23 posts from Sunday, May 10, 2026

Hello America, I'm Mark Levin, and this is Life, Liberty, and Levin Saturday. Welcome to the program. You know, President Trump has done something no president dared to do in the last half century. He, with our ally Israel, and their great Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has destroyed the Iranian regime's military, the immediate nuclear threat, and most of the missile systems which were used to terrorize surrounding nations. If I told you that would have been accomplished in a few days, or even a few weeks, you wouldn't have believed me. And yet for some reason we act like this hasn't been a spectacular military success. That said, the knowledge on how to develop nuclear weapons and ICBMs, along with assistance from countries like China, Russia, and North Korea, and the internal militia and security forces of Iran, seem to ensure that sometime in the future, Iran will be able to reconstruct these weapons systems, rebuild its military, and internally increase its mass murder of even the most peaceful voices of dissent. So what do you do after you defeat an enemy's military and take out the top tier of their leadership? What do you do? Because that's where we are. Well, let's first look at what we said we will not do. No ground troops. Why? Because there's virtually no political will in our country to send ground troops into Iran. And I would argue there's no need to send in our ground troops for reasons I'll explain in a moment. President Trump has not only led a historic military victory against Iran, but he has asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz. Thereby controlling Iran's ability to sell its oil and choke the Iranian economy in hopes of forcing the regime to make a deal or collapse. Those are two very distinct objectives. To make a deal or collapse. So the question is which is preferable? So let's dig into this further. If the goal is to take down the regime, two of three most important conditions have already been achieved. The destruction of virtually its entire military capacity and economic control over their economy. These are two historic successes on their own. If the goal is to get a deal, the issue is not only what kind of deal, but can the deal stick? That is, how do we know if the enemy will adhere to the terms of a deal, especially after President Trump leaves office? Well, let's look at the Iranian regime's record. Rather than recounting the scores of examples, evidence, if you will, that the regime has violated every deal it has ever signed with any international organization, any country, or any group of countries, there simply is no evidence that the regime has ever honored any deal. Even the Obama nuclear disastrous deal, which ensured that Iran would have a nuclear weapon within 10 to 12 years of its signing, was violated by the Iranian regime, even though it would hand them nuclear weapons effectively. Why would the Iranian regime violate a deal that ensures it would have nuclear weapons in a decade or so? Because it felt no obligation to adhere to any deal, and it wanted to develop nuclear weapons to break out as fast as it could. So to be clear, even a deal in which the Iranian regime would in fact be able to secure nuclear weapons was violated by the Iranian regime repeatedly and in scores of ways. Monitoring, unannounced inspections, and the like were all eventually defied by the Iranian regime. So it's important to understand the ideological mindset of who and what we're dealing with. They're not of a Western mindset. The regime has learned from past experience with our country and with the current opposition in our country, from the Democrats, the media, and the radical isolationists, that all they need to do is wait us out. We have an election in November and they see that election as possible, if not likely, to change our government, at least one part of it. That is, with the election of Democrats in the House, for example, they know that that party stands for appeasement, radical pacifism, and isolationism. They've heard what they have to say, they have heard what their media have to say, and they also know that the Democrat Party will try to undermine President Trump, including his foreign policy, and especially in Iran, where the Democrats actually funded the regime and its war-making power under the Biden administration. Even more, they watch these debates over the War Powers Act, articles of impeachment against the Secretary of War, then declarations of impeachment against the President should the Democrats win the House, based in large part on what the Democrats falsely claim as constitutional and legal violations, and they claim that this is a war of choice, that it is a blunder, and that it is an illegal war. So the Iranians say, let's just hang in there. If the Democrats take the House, that's an American regime change, and if the Democrats take the presidency, wow, we're free to roll. Three years hence, if a Democrat is elected president, the Iranian regime figures it's no longer bound by the terms of any agreement, no matter how great the terms, because it simply will not be enforced, and we won't have the stomach to enforce it militarily, will we? You have a courageous president who's taking actions, who's ignoring the polls and doing what's right for the security of this nation in the world. Unfortunately, that's rare. The Iranian regime also knows there's a Marxist-Islamist alliance and presence in our country, and in fact, the Iranian regime is a Marxist-Islamist technological regime, and they and their allies helped fund it in our country and around the world, and it's very loud, and it's very violent, and it has the Democrat Party by the throat. And it, along with the neo-fascist isolationists, the neo-fascist isolationists will claim that Israel is behind any effort to enforce an agreement with Iran, and Israel is dragging us into another war. We hear it now, right? We cannot ignore the dark storm clouds of anti-Semitism that are now hanging over our country and have a strong foothold in the Democrat Party, the media, the academia, and this radical isolationism. Then there is the ideology of the Iranian regime, which, remember, is a worldwide Islamist revolution. That's its belief. Again, it is a Marxist-Islamist, worldwide revolutionary movement. As the Blair Institute has said, just like communism, a state was never the objective of the revolution. The organs of the Iranian state served the revolution, not the other way around, and the end goal of the revolution was never a state. It was the expansion of the revolution. The revolution does not exist to perfect the state. The state, or in this case the so-called Republic of Iran, is simply a means to support and perfect the revolution. Where the two conflict, the revolution is prioritized. This is something people in the West, in our country, simply don't seem to be able to get their heads around. They go on the failure of the administration of former US President Barack Obama and the new European External Action Service, the EEAS, to properly read Iran's intentions and their persistence in viewing Iranian political developments through the prism of Iran's relations with the West, severely constrained the Western negotiating position. This is key for any deal, any negotiation. To not understand that you're negotiating with a revolutionary Marxist-Islamist movement that seeks to destroy the West, at all costs, at any costs, even in their own disruption, is to completely misconstrue and misunderstand what you're negotiating with and what you're up against. This is not a nation-state negotiating with a nation-state. It is a nation-state, the United States of America, negotiating with a revolutionary audiology that seeks global dominance. And they go on to explain that these agreements with the Iranian regime do more to tie the hands of the West than the hands of the regime, which feels no obligation to adhere to any agreement with the West. And this has consequences, as an example. If we make a deal with Iran, does that mean Israel can't defend itself against Hezbollah? Are we going to have a situation where the Iranian regime survives, Hezbollah survives, and Hamas survives? Is this all being taken into consideration? Let's hope so. Okay, so you say, Mark, okay, well, what if there's no deal, or if a deal short of the unconditional surrender that we had mentioned earlier? And if you're not going to send the ground troops to destroy the regime, well, then what are you going to do? This is where I turned a more recent history in what I call the third leg of victory. In addition to the historic military and economic actions, there must be steps taken to destroy the regime internally. After all, the Iranian regime has an elaborate police state, an internal security force that is armed and well-trained and is critical to the revolution. In fact, the regime has been importing militia from Iraq and elsewhere to reinforce its internal security force. So what do we do about this? We can't defeat it from the skies. We can't defeat it from the seas. We can't defeat it alone by economically choking them off. Even though some people have suggested that. The way we have dealt with this in the past, during the Reagan administration and as part of the Reagan Doctrine, as I've explained here now, three or four weeks in a row, is to train and arm the people. And in Iran, you have millions and millions of people who are desperate to overthrow the regime, who are courageous, tens of thousands who have died. What other proof do they have to provide?

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We don't have to create opposition. There is opposition. We need to seize the opportunity, and we need to see the opportunity. And by that I mean that our CIA, along with the Israeli Mossad, make determinations about the best way to determine who to train and arm. Well, at the same time, we continue the economic stranglehold, and our military, along with our allies the Israelis, provide coordinated support with targeted and supportive attacks on the IRGC and the Basij paramilitary police. That's, in my view, how you do it. Well, Mark, you never served in the military. I know history. I know history. Nobody alive ever served in the Civil War either. Nobody alive ever served in the Revolutionary War either. That's not the point. You do leave it to the experts to figure this out. But the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, he makes the decisions. And I look at history. I look at success. Success in destroying the Soviet Union. Success in pushing communism out of Central and South America. And we did this. Success in pushing communism out of parts of Africa. Success in pushing the Russians, the Soviets, out of Afghanistan. We didn't send in troops. We armed the freedom fighters. The Mujahideen in Afghanistan and others throughout the world. Why would we take this off the table? If the Kurds stole weapons, and the Kurds have been great allies of ours, everywhere around the Middle East, they are patriotic, they are pro-American. There are other ways to do this. The question is whether our CIA is up to the task. I hope it is. I don't know anything about the bureaucracy over there. I remember William Casey, the director of the CIA under Reagan. That man was fearless. It's something to think about quite seriously. This is how we've dealt with it in the past. Obviously, Iran is not Afghanistan. It's not Angola. It's not Nicaraguan and so forth. But as I see it, as we have all seen, the Iranian people have been more than willing than any other people to die for their liberation. They want liberation. And I bet they want retribution against this regime for slaughtering tens of thousands of their family members and raping and torturing their young women, their daughters, their sisters, their wives and their mothers by the tens of thousands. They just need an opportunity. They can't do it with their bare hands. But the point is this. The only certain way to ensure that the Iranian regime can never and will never spread its revolution here, in the Middle East, in Europe or anywhere else, and all that evil and horror that goes with it, involves its elimination. No matter what President Trump does, he will be attacked by the Democrats, the media, the isolationists for his heroic actions against the Iranian regime. So I would ignore the Democrats and the media and the isolationists. They want failure. They will define success for them as our failure as a nation, because they are driven by a deranged mentality about politics and exploitation for power. They are fundamentally power-hungry. We've come so far. We've made such incredible progress. Victory is in sight, in my view. There's a gentleman by the name of E. Frankfurt. He's an expert in counterterrorism on Iran and Middle East, based in Washington. And he writes the following in the Jerusalem Post. "Moments in which internal crisis and external pressure converge at this level," he's talking about Iran, "are rare, and history suggests they don't remain open indefinitely. Previous opportunities for fundamental change were constrained by hesitation, particularly at the level of international coordination, and those constraints carried consequences. The current moment presents a similar test, but with higher stakes and less margin for delay. If the regime survives," he writes, "the ideology that defines the system will remain intact, along with its patterns of behavior, as a threat that cannot be managed indefinitely. Systems defined by this level of ideological rigidity and expansionism do not evolve into moderation. They persist until they are forced to change or cease to exist. The removal of this structure would not only address an immediate security challenge, but would also open the possibility for a different relationship between Iran and the region, one that aligns with the emerging framework established by the Abraham Accords." Now, to be clear, I don't have access to all the information the president has or the military and intelligence experts, but I know what I know. And I know the president of the United States, President Trump, always has the best interests of the American people at front of mind. And that will be his guiding motivation. And frankly, I could not be prouder of our president, his team, and our military. I could not be prouder of all of them. My unsolicited advice, just as a commentator, somebody who studies history, stay the course. Stay the course. But thank you to all those who brought us to this point, where frankly nobody thought we would ever be, thanks to our president, our military, and the people around him.

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Welcome back, America. We're here with our good friend, Hudson Institute senior fellow Keystone Defense Initiative director Rebecca Heinrichs. Rebecca, thanks for coming back. Well, we're at this point now where really I think it comes down to containment through a deal or some sort of victory where we keep the pressure on, military pressure, economic pressure, and so forth and so on. How do you see this right now? Well, I actually think there's a third way, and that's essentially you put the pressure back on, you do another military operation, and that is going to be more conducive to getting a deal that works. President Trump has been incredibly patient with this rump regime, but it has not delivered. When the president says, look, we're going to have a ceasefire, you still have IRGC militia firing on Navy ships. Now, our military is still in place, Mark, as you know, so we continue to take out these small boats that are trying to harm either tankers or our ships. But, you know, enough is enough. I mean, we've got them economically squeezed. They are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day because of what President Trump's economic pressure campaign is doing. The military pressure is still in place if President Trump gives the go-ahead, but I still think we have got to do another round. We know what targets we still have to hit inside Iran. That needs to come next, and then we're going to be in a better position to get these Iranians to actually start playing ball. Well, let's say we do that, and let's say we get there, and they say, OK, Uncle, we give, now we really want to talk to you again. What do we want? We know we want no nukes. We know we want no enrichment. We know we want to remove all the stored enrichment. What else do we want? We want control of the Strait of Hormuz. But President Trump was completely right to initiate Operation Epic Fury, and whenever you saw his critics come in and say, oh, my goodness, the United States didn't prepare for the Iranians to threaten the Strait, it's nonsense. We always knew that this was the only thing the Iranians could do. They could terrorize the Strait of Hormuz 20-plus percent of global shipping, and so we cannot give them that card ever again. And of course, we know that as long as the Iranians can terrorize the Strait, and by the way, there's still 1,500 ships being held hostage by the Iranians stuck in the Strait that President Trump wanted to be able to release with Project Freedom. We've paused that because the Iranians want us to pause it. I think that's a mistake. But I think we've got to take that away. They cannot be funding proxies throughout the region. We're really handling that by depriving them of any resources. They're not even able to pay their militiamen at this point because of the economic squeeze they're in. But we don't want them to control the Strait. They can't have nuclear weapons, and they can't have a ballistic missile program that can act as a shield so that the United States, with our great partners and allies, the Israelis, so that we can't come in and do this again if we need to in 10, 15, 20 years. Now, that is a great point. They can't do it again, but we may have to come back in 10, 15, or 20 years. You see the opposition to what the president is already doing. I see the opposition here in the United States is growing. We have this isolationist movement. We have this Marxist Islamist movement. We have these woke right neo-fascists. We have a Democrat party that is radically pacifistic. This is my concern. How long can this be managed once President Trump leaves office? Can it be managed in an effective way given our politics and given the Democrat party and these other elements? Well, it's a great question. I think that President Trump is really the only president that has decided to finally take on this terrorist regime that has been an enemy of the United States killing Americans for 47 years. And we know that all of this diplomacy, the Iran deal, Obama's attempt with the JCPOA, it was a failure. At the end of failed diplomacy, you have to have military force to reestablish deterrence. President Trump has done that. The Iran regime, I think, Mark, is already completely crumbling. And we basically have a rump regime in place. It's splintering. It's part of the reason that we can't get a deal at this point because the IRGC isn't listening to the people who are negotiating with the Americans at this point. And so I think that we have to do what we can to eliminate those who are the most obstinate, the most committed to the Islamic revolution and try to get to a point where we can have a regime that can comply with the United States in our demands. Let me come back. My question to you is this. Why don't we just keep the pressure on economically if they're crumbling? Do as you say. Our military is sitting there. It's a beautiful military ready to do what it needs to do. Put this additional pressure on them and that way maybe they will collapse. And that's the surest way to make sure in 15 or 20 years from now, they won't be back. We'll be right back. Welcome back, America. We're here with Rebecca Heinrichs. Rebecca, so why have a deal at all? Why not keep the pressure on, the pressure on, pressure on? They want a deal. Of course they want a deal. That's the nature of the beast there. They'll take a deal. Maybe they'll sign something that's really in our favor but probably won't honor it in the out years and so forth. If they're crumbling, why don't we give them the extra push? Yeah, I think we do need to give them the extra push. And whenever I say that we might have some sort of diplomatic, you know, political outcome to this, it's really not a deal that I'm looking for. It's not something that I'm not going to believe anything that the Iranians signed. It just means that they've completely submitted to American demands. President Trump has not moved off of his red lines. He has kept his red lines in place to his credit. But I do think we keep the economic pressure in place. We keep the blockade in place. Their economy is crumbling. They cannot sustain this kind of pressure. But I do think that we need to go on the offensive again because we have seen the IRGC using cruise missiles, using other kinds of weapons systems that we didn't see that they had when we stopped Epic Fury. So we know where they are. We know where they are along the coastline. I do think that there's more munitions facilities that we now know exist. So I think we do have to have another military operation go through there, take out more IRGC and Basij. And then the last point, Mark, I would say arm the Iranian people. We don't even have to do the heavy lifting at this point. The Iranian people support the United States. They oppose the Iran regime. They're the victims of oppression and they can handle the rest if they have the weapons to do it. There seems to be some opposition to this. I don't know who it is or why it is. I'm just wondering if the CIA bureaucracy is not up to it or doesn't want to do it or somebody doesn't want to do it because this is something that works. It's something we did throughout the Reagan administration. It doesn't involve our troops on the ground, you know, fighting the Iranian troops and so forth and so on. And we have a willing people, tens of millions of them that just want to be able to take on this regime. How many times do they have to prove it? They've had 50,000 dead this time, 100,000 dead before that. They want to be free. Why don't we use this resource and at the same time help free these people? Well, I think it's a great question. And we saw early on in Epic Fury, President Trump essentially implied that we had a plan in place to get arms into those who could get it into the opposition. And that plan didn't work. But I would hope that we try again and see if there's another avenue to do this. During the ceasefire, we should have the CIA with the Israelis, intelligence services who have completely penetrated the regime. They know who the different factions are, who the people are, who they can work with. And in fact, the Iranian people have given coordinates to the Israelis to show them where the besieged leaders, those are the people who are controlling the Iranian populations, the dissenters. So there has been some collaboration already. Those individuals just need the weapons. They stand no chance unless they are completely armed. This is something that the United States should absolutely take advantage of. And as you said, Mark, that would enable them to take their own future in their hands. It's not something that the United States would have to do from the top down. Yeah, when people keep saying they need to rise up and get shot in the head, they want to have a fighting chance. And we Americans believe that people who want to be free, who are being abused, ought to have a fighting chance. I mean, Rebecca, if it wasn't for the French in the Revolutionary War that wanted to make sure America had a fighting chance, we wouldn't be the United States of America. You look throughout the history of these things here, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, in Angola, in Nicaragua, the US are back, but the people did rise up under Reagan. We did push communism out of so much of our hemisphere and so forth and so on. I think we know how to do this, don't we? We do know how to do this. And the other thing that's really important to keep in mind is the standing army in Iran is not like the IRGC. They're nationalistic Iranians. They're not all, you know, ideologically committed to the Islamic Revolution like the IRGC, which is why in the past you heard some US officials say, look, we haven't taken out the army. We have completely taken out the Iranian Air Force, the Iranian Navy and we've left the army pretty much in place. Why? Because that is a moment of opportunity to overthrow the Iran regime, the Islamic Revolution. And so you have people there and then you have the civilians who are willing to take their country back. It was only just a few decades ago, Mark, that these people had a more secular country. These people know how to be self-governing. They know how to have a secular government. It would work, I think, if the United States used and took advantage of these people who just want freedom. I'm with you 100%. I've been blowing this horn for a couple of months now. And particularly when the army is not getting paid, particularly when the economy is hurting, they're going to lose more and more of their loyalty to this regime. And you're right. People confuse the army with the IRGC. It's not the IRGC. It's separate and apart. The IRGC is there to try and keep the army in place. And so those guys don't go running when they want to run. Rebecca, I want to thank you very much, the Hudson Institute, a great organization too. God bless you, my friend.

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let's bring in Fox News contributor and pastor of First Baptist Church, Robert Jeffress. Pastor Jeffress, great to have you on. So I want to get your take here. The Vatican put out a statement and they said that there was an exchange of views. We don't know what exactly that means, but they exchanged some views. Give me your take about this public criticism from really both sides. Yeah, look, I think it's commendable that the Trump administration is meeting with the Pope and trying to work with the Pope. The Pope is a good man. He's sincere in his faith, but he is sincerely wrong when it comes to Iran. The Pope ought to know, and I think he does know, God created both the church and government for two distinct purposes. The role of the church is to point people to faith in Jesus Christ, but the role of government is to protect citizens from evildoers, according to Romans 13. And look, three days after this conflict began, I was in the Oval Office with President Trump and a few other faith leaders, and he told us that Iran was within weeks of getting a powerful weapon that would destroy Israel, much of the Middle East, and could bring great harm to America, and he had no choice but to act. And I thanked him then for having the courage to fulfill his God-given responsibility to protect our nation. And you know, the great irony is it looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the Pope has, and I'm glad the president hasn't backed down at all. Okay, I gotta ask you about this, pastor. I can't believe I'm asking you about this, but as you know, the federal government under the authority of President Trump just released a lot of UFO files, and apparently the Department of War, when they launched this on their website, got 340 million hits in just 12 hours. A lot of people are very interested to know if there's other life out there. An article came out this week saying that religious leaders apparently were told to prepare now for UFO disclosure to unleash Bible-changing reveal, revel, and it says an evangelist, a Bible teacher, an author from Tennessee warned that fellow pastors were recently invited to a secret meeting with U.S. intelligence officials to prepare for the release of secret files on extraterrestrials, and he said you're going to have people who are going to say if there are galaxies and there are allegedly other creations in the galaxies, then the whole creation story is a myth. So first of all, was there a secret meeting, pastor, and what do you say to people who are wondering, okay, if there's aliens out there, what does that say about my faith? Well, I guess my invitation got lost in the mail. I certainly wasn't there at that B&B in Tennessee or wherever it took place. But look, if it was found, discovered, that there is life on other planets, it would not shake my faith at all. There's nothing in the Bible that precludes life on other planets. When it comes to the Bible, people need to remember the Bible tells us everything we need to know. Everything the Bible tells us is true, but the Bible doesn't tell us everything. And when I think about creation, I think of Colossians 1, 16, Jesus Christ created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, all things were created by Him and for Him. And if that all things includes life on other planets, so what? It's the same God who created them who created us. And the most important thing in life is to be in a right relationship with that God who made us all. Wow, that's surprising. So you're leaving the door open, pastor, to potential alien. Do you believe that there are aliens out there? What's your personal take? I don't know. I doubt it, but I think it's normal to doubt it because we're so confined to this world. And the truth is our planet, our galaxy, is like a grain of sand on the Sahara Desert compared to the vastness of this universe. We serve a great God, a creative God, who can do whatever He chooses to do. And every single day we find new creation here on this planet, in the ocean, everywhere, in the rainforest. So why would we be surprised if there's something else out there? And like you said, you're saying that it's all under God's dominion no matter what it is, where it's at. That's right. And what I do know is God loved us so much He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, so that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. That's what I need to know. Okay, Pastor Jeffress, thank you for that. That's a high note that we end this show. Great to have you on.

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