There aren’t many pictures slipping through the iron fist of Iran, but there are enough. What the world has seen in the ashen streets and smoldering buildings tells the story of unhinged terror and revenge. An emotional image of dozens of shoes, thrown haphazardly against a wall, feels like the last witness to whatever horrors happened there. “At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, there is a room filled with shoes,” Arash Sigarchi posts emotionally. “Now look.” This is all that remains of so many unarmed Iranians, he laments, “whose only demand was freedom.” 

While videos continue to trickle out of the carnage after days of protests and state-sponsored violence, no one is quite sure how bloody the uprising has actually been. After the regime froze the country’s internet, the death toll is said to be anywhere from 4,400 to quadruple that — leaving behind cities that look like charred previews of the apocalypse. Survivors paint a grisly picture of men and women burned alive or corralled into rings of fire and gunned down by the ayatollah’s men. 

The massacres have triggered a wave of international urgency, as leaders of the U.N. Human Rights Council race to host an emergency session on Friday. President Donald Trump, for his part, has held off on a direct strike after extracting at least a temporary agreement from Iran not to murder more innocent people or carry out more mass executions. Even so, Trump did tease the idea of replacing Ayatollah Khamenei on Saturday, describing him as “a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people.” It’s time, he told Politico, “to look for new leadership in Iran.” 

General Abolfazl Shekarchi, one of the nation’s spokesmen, countered with a warning of his own: “… [I]f any hand of aggression is extended toward our leader, we not only cut that hand, but also we will set fire to their world.”

As the standoff continues, the White House isn’t sitting idly by. Shipping trackers confirmed that the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier, is now headed to the Middle East, joined by a handful of guided missile destroyers. As the Associated Press points out, the region has been “without an aircraft carrier group or an amphibious ready group, likely complicating any discussion of a military operation targeting Iran given Gulf Arab states’ broad opposition to such an attack.”

Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, agreed that this is all part of the pressure Trump is building on the regime. “I think you have to have at least two aircraft carriers in the region. You have to have at least 10 to 12 destroyers which help Israel and U.S. allies and U.S. bases in the region with an anti-missile defense shield like we had back in June. I think you need to have special operators who are on the ground, ready to extricate any American pilots that may be shot down. And frankly,” he added on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” “this is not being done without risk to the United States. … But President Trump is trying to create a situation in which the U.S. has maximum advantage. And if the Ayatollah continues with his repression of the Iranian people, and there is not a pathway to his removal from power, whether by hook or by crook, then we’ll see action over the skies of Iran, assisting the Iranian people…”

That doesn’t necessarily mean war is imminent, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reiterated to the BBC in the U.K. on Monday. “I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that, or any necessity of that,” he stressed. “We do want to encourage the flourishing of freedom, and I think this is a very welcome development. I think freedom-loving people around the world recognize that, and they’re applauding it and praying for the Iranians that they can continue this.” 

That said, he continued, “the indiscriminate killing of innocent citizens and protesters is detestable” and “must be stopped.”

In a brief glimmer of hope for the Iranian people, who’ve been cut off from the world and hunted by their leaders, hackers managed to get by the regime’s blackout, interrupting the feed with footage “supporting the country’s exiled crown prince and calling on security forces to not ‘point your weapons at the people. Join the nation for the freedom of Iran,” the broadcast urged. 

Mike Waltz, Trump’s ambassador to the U.N. and former member of the Army Special Forces, sat down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins to express his disgust with the Iranian violence. “With the brutality that the regime has meted out on its own people, massive arrests by the U.N.’s own figure, up to 18,000 [have been] killed. Other international figures have it anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 [casualties]. Regardless,” he emphasized, “this has been a massacre. The regime has used military-grade weapons and mowed down its own people. In addition to that, we’re seeing tens of thousands of arrests. It appears the executions that were imminent have stayed for a bit. And I think that’s in direct response to the regime being afraid of the potential actions President Trump could take. But we’re watching closely, and it is wholly unacceptable,” he argued. “And I made that point to the United Nations Security Council [and] called them out for their silence over the prior week…” 

The other silence, a deafening one, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) underscored, is from the American Left. “All the people who are marching in the streets condemning the United States and condemning Israel are curiously silent now, when the Ayatollahs are massacring their own people,” he said. “On college campuses, where you had students living in tents, protesting their own country, protesting Israel, there are no encampments now,” Cotton said. “Nobody has seized campus buildings.” He shook his head at the hypocrisy. “It makes you think they weren’t focused on innocent lives, they were focused on attacking Israel and attacking the United States.”

Fortunately for Israel and Iran, America isn’t operating under Joe Biden’s strategy of weakness and avoidance. On the contrary, Waltz said, everything’s changed. “We remember an uprising under the Obama administration, the Green Movement, where, frankly, the administration and President Obama did next to nothing in response.” But President Trump, he was quick to point out, “is not a man of talk. He’s a man of action, number one. Number two, the second executive order he put in place was to reinstitute his maximum pressure campaign that had been lifted under the Biden administration.”

What does that mean? Well, Waltz explained, “the Iranian economy is not going to improve anytime soon. Their currency is tanking. They’re able to export less and less of their illegal oil. President Trump put the buyers of that oil and anything else coming from Iran on notice with another promise of additional tariffs. And we took out, at least for the foreseeable future, the Iranian nuclear threat,” he reminded people. “So, the regime is ultimately afraid. It’s afraid of its own people. It’s afraid of losing power. And it certainly is afraid of the potential action from President Trump.”

Another metric the ambassador is watching closely is Iran’s terror proxies, who Waltz suggests are the proof that what Trump is doing is working. The Houthis, Hezbollah, their militias in Iraq, and others “are complaining,” he noted. “[They] aren’t getting the plane loads of cash. And now Venezuela, as well, [isn’t] getting the plane loads of cash that they used to. And that means that the ‘terrorist trust fund’ that sits in Tehran is drying up,” he warned. 

And for everybody out there saying, “Why do we care?” Waltz was quick to explain. “Look, the root of all evil comes out of this Iranian regime across the Middle East that has caused conflict after conflict. President Trump is focused on fundamental change. And first and foremost, it’s drying up the regime’s money that it’s used to fuel these wars all over the Middle East and the world.”

In the meantime, it’s clear what the Iranian people want and are willing to die for: freedom. “They continue to march. They continue to protest. They continue to turn out to fight against the regime,” Roman said with amazement. The entire nation is at a tipping point. And if the ayatollah doesn’t go, he warned, our president “will help push him along.”