Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged Iranians to keep protesting their theocratic, authoritarian government, vowing “help” was coming as the regime continued its brutal crackdown on the nationwide demonstrations.

Trump’s message came amid growing concerns from Iran that it could see defections among the security forces, which have been killing and arresting thousands of protesters to crush the biggest threat to the regime’s stability in years.

“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have canceled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA [Make Iran Great Again]!!!”

Trump did not elaborate on what support may be coming. When asked what he meant by “help is on its way,” Trump told reporters that they would have to figure it out.

However, Trump has said multiple times over the last two weeks that he will intervene against the Iranian regime if security forces continue killing protesters. Adding to threats of military action, Trump late on Monday announced that any country doing business with Iran will face a new tariff of 25 percent on its exports to the US.

According to reports, Trump was to meet with senior advisers on Tuesday to discuss options for Iran, including military strikes, using cyber weapons, widening sanctions, and providing online help to anti-government sources.

Iran has continued to face fierce demonstrations, which began on Dec. 28 over economic hardships but escalated into large-scale protests calling for the downfall of the country’s Islamist system.

The regime has responded with an increasingly violent crackdown on protests. An Iranian official told Reuters that about 2,000 people had been killed in the protests, marking the first time authorities have given an overall death toll from more than two weeks of unrest.

US-based rights group HRANA said that of the 2,003 people whose deaths it had confirmed, 1,850 were protesters. It added that 16,784 people had been detained, a significant increase from the figure of 10,721 it gave on Monday.

However, thousands more people are feared dead.

“Based on available data and cross-checking information obtained from reliable sources, including the Supreme National Security Council and the presidential office, the initial estimate by the Islamic Republic’s security institutions is that at least 12,000 people were killed in this nationwide killing,” reported Iran International, a Persian-language news outlet.

According to CBS News, the figure could be as high as 20,000.

With the regime imposing an internet blackout since Thursday, verification of such figures has been difficult.

Trump continued to urge Iranian protesters to “take over” institutions while speaking at an economic event in Detroit, Michigan on Tuesday.

“And by the way, to all Iranian patriots, keep protesting, take over your institutions, if possible, and save the name of the killers and the abusers that are abusing you; you’re being very badly abused if the numbers are right,” Trump said.

“They’ll pay a very big price, and I’ve canceled all meetings with the Iranian officials, until the senseless killing of protesters stops. And all I say to them is, help is on its way. You saw that,” he continued. “I put tariffs on anybody doing business with Iran just went into effect today. And I say, make Iran great again, you know, as a great country until these monsters came in and took it over.”

Iran has warned that any military action would be met with force in response.

“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories [Israel] as well as all US bases and ships will be our legitimate target,” Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf told a crowd in Tehran’s Enqelab Square on Monday, adding that Iranians were fighting a four-front war: “economic war, psychological warfare, military war against the US and Israel, and today a war against terrorism.”

Following Trump’s social media post the following day, Iranian security chief Ali Larijani said on X that the US president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were the “main killers” of the Iranian people.

Despite the protests, there have been few examples of fracture among the security forces and regime elites that could topple the clerical system, which has been in power since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. However, there are signs of Tehran fearing defections.

The Intelligence Organization of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist group and a key force responsible for suppressing dissent, issued a statement on Friday castigating the protests as part of a “terrorist” plot orchestrated by the US and Israel to topple the regime. In a now-deleted section of the statement, the IRGC also warned that any “defiance, desertion, or disobedience” among the military would be met with “trial and decisive action.”

“The apparent removal of this language likely reflects concerns about triggering a panic, but it nevertheless exposes the depth of anxiety among regime officials,” wrote Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile, the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization also said that it was “dealing with possible acts of abandonment,” similarly suggesting that some Iranian security forces may have already defected or that the regime is concerned about such a possibility.

A Kurdish human rights organization reported last week that the regime had arrested “dozens” of security officers in Kermanshah City who refused to fire on protesters.

“The regime may be framing protesters as ‘terrorists’ and linking them to the United States and Israel to increase security forces’ willingness to use lethal force against protesters and reduce the risk of defections,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote in a new analysis.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly ordered the IRGC to take control of the crackdown in part due to fears of defections by the police and regular armed forces.

“He [Khamenei] is in closer contact with the IRGC than with the army or the police, because he believes the risk of IRGC defections is almost non-existent, whereas others have defected before,” a senior Iranian official told The Telegraph. “He has placed his fate in the hands of the IRGC.”

The Institute for the Study of War noted that the regular Iranian military “is generally less ideological and more representative of the Iranian population than the IRGC, which increases the risk that [army] members could defect.”

Defections could tip the scales in favor of the protesters. But even if the regime succeeds in stamping out the unrest, some observers argue the Islamist theocracy has no long-term future in Iran.

“I assume that we are now witnessing the final days and weeks of this regime,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Tuesday, adding that if it had to maintain power through violence, “it is effectively at its end.”

Germany, along with Britain, France, and Italy, all summoned Iranian ambassadors in protest over the crackdown, decrying what British Foreign Minister Yvette Cooper called the “brutal killing” of protesters.

Meanwhile, the European Union has indicated it will impose harsher sanctions on Iran in response to the repression of anti-government demonstrations.

“The rising number of casualties in Iran is horrifying. I unequivocally condemn the excessive use of force and continued restriction of freedom,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on X. “Further sanctions on those responsible for the repression will be swiftly proposed.”

China and Russia, meanwhile, have backed the Iranian regime, warning against foreign “interference” in what officials described as Iran’s internal affairs.

Amid the unrest, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told Al Jazeera that he and US envoy Steve Witkoff have been in contact.

Witkoff met Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah and a prominent voice in the Iranian opposition, this past weekend, Axios reported.

Dr. Lilian Steiner isn’t really listening.

Yes, she hears the thunderous strains of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” playing from an upstairs neighbor’s apartment above her psychiatry practice in a tony arrondissement of Paris. She is committed to recording the sessions on mini-discs for future reference, even if she has to bug her digital native son to buy replacements on Amazon. But when a patient dies from an apparent suicide, without any of the usual warning signs, she knows she’s missing something.

French director Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, a semi-dark comic mystery takes Lilian out of her routine. The film has the therapist, played by a captivating Jodie Foster, principalement en français, working to solve the case of her patient, a middle-aged German language teacher named Paula. When Paula’s daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami), approaches Lilian with what she believes is a message, Lilian listens back to their sessions and begins to suspect foul play — i.e., murder. Soon she’s sleuthing around, and hooking up with her ex-husband Gaby (Daniel Auteuil).

Things take a turn for the sinister when Lilian shows up to pay her respects — later to be thrown out by Paula’s irate widower, Simon (Mathieu Amalric). Shortly after arriving, Lilian removes a sheet from a mirror, and a woman warns her that in doing so she will “awaken the dybbuk.”

The moment of cultural unawareness is telling if not entirely plausible. While Lilian is Jewish, and establishes her knowledge of the custom of burying a body quickly, she’s firmly secular. We see her slurping back an oyster and learn she didn’t circumcise her now-adult son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste). For whatever reason, she didn’t get the mirror memo. What she does detect, perhaps more acutely than most as an American expat, is antisemitism.

A hypnotist Lilian consults to fix her newly compulsive crying informs her that Freud stopped practicing hypnotism when he realized it was less “interesting” financially than the longer process of psychoanalysis. Lilian wastes no time dubbing this remark “borderline antisemitic.”

But their session produces a real breakthrough, linked to an infamous episode in the Holocaust. In a surreal sequence, Lilian sees herself in the body of a male cellist in 1942 Paris, witnessing a raid of a concert hall by the police in what can be assumed to be the Vel d’Hiv Roundup, the mass arrest and deportation of Paris’ Jews.

In the trance, Lilian sees Nazis in the house seats, a woman who looks exactly like Paula is playing next to her whispering something indistinct, Simon conducts, and her son Julien’s face is on the body of a militiaman — not a Nazi, she insists, but a French collaborator. Indeed, they were the ones who carried out the arrests. When Lilian returns to her tape of her hypnosis to reenter the scene, she finds more clues, including a postcard that takes her out of Paris for a stakeout. (Zlotowski co-wrote the film with author Anne Berest, whose autofictional book The Postcard uncovers her family’s story in the Holocaust.)

When Lilian brings this hypnotic vision up at Julien’s birthday dinner — noting his interest in German at school — he scoffs at the story and calls her paranoid. Gaby is shocked that Lilian, a woman of science, would suddenly buy into woo-woo notions of past lives. She really, truly, seems to believe her vision holds the key to Paula’s death, while her French-born family takes it all in stride.

Why, then, is history erupting in this modern story, a kind of continental arthouse spin on Netflix’s Murder Mystery franchise?

As motives are clarified and red herrings reveal themselves, the Pétain years Lilian glimpsed show themselves as very much alive in the present. A disgruntled patient draws a swastika by her office: “A very small one,” he says in his defense, “by the doorbell.”

Zlotowski took on the period just before Nazi occupation in her 2016 film Planetarium, a sort of roman à clef about persecuted Jewish French film producer Bernard Natan. In Private Life, as in her films Dear Prudence and Other People’s Children, Zlotowski masterfully sketches a French Jewish family and all its messy intersections in a society that privileges the principle of laïcité, the state religion of secularism. (I can’t account for her choice to have Paula’s family say kaddish over her dead body at their home before the funeral, but the rest feels right and an autopsy did delay burial.)

Long on style, with scarlet giftboxes and blood on white snow that reminded me of Resnais’ Stavisky and mirror shots that recalled Joseph Losey’s Monsieur Klein, the film has something elemental on its mind that seems inseparable from the Jewish question. It ponders how Jews may continue on in a culture that rejects them with some regularity, even as Lilian says at one point — and this holds mostly true of the cast of characters — “everyone here is Jewish.”

What Lilian picks up on is the “very small” swastika on the national fabric, a country still haunted by the Vichy regime. It’s a dybbuk that has yet to be exorcized, and like all dybbuks its business is unfinished.

The post In a stylish mystery, Jodie Foster releases the dybbuk of French Jewish identity appeared first on The Forward.

Stephen Spencer Pittman, the suspect in a Saturday arson attack at a historic Mississippi synagogue, targeted Beth Israel Congregation because of its “Jewish ties,” according to the FBI. In an interview, he called the shul the “synagogue of Satan,” and his recent social media posts included an antisemitic cartoon.

But on a Christian fitness site registered to Pittman and linked across his social media profiles, Hebrew is liberally sprinkled throughout workout advice and scripture study.

That a man who would burn a synagogue would also be so interested in Hebrew language study, or pepper it throughout his Christian fitness site, may seem surprising. But understanding the reference points of Pittman’s fitness website helps explain the cultural touchstones and media diet he was likely consuming, one that may have influenced his thinking.

Pittman’s site, called One Purpose, advertises “scripture-backed fitness.” It refers to its users as “brothers” who are building their “temple” — women are not mentioned and presumably not the target audience. Instead, it pairs a veneer of biblical truth and Christianity with rhetoric about masculinity.

At the top of the homepage is the tetragrammaton in Hebrew, one of the biblical names for God. The site also says that it has modeled its fitness program after the “biblical patriarchs,” listing some of the oldest men in the bible — Adam, Methuselah, Noah, and others — with their Hebrew names. The site also notes several Jewish fast days, including lesser-known days usually only observed by Orthodox Jews, such as the Fast of Daniel and the Fast of Esther, again with their Hebrew names.

A post on Pittman’s Instagram about a “Christian diet/testosterone optimization” advises eating only raw milk and eggs as well as limiting oneself to “God-made fats,” listing the Hebrew words for oil and butter. Clicking through the site’s instructions for its fitness regimen brings the user snippets of Hebrew vocabulary, such as derekh, meaning path in Hebrew, and ma’atzor, meaning obstacle, scattered among copy about striving to live up to one’s true manliness and strength as ordained by God.

But beyond the biblical sheen, the site — which costs $99 a month to access in full, or $599 for the year — is full of the kind of “grindset” hustle culture advice on masculinity, charisma and workouts that regularly populates the so-called manosphere. Advertised among the premium features are training modules for “looks-maxxing,” which promises a “complete aesthetic optimization” and “test-maxxing,” which is not about acing exams but instead about raising testosterone levels.

This rhetoric is common among influencers widely regarded as proponents of toxic masculinity, including self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who was arrested for sex trafficking in Romania; Myron Gaines, who wrote a book titled Women Deserve Less, and even Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a manosphere elder who regularly inveighs against feminism. They often alternate between “negging” — internet slang for insulting — their participants, and pumping them up, promising a whole new life full of sex and money if they follow the advice of these influences. If they don’t, they will be weak “simps” or “cucks.”

One Purpose uses similar tactics at each click, just with a religious overlay. Users are offered the choice to “take up the cross” and “walk in the purpose God created for you,” or else, if they do not sign up for the site’s weight-lifting, diet and prayer program, to “let your temple fall into ruin” and “drift further from God’s purpose.”

Over the past few years, much of the manosphere has increasingly merged with Christian influencers, particularly traditionalist Catholics, or “tradcaths,” and the TheoBros, adherents of Reformed Christian theology. The overlap is borne largely out of shared values over women’s subservience and male dominance — which manosphere leaders such as Tate believe is biological, and TheoBro leaders such as Joel Webbon believe is biblical.

Many of the TheoBros, such as Webbon or Brian Sauvé, run YouTube series and podcasts where they also discuss their lifting routines and beard care, aligning with the manosphere values. And these TheoBros are often openly antisemitic, viewing Jews as Satanists who have rejected Jesus, and endorsing numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial. Manosphere leaders including Tate and Gaines have done the same; Webbon and Gaines have also both hosted outspoken antisemite Nick Fuentes on their shows.

This manosphere interest among Christian influencers has grown alongside an increased attention to Jewish practice and the Hebrew Bible among many Christians, who see it as a way to grow closer to Jesus’ own practices and add a sense of mystery and spirituality via Jewish rituals that are unfamiliar, and feel esoteric, to most Christians.

Hebrew, in these contexts, largely serves to add a sense of authenticity to Christian practice — a way to advertise that their version of Christianity is ancient, from the time of Jesus. But it’s a mistake to see this interest in Hebrew and Jewish texts as philosemitism; while it sometimes manifests as friendliness toward Jews, it often has little relationship to Jewish people today.

Pittman’s One Purpose does not contain the overtly antisemitic or misogynist language that many TheoBro and manosphere influencers use. But the rhetoric of his biblical fitness site echoes their content, placing itself firmly in the same ecosystem. Its subtext aligns with a world rife with conspiracy theories about Jewish governmental control and Satanic rituals.

We don’t know yet exactly what Pittman’s media diet was. But his biblical fitness site’s imitation of Christian masculinity influencers indicates he likely consumed a lot of content that, alongside lifting routines or nutrition advice, contained antisemitic conspiracy theories. On his Instagram, he follows numerous accounts that describe themselves as a “soldier of Christ” or a “watchman for Christ,” some of which also contain conspiracy theories. When the beliefs on what it means to be a “real man” and a good Christian combine, they paint a vision of Christian masculinity that requires defeating Satan — and Satan, in this case, is the Jews. As Pittman said, according to an affidavit, he was due for a “homerun.”

The post The Mississippi synagogue arson suspect has a Christian fitness site. Here’s what that tell us appeared first on The Forward.