U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has called on the U.S. to supply arms to Iranian protesters.
“We should be arming the protesters in Iran. NOW,” Cruz wrote Tuesday in a post on the social platform X.
“For the Iranian people to overthrow the Ayatollah — a tyrant who routinely chants ‘death to America’ — would make America much, much safer,” he continued.
Protests erupted in Iran on Dec. 28 in response to the country’s sharp currency collapse and soaring inflation. The Iranian government responded with a deadly crackdown and on Jan. 8 cut off all internet access in the country, Amnesty International reports.
“The authorities carried out massacres of protesters, primarily on 8 and 9 January, when the death toll rose into thousands,” Amnesty International wrote in its January 26 report. “January 2026 marks the deadliest period of repression by the Iranian authorities in decades of Amnesty’s research.”
Cruz’s enthusiasm for seeing armed protesters in Iran’s streets appears at odds with his sentiments about U.S. demonstrators exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Texas’ junior senator had this to say following the death of Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti on his podcast this week, MS Now reports:
“If you have a firearm, the odds of that confrontation escalating rise dramatically,” Cruz said. “We are seeing, sadly, leftists targeting ICE agents for murder. And if you have that firearm and you’re engaged in violence, the agent’s perception of the physical threat to them is understandably much, much higher.”
Cruz joins a number of other top republicans in siding with Iranian protestors, even as the current United States presidential administration clashes violently with its own.
Indeed, President Donald Trump has made comments that echo those of the Iranian regime.
On January 15, a few days after the peak of the uprising in Iran, Iranian Minister of Defense Aziz Nasirzadeh called the Iranian protesters “savage armed terrorists.” Sound familiar?
U.S. Lyndsey Graham, R-South Carolina, also expressed support for the protestors in Iran in recent days, saying “Trump has your back” and “help will be on the way” on FOX News this week, Mediaite reports. But when it came to matters back home, Graham said “recent physical and verbal assaults on ICE and Border Patrol agents have led to a very dangerous situation,” according to MS Now.
“People in Iran daring to express their anger at decades of repression and demand fundamental change are once again being met with a deadly pattern of security forces unlawfully firing at, chasing, arresting, and beating protesters[…],” said Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
The rise of the Ayatollah, against whom protestors in Iran are resisting, can be traced back to the 1953 American CIA intervention in the country, which overthrew democratically elected leader Mohhamad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize his nation’s vast oil reserves.
Mossadegh’s ouster was due in part to paid protestors in a coup orchestrated by the CIA, according to the book All the Shah’s Men by Steven Kinzer. Mossadegh was arrested and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
The power vacuum led to the rise of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom many Iranians viewed as an American puppet presiding over a cruel and violent regime. The Islamic Revolution forced out the Shah and installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country’s first supreme leader, followed by a succession theocratic Ayatollahs, whom the United States has repeatedly accused of harboring nuclear ambitions.
Currently, the Supreme Leader of Iran is Ali Khamenei, who went into hiding following Israel’s attacks on the country last summer. Reuters reports that Iranian leadership is engaged in succession talks to put a plan in place in the event of the leader’s death.
Two frontrunners have emerged in the succession discussions, insiders told Reuters: Khamenei’s 56-year-old son Mojtaba and Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the father of the Islamic revolution.
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