President Donald Trump said early Friday morning that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters,” the United States “will come to their rescue.”

Trump added that “we are locked and loaded and ready to go” in the post on his Truth Social network, which went live just before 3 a.m. Eastern time.

‘Trump should know that intervention by the US in the domestic problem corresponds to chaos in the entire region and the destruction of the US interests.’

Trump’s warning came hours after reports that at least six people have been killed after nearly a week of protests in Iran over grim economic conditions there, CBS News reported.

More from CBS News:

Iran has been plagued for years by staggering hyperinflation, fueled by Western sanctions imposed over the hardline clerical government’s nuclear program and backing for militant groups across the region.

Videos and photos from Tehran and other cities posted on social media have shown protesters marching through streets from early this week, often chanting anti-government, pro-monarchy slogans and sometimes clashing violently with security forces.

In an apparent bid to quell the unrest, Iranian authorities have acknowledged the economic concerns and said peaceful protests are legitimate, but suggested that foreign powers — usually a reference to Israel and the U.S. — are behind subversive elements fueling violence on the streets.

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Ali Larijani — a former speaker of Iran’s parliament and now the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council — said Friday on social media in reaction to Trump’s remarks that “Trump should know that intervention by the U.S. in the domestic problem corresponds to chaos in the entire region and the destruction of the U.S. interests,” CBS News reported.

Larijani added that “the people of the U.S. should know that Trump began the adventurism” and that “they should take care of their own soldiers,” according to the news network.

The “soldiers” remark appeared to be in reference to U.S. military forces in the Middle East in range of Iran’s ballistic missiles, CBS News added.

Ali Shamkhani — an adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — warned that “any interventionist hand that gets too close to the security of Iran will be cut,” the news network reported.

“The people of Iran properly know the experience of ‘being rescued’ by Americans: from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza,” Shamkhani added in a social media post, CBS News said.

Prior to Trump’s Friday morning post on Truth Social, the U.S. and Israeli governments issued statements supporting the Iranian protests, the news network said.

“The people of Iran want freedom. They have suffered at the hands of the Ayatollahs for too long,” Mike Waltz, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a Monday X post. “We stand with Iranians in the streets of Tehran and across the country as they protest a radical regime that has brought them nothing but economic downturn and war.”

More from CBS News:

Tension between the U.S. and Iran escalated this week on the heels of a visit to the U.S. by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has campaigned his country’s close allies in Washington for decades to take a tougher stance on Iran.

After meeting with Netanyahu at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Sunday, Mr. Trump said he had heard that Iran could be attempting to rebuild its nuclear program following the unprecedented U.S. strikes on its enrichment facilities in June. Mr. Trump warned that if Iran did try to rebuild, “we’ll knock them down. We’ll knock the hell out of them. But hopefully that’s not happening.”

Iranian President Mahsoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday said Tehran would respond “to any cruel aggression” with unspecified “harsh and discouraging” measures, the news network added.

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Where do we go after Donald Trump?

The question has divided the right. When it comes to charting the correct course, a book published during the president’s first administration is timelier than ever: R.R. Reno’s “The Return of the Strong Gods.”

‘The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening,’ writes Reno.

MAGA 2.0?

One faction of the right appears keen to continue delivering on the promise of Trump’s “Golden Age” by leaning further into a muscular and nationalistic conservatism.

Liberal interlopers and other ideological refugees with forward operating bases situated right-of-center have been working ardently to politically neutralize this camp ahead of the 2028 election, smearing, for instance, some of those in Vice President JD Vance’s orbit as “woke right.”

Such liberal saboteurs are right to be fearful of this camp, as its dominance — affirmed by a Vance win — would signal the MAGA movement wasn’t a sprint but a marathon.

Libertarian libs

The second camp, whose potential champion in the 2028 primary field appears to be Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is keen both to act as though the populist upheaval of the 2010s hadn’t irreversibly changed the game and to slink back onto the rhetorically conservative, libertarian-minded side of the liberal coin.

This is the politics that has purchased cultural and economic deregulation, a ruinous series of foreign entanglements, a demographic crisis, and a low-trust society marked by an anemic sense of “we.”

The old guard in both parties — those who’ve long railed against and/or sought to undermine the MAGA agenda — would doubtless regard the success and empowerment of this camp as a godsend.

Early polling data provide strong indications, however, that there is little appetite among likely Republican primary voters for a return to a George W. Bush-era style of Republican leadership. The reason is perhaps best explained in a book first published six years ago.

Weak loves vs. strong gods

In “Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West,” R.R. Reno, a political philosopher and editor of First Things magazine, discusses both what was behind and what is ahead of the recent nationalist and populist uprisings in the West.

The book, which Reno has touted as an “essay in the politics of imagination,” is an engrossing elaboration on an article he penned years earlier detailing the full-spectrum campaign spearheaded by classical and progressive liberals after the Second World War to “disenchant and desacralize public life” and to produce an “open society” wherein the “strong gods” — the “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies” — could inevitably be neutralized and/or replaced by “weak loves” such as relativism, diversity, and tolerance.

Reno suggests that the reasoning behind this project of societal opening and weakening was that earlier in the 20th century, strong gods had supposedly rendered the masses easily manipulable by demagogues and set the stage for those totalitarian regimes that warred against humanity.

The general theory of society underpinning the postwar consensus became, according to Reno, “characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong — strong loves and strong truths — leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”

RELATED: Conservatives face a choice in ’26: realignment or extinction

MediaProduction via iStock/Getty Images

Making monsters

This, Reno insists, was a catastrophic overreaction.

In their campaign to water down dark loves, the war-traumatized liberal elites of yesteryear also watered down the powerful loves and intense loyalties that hold Western civilization together and supply a sense of belonging, purpose, and solidarity — such as family, nation, religion, and transcendent truth.

Reno notes that this campaign not only produced a dysfunctional society but incubated some of the very dark loves it was meant to destroy.

“The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening,” writes Reno. “On the contrary, they are encouraged by multiculturalism and the reductive techniques of critique. In its present decadent form, the postwar consensus makes white nationalism an entirely cogent position.”

“We cannot forestall the return of the debasing gods by reapplying the open-society imperatives. False loves can be remedied only be true ones,” adds Reno.

‘A language of love’

While the postwar liberal regime enjoyed great success in producing monsters and in disenchanting, disorienting, deracinating, and rendering homeless those guns-or-religion deplorables for whom America’s detached elites still brazenly express contempt, its success karmically set the stage for a popular yearning for anchorage, belonging, and a sense of “we,” which in turn prompted a rejection of the postwar consensus.

That rejection has manifested in various ways but most clearly in the rejection of the open society and its possessing forces of weakening that occurred on Nov. 8, 2016.

During his first term and again over the past several months, Trump has pursued reconsolidation and protection as opposed to deregulation and openness and delivered significant results along the way.

Those who’d seek to steer the right back toward the open society and sell voters on a rebrand of the postwar consensus stand a better chance of sweeping waves back into the sea.

While well-positioned to lead, those in the first camp may nevertheless want to heed Reno’s caution about the open society: “This project cannot be opposed solely on political grounds, as if nationalism alone can overcome the ‘destiny of weakening.’ We need strengthening motifs across the board.”

“Our task, therefore, is to restore public life in the West by developing a language of love and a vision of the ‘we’ that befits our dignity and appeals to our reason as well as our hearts,” wrote Reno.

“We must attend to the strong gods who come from above and animate the best of our traditions. Only that kind of leadership will forestall the return of the dark gods who rise up from below.”

​’return of the strong gods’, Conservatism, Donald trump, Election 2026, J.d. vance, R.r. reno, Ted cruz, Recommended reading 

Former President Barack Obama may have deported more immigrants than President Trump, but that isn’t stopping the left from accusing supporters of Trump’s immigration policy of being heartless and cruel.

“Biden also deported over a million people,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says on “Relatable.” “Did you hear about ICE raids under Biden? Did you hear about ICE raids under Obama? Did you hear about kids in cages under any of these administrations, even though that was happening, if you want to call these detention centers cages?”

“Did you hear about all of the lost children who were abandoned and not accounted for under these administrations? Did you hear about the sex trafficking, the human trafficking, the drug and weaponry trafficking that was happening under these administrations?” she asks.

“No, it’s not because it wasn’t happening. It’s because the media is in bed with the Democrats, and they don’t want you to see the Democrats doing things that they are criticizing Donald Trump for,” she adds.

Stuckey calls this a “weaponization of empathy.”

And Democrats weaponize your empathy to make you feel like the well-being of a stranger who lives a world away should be a priority in your own life — but Stuckey couldn’t disagree more.

“Countries are like families, just on a bigger scale. You put the safety and security of your people first. Not because you hate people from other countries, but because you love people in your country. It is not possible for us to equally prioritize all of the interests of everyone in the world and all of their safety and security,” she says.

“I believe we see that principle in Romans 13, that governments were instituted by God to punish the wrongdoer and reward the good,” she continues, adding, “You take care of your people. Nations were God’s idea. Borders were God’s idea. Government, laws, all God’s idea, and they are good.”

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