TEHRAN—In a stirring display of national unity, Iranian officials have defended funding their children’s extravagant lives in the West as a “necessary blow to imperialist decadence,” sources confirmed Monday. Top regime figures, whose children have reportedly been spotted slurping lattes in Paris, studying at Oxford, and buying up half of Vancouver’s real estate, maintain that these actions are entirely consistent with their calls for sacrifices from ordinary Iranians.

“It’s important my son Nasser infiltrate the capitalist system by driving a Maserati in Milan,” explained Mohammad-Reza Poudravi, Deputy Minister of Piety and Economic Hardships, from his villa in Nice. “He’s basically an undercover agent in the war against immorality. Plus, Italian leather seats are good for his back.”

Ayatollah Jamal Sarraftan, whose daughter Leila recently debuted her fifth TikTok cooking show in Beverly Hills, assured critics that her avocado toast activism is “disrupting Western values from within.” “Every dollar she spends is a bullet fired at American consumerism. It’s really sabotage, if you think about it.”

Regime spokesperson Firoozeh Tabrizi added, “Frankly, our children deserve these opportunities for their service: it takes courage to endure Starbucks pumpkin spice so the homeland can be free. Any suggestion otherwise is Zionist propaganda.”

Meanwhile, average Iranians were reassured that their leaders’ offspring would return home just as soon as they finished “gathering critical intelligence at Coachella.”