It’s my best friend’s tabs, used to be mine …
Massive protests erupt in Rasht, Iran, with fires breaking out as crowds chant “Death to Khamenei.” pic.twitter.com/iEgKCoCTBB
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) January 8, 2026
Ed: Check out my latest podcast interview with Gregg Roman from Middle East Forum, embedded below the comment section. The regime looks ready to collapse, but that is going to create a complicated mess – and it may not get rid of the real power in the IRGC and Basij.
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LA Times: People in Iran’s capital shouted from their homes and rallied in the street Thursday night after a call by the country’s exiled crown prince for a mass demonstration, witnesses said, a new escalation in the protests that have spread nationwide across the Islamic Republic. Internet access and telephone lines in Iran cut out immediately after the protests began.
The protest represented the first test of whether the Iranian public could be swayed by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose fatally ill father fled Iran just before the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Demonstrations have included cries in support of the shah, something that could bring a death sentence in the past but now underlines the anger fueling the protests that began over Iran’s ailing economy. …
The growth of the protests increases the pressure on Iran’s civilian government and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. CloudFlare, an internet firm, and the advocacy group NetBlocks reported the internet outage, both attributing it to Iranian government interference. Attempts to dial landlines and mobile phones from Dubai to Iran could not be connected. Such outages have in the past been followed by intense government crackdowns.
Ed: The Pahlavis could play a helpful role in uniting all of the factions against the regime. At the very least, this shows that the mullahs’ usual talking point that relies on hatred of the Shah as leverage with the populace is no longer working. The mullahs may be out of political plays here, and may only have force left to keep their grip on power.
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During a call earlier into the Hugh Hewitt Show, President Donald J. Trump once against threatened to take action against Iran if they attempt to violently quell ongoing anti-government demonstrations, stating that if they kill any protesters, the United States will strike Iran… pic.twitter.com/viEJ5YmmBk
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) January 8, 2026
Ed: Check it all out. The full interview will be at the end of today’s Final Word, but Trump is making sure that the pressure on the mullahs aims at their use of violence, not at regime change as a direct goal.
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Confessions of a Conservative Atheist: While it is normal for the opposition party to oppose, I don’t think many would argue that opposition to President Trump is on an entirely different level than anything we have seen in recent history. Democrats today don’t merely oppose him on political or ideological grounds. Instead, they insist that almost everything the President does is both illegal and unconstitutional, unconscionable and immoral while simultaneously insisting that domestic and international calamity will be the certain result. The situation is so extreme that at least some segment of progressives continue to demand his removal from office on whatever grounds, either impeachment or the 25th amendment, and prognosticators expect that Democrats will almost certainly impeach him for the third time should they regain control of the House of Representatives in the upcoming mid-term elections. In addition, there is already something of a cottage industry of recommendations for the next Democrat Presidential nominee’s platform.
Brian Beutler, formerly of The New Republic, summed this up quite nicely earlier this week while adding an insane new plank. As he put it, “The next Democratic president will have a rotted, hollowed out state to fix, a social compact to restore, and a world order to steady. That stuff will be the ‘why’ of the next campaign. But as a litmus test, we’ll want all Democrats to be willing to say, e.g., ‘I will demolish Donald Trump’s palace ballroom,’ ‘I will confiscate his Qatari jumbo jet,’ and ‘I will remove the words ‘Donald Trump’ from the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace, and anywhere else he’s plastered his name.’ We’ll want them to understand why doing those things is important. And we’ll want them to pass the test without mistaking those promises for a real platform.” Mr. Beutler continued, going one step further than anyone has before, claiming that the future Democrat nominee should make it clear he or she would allow President Trump to be extradited to a foreign country for unspecified crimes, a position that would have been unimaginable in any other era. “Today, I’m toying with a new entry: The next Democratic president should be willing, in his or her heart, to honor extradition requests for Trump from countries where he’s unilaterally violated the domestic law. Such as, for instance, Venezuela.”
Ed: Isn’t that basically the same message on which they ran in 2024? Somehow, I don’t think voters will like that Quislingesque message any better in 2028. And if that’s what Democrats offer, voters will be far more inclined to align with a candidate looking toward the future rather than obsessing over a TDS-drenched past.
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I’m on the ground in Minneapolis for @realDailyWire. This AM one of the organizers, in an @AFLCIO vest, thought I was part of the group.
“Did everyone get the message we’re moving out?”
I said no
“We are moving out. We hit our goal time.”
Goal time. This is not organic. pic.twitter.com/833pp3EmNR
— Brecca Stoll (@breccastoll) January 8, 2026
Ed: It never is. The quality of the signage in this pic is misleading; in other protests, it’s clearly professional and well-funded. Perhaps this time around, the Department of Justice will do a little money-following to determine who’s trying to incite violence, and why.
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Daily Mail: Now, Good’s former brother-in-law Joseph Macklin has weighed in on the tragedy, telling the Daily Mail on Wednesday night she put herself in a dangerous situation without reason.
‘She had no reason to be there, in my opinion,’ he said.
‘It had nothing to do with her. She shouldn’t have been in the way. She had nothing to do with the ICE agents or immigration, so she shouldn’t have been there. She should have minded her own business.’
Ed: If she had just stayed on the sidewalk protesting, there would have been no problem. If Good had not blocked the street and interfered with ICE operations, there would have been no problem. Had she obeyed law enforcement commands to exit the vehicle and deal with her obstruction rationally, Good would have gotten booked and released, at worst. Instead, Good chose badly at every single decision point, including accelerating toward an ICE agent. It’s not just about minding her own business, although her brother-in-law is certainly right about that too.
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A masterclass in propaganda. One photo, zero context. The caption says “terrorized innocent man.” The reality – he grabbed the officer’s weapon moments earlier, and that’s pepper spray, not a firearm. This is how outrage is manufactured. https://t.co/qNLQxw8Dpt
— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) January 8, 2026
Ed: Lotta people making a lotta bad decisions when it comes to immigration enforcement operations. This isn’t the face of terror; it’s the face of a mild case of FO after some serious FA’ing.
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Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO:
- “This could have happened to anyone.”
No, it couldn’t. This is the bizarre cousin of the “executed” line. A lightning strike could happen to anyone. This incident could not have. That the deceased was there in her car did not necessarily make her death legitimate, but it did make it more likely than if she had not been there in her car. She was not chosen at random. She decided to interfere with law enforcement, and, subsequently, to refuse to follow law enforcement’s orders, and those decisions had knock-on effects. Whether those knock-on effects were justified remains to be seen, but they were one possible result of her choices, not a freak occurrence staged by a capricious universe.
- “ICE shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
This is nonsense. We have a lot of duly passed immigration laws in the United States, and the duly elected head of the federal government is permitted — required, even — to enforce them without the acquiescence of the states. This is Constitution 101, and the alternative is not unicorns and rainbows, but nullification, insurrection, and chaos. It is entirely reasonable to criticize the prosecutorial choices of the executive branch, or the tactics deployed by a given agency, but to propose that the mere existence of federal agents is responsible for the conduct of those who wish to undermine them is to invert our system of government and make a case for anarchy. It cannot stand, and, if the deceased had been, say, a tax protester, it would not be expected to.
Ed: Read the whole post. These are the final two bullet points in a series scolding people who speculate without critical reasoning capabilities. Cooke is reserving final judgment on the justification for the shooting, but antagonists to ICE and Trump are not exactly exhibiting much candlepower on this controversy at the moment. Speaking of limited candlepower …
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Kimmel wants to be canceled and become a leftist martyr. It’s all he has left as his relevance has cratered beyond the Hollywood bubble. See Kathy Griffin. Pitiful. https://t.co/hKMsqaSZmg
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) January 8, 2026
Ed: Res ipsa loquitur. He’ll be canceled at the end of his contract extension in May 2027 anyway, in between election cycles, when hardly anyone will notice.
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Jonathan Turley: [Dan] Goldman has made a career of dismissing due process for his political opponents while engaging in willful blindness of the conduct of his allies. He has denied the existence of Antifa as an organization as well as claiming that he has seen no evidence of an increase in attacks on ICE officers.
He apparently needed no further proof to declare this officer a murderer: “It was an outright murder. This officer needs to not only be fired and suspended, but—based on the video—charged.”
The video does not support such a claim. Under the governing case law, the officer is allowed to use lethal force when he is facing an imminent threat to his life or the lives of fellow officers or third parties.
In this case, the officer had a fraction of a second to decide whether to fire his weapon after Good sped toward him. Good appears to have been attempting to flee the officers and flight alone is not a justification for the use of lethal force. However, when you speed toward an officer, he may treat the vehicle as a weapon and discharge his weapon in self-defense.
Goldman is fully aware that past case law supports the officer in this case. However, he is also aware that he is facing a Mamdani-supported socialist, Brad Lander, a popular local politician.
Ed: Goldman is despicable.
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I do not normally respond to online rumors but feel the need to do so at this moment
I will not be a candidate for the currently vacant HC and GM positions with the Miami Dolphins.
While you never know what the future may bring right now my focus must remain on global events…
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 8, 2026
… and also the precious archives of the United States of America.
Thank you
Ed: You gotta love it. Click here to see John Ondrasik’s response, too.
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Ed: This is one of the very best New Wave songs. A great bass line and a sweet guitar riff at the end of each refrain. Normally I don’t explain the song reference at the top of the post, but this deserves a play.
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