse settlement, there has been a retreat from adult responsibility in shaping young people to be virtuous American citizens. If I had a magic wand and could turn back the clock for Boy Scouts, it wouldn’t be to 2021 when DEI came around, or 2017 when girls joined up. I’d go back to the 1980s when abuse cases were starting to bubble up and plead with the people in charge to make it right. It’s the wound that affected everything that has happened with BSA. Absent the power of time travel, Scouting can endure and serve all American youth by teaching them to be responsible, courageous, discerning, and honest. Scouts BSA changed my daughter’s life for the better, same as it did for me. Secretary Hegseth brought some much-needed reinforcements to all of us working within BSA every day to try and save it for future generations. *** Stephen Kent is an author and the creator of Geeky Stoics on YouTube. Follow him on X @stephenkentx. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Donald Trump understands something fundamental about foreign policy that most politicians don’t — including ones who have been active in this space for a very long time. In the run-up to Operation Epic Fury, the critique circling on Capitol Hill wasn’t quiet. Republicans were concerned that, given the risk factors involved in a major regime change war — even one that was undertaken overwhelmingly by air and sea, not Army boots on the ground — the president had done little or nothing to warn the American people of the potential losses inherent in any attack. Unlike the precision strikes Trump has used in the past — amazing feats of military technological capability, yes, but with lower potential loss of American lives — going after the Iranians meant inevitably setting off a barrage of missiles and drones that could attack all America’s forces in the Middle East, as well as our allies and regional partners. Exfiltrating Nicolás Maduro and his wife without the loss of a single American life was an incredible achievement, one that was only possible thanks to the bravery and commitment of a terribly wounded helicopter pilot. Things could’ve gone sideways very quickly. Instead, the American forces under Trump pulled it off without one death. Assign it to good fortune, good planning, or the grace of God, but this is not the way such missions are expected to go. The line from one old military hand to me in the run-up to the Iran strike was simple: How long can the old man keep going back to the table and coming up aces? That risk, for a normal politician, would require advance mitigation. Think back to the lengthy effort George W. Bush and his associates put into making the case for war in Iraq. The many briefings, public speeches, presentations before the United Nations, and an open effort on television and in op-ed pages to make the case for war were meant to warn people of the potential loss of life and materiel. The message was clear: Steel yourselves for the worst, but understand we’re doing this because we think it needs doing. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction require it. Of course, after the WMD turned out to be a pittance of what was expected, and Hussein’s threats turned out to be the actions of a blowhard maintaining his hold on power, the Bush administration was forced into an uncomfortable pivot toward a war built on positive vibes and spreading democracy. The whole prewar case turned out to be built on falsehoods, albeit falsehoods every intelligence service in the West purportedly believed. Trump became, like so many Americans, an outspoken critic of this war after the fact, as it dragged on interminably and descended into chaos that cost American lives and resources. He took the lesson, as did many politicians in the rising generation, that boots-on-the-ground regime-change wars without clear goals in mind are a pointless and expensive exercise. But Trump seems to have taken another lesson from it, too: that the messaging build up to such action is unwise and unnecessary. So, if the political critique of President Trump’s approach in Iran is that he didn’t make the case to the American people, it’s true — he didn’t. He understands that he doesn’t need to. Americans assess foreign policy and national security not as ever-running aspects of their daily lives, but as a binary: success, or failure. We like to win. We hate to lose. What Trump has done is show that he knows more about the reality of these issues politically than any longstanding politician, consultant, or commentator. He understands the importance of unpredictability. He makes his decisions in his own time and believes Americans will judge him only if his effort is unsuccessful. And if it is a failure, no amount of prior argument — readying the ground with an awareness of risk, detailing the potential benefits to energy markets or a destabilized China — will make a difference anyway. It’s a fundamental change in the way an administration conducts foreign policy. It’s in keeping with Trump’s roll the dice approach. And it’s also based on enormous confidence in what the United States military is capable of when you ask them to blow something up instead of changing hearts and minds. Donald Trump understands the old Vince Lombardi dictum applies here: Winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing.

The U.S. military declared air superiority over Iran on Monday morning and said it “remains on the hunt” for Iranian ballistic missile launchers as the crumbling Iranian regime continues to attack military and civilian locations throughout the Middle East. The U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, released unclassified footage showing the U.S. military wiping out multiple ballistic missile launchers. CENTCOM did not confirm when exactly the strikes shown in the footage occurred, but stated that “U.S. forces remain on the hunt to eliminate this threat.” Iran continues to maliciously launch ballistic missiles, indiscriminately targeting military and civilian locations throughout the region. U.S. forces remain on the hunt to eliminate this threat. As the President has said, our resolve has never been stronger. pic.twitter.com/SDdvaL38yp — U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 2, 2026 “As the President has said, our resolve has never been stronger,” CENTCOM added. The new footage was released shortly after War Secretary Pete Hegseth held a press conference at the Pentagon alongside General Dan “Raizin” Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss the ongoing military operation against Iran. During the press conference, General Caine said the United States has established air superiority over Iran, which he said would “enhance the protection of our forces” as well as “continue the work over Iran.” After the United States, along with Israel, decimated Iran’s military and took out numerous military and political leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran responded by launching missiles toward U.S. bases in neighboring Arab countries, including Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. At least four American troops were killed in an Iranian rocket attack on Kuwait. Iran’s Arab neighbors have also condemned the regime for launching missiles at airports and residential areas. Hegseth said on Monday morning that the Trump administration has a clear goal of destroying Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure and is not concerned with regime change. President Donald Trump defended the U.S. military mission, titled “Operation Epic Fury,” saying on Sunday that the United States has a “duty” to obliterate Iran’s military capabilities. “We’re undertaking this massive operation, not merely to ensure security for our own time and place, but for our children and their children just as our ancestors have done for us. This is the duty and the burden of a free people,” Trump said. “These actions are right and they are necessary to ensure that Americans will never have to face a radical, bloodthirsty terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons and lots of threats. For almost 50 years, these wicked extremists have been attacking the United States while chanting the slogan, ‘Death to America.'”