There are times when a regime stops pretending. It no longer needs analysts, it no longer needs to decipher statements, it no longer needs to engage in endless diplomatic archaeology about “moderates” and “hardliners.” The regime simply speaks and tells us exactly who it is.
That moment came on Sunday, when the state-run Channel 3 of the so-called Islamic “Republic” of Iran, along with media affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, broadcast a three-minute video with a title written in a font that imitates blood: “Where to kill Barron Trump?” A twenty-year-old student.
The video showed his campus. The escort vehicles. The positions of the Secret Service agents. It claimed to have identified his Xbox, Discord, and FIFA accounts, as well as those of his fellow students. People whose only “crime” is sitting next to him in the auditorium. It ended with a sum: ten million dollars. And with a phrase that cannot be misinterpreted: “Barron Trump, wait for us.”
Let’s call a spade a spade. When a private individual threatens, it is a crime. When a state television station threatens, with public money, with state equipment, with the permission of the censorship of a regime where not a single frame is broadcast without approval, then this is not a matter of “some journalist’s extremism”. This is a state criminal policy expressed in video form .
And it’s worse than a simple threat. It’s crowdsourcing assassination. The regime doesn’t say, “We’ll kill him.” It says, “Here’s the price, here’s the map, you find him .” It’s aimed at every psychopath, every fanatic, every desperate person with a gun and a smartphone, anywhere on the planet. It’s the industrialization of terrorism through outsourcing, and it has the added advantage, for Tehran, of plausible deniability. If someone actually acts, the mullahs will throw up their hands and say they knew nothing.
It’s not theory. It’s Tehran’s verified operational manual , recorded in American courts:
- In 2022 , the US Department of Justice charged a member of the Revolutionary Guard with conspiring to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton . The reward offered for an executioner within the US was $300,000.
- In 2024 , the FBI foiled a plot to assassinate Donald Trump himself, with a Revolutionary Guard agent stationed in Tehran and two accomplices arrested in New York.
- In March 2026 , a federal court convicted Asif Merchant of terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder for hire, while he admitted in court that he was sent by the Guards to the United States to organize political assassinations.
- For years, the same Terrorist networks have been hunting Iranian dissidents in New York, London, Toronto and Amsterdam, journalists, activists, people without guard and without protection.
In 2025, fourteen governments—from France and Germany to Canada and Sweden—signed a joint condemnation of this very network. Tehran’s behavior did not change one bit. In February 2026, the European Union finally designated the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. It did so three decades later than it should have. And again, nothing.
This is the answer to those who ask why the negotiations failed. They did not fail because the West did not offer enough. They failed because on the other side of the table sits a regime that, while discussing uranium and trade routes, simultaneously broadcasts on its state television a map of a child’s university campus and plans his assassination!
There is a distinction as old as war itself, and the entire edifice of international law rests on it: the distinction between combatants and civilians. One can disagree vehemently with American foreign policy. One can consider the current operations excessive, the sanctions harsh. All of these are legitimate subjects of disagreement.
However, Terrorism is not a legitimate subject of disagreement. Because a regime that puts a price on a student’s head has eliminated itself as an interlocutor.
Barron Trump runs nothing. He doesn’t vote for sanctions. He doesn’t sign orders. His only connection to American politics is biological. Targeting him means you have adopted the most primitive logic known to man: blood guilt. The punishment of the son for the father. It is the same morality that sent Hamas to the kibbutzim on October 7 and the same that bombed Lockerbie airport. It is not strategy, but it is hatred dressed in the clothes of strategy.
And let’s not lose sight of the essence in the video’s effects. A large part of the material is likely staged with sensational graphics, images generated by artificial intelligence, claims that no agency has confirmed. The amount of the reward itself remains unconfirmed. It doesn’t matter. The intention does not need confirmation from third parties, since it was broadcast on a state frequency, with a title, with an amount, with a date. What Tehran may not be able to do, it has clearly told us that it wants to do. And it wants it enough to schedule it on the news.
The regime that produced this video rules a country with a vast history, an extraordinary people, and a ruined economy. The rial is at an all-time low. The speaker of the parliament has publicly admitted that no amount of military force can save a country where the world is starving. The streets of Tehran are not filled with people demanding the head of an American student, but they are filled with people demanding bread and a life that resembles life.
This is the crucial distinction, and it must be made clear. The enemy is not the Iranian people. It is a specific mechanism — the Revolutionary Guards and the theocratic establishment that feeds them — that is holding seventy million people hostage to finance the export of death. Its first victims are not Americans. They are Iranians. Those hanged in Evin prison, the women murdered for a headscarf, the exiles who live looking over their shoulders in European capitals.
A regime that has lost its people turns outward. It has nothing to offer prosperity, so it offers revenge. The video about Barron Trump is not a sign of strength, it is a sign of vulgar degradation. It is the cry of a system that can no longer hit military targets, so it fantasizes about student dormitories.
The West has spent four decades treating the Islamic Republic like a normal state with unusual habits. It pronounces accusations that are never carried out. It imposes sanctions that are bypassed. It issues joint statements that no one in Tehran reads. Each time, the regime has registered the gap between words and deeds and gone one step further.
Sunday’s video is that next step. It is also, perhaps, the clearest argument Tehran itself has ever offered in favor of those who argue that with this regime there is no diplomatic way out, only deterrence, pressure, and an end to impunity.
Ten million dollars for a child. That’s their offer. Let’s never pretend again that we didn’t know what it is.
G. Ant.
