The worlds self-appointed guardians of democracy and human rights have gone conspicuously quiet as Iranians risk their lives to challenge one of the planets most vicious regimes.
There are no activist flotillas steaming toward the Persian Gulf, no Soros-backed democracy outfits leaning on Western governments to intervene on behalf of civilians who are being rounded up and killed. According to Conservative Daily News, there is no slick, coordinated astroturf campaign demanding sanctions or boycotts, no choreographed outrage from the same professional protest class that can shut down Western cities over far less.
When American college students returned from winter break, they did not encounter a single tent city or campus encampment in solidarity with the Iranian uprising against the theocrats who have strangled that country for decades.
International institutions are equally indifferent. There are no emergency sessions at the United Nations, no urgent resolutions condemning Tehrans brutality or demanding accountability for the regimes security forces. Instead, member states have been busy denouncing the United States for removing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro and attacking Israel for its recognition of Somaliland. The more people might be free, the more the U.N. is distressed.
The media, which can manufacture global moral panics on command, have treated the Iranian protests as a nuisance rather than a story. Outlets such as the BBC, which uncritically amplified virtually every fabricated claim about a Gaza genocide and famine handed to them by Hamas propagandists, could barely spare a segment for the widespread demonstrations in Iran. The contrast is not accidental; it reflects a worldview in which Western democracies and their allies are always the villains, and Islamist regimes are to be explained, excused, or ignored.
Hollywoods conscience, so loudly advertised when the target is Israel or conservative America, has likewise fallen silent. A year ago, Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Guy Pearce and a parade of other moral exhibitionists paraded across red carpets wearing red and orange pins featuring a hand around a black heart symbol a grotesque reference to a Ramallah lynching of two Israeli reservists in 2000 who mistakenly drove down the wrong street and were literally torn apart by a Palestinian mob. One of the murderers deliriously displayed his blood-soaked hands from the window to a cheering throng. This year, the Golden Globes did not feature a single celebrity championing the Iranian people.
The silence is not merely hypocrisy; it is ideological clarity. All the silence is revealing. Not because its hypocrisy. It isnt. It expresses a consistent political position. The progressive Left and segments of the so-called woke Right have effectively aligned themselves with the mullahs, not because they admire clerical rule, but because they share the same enemies: Western civilization, Israel, and the idea of national sovereignty rooted in tradition and ordered liberty.
Mocking this alliance as mere inconsistency misses the deeper reality. The charge of hypocrisy against leftist defenders of the mullahs reminds me of the mockery we throw at members of groups such as Queers for Palestine. It misses a larger point. The red-green partnership between leftists and political Islamists is not new; it is a strategic convergence. The red-green alliance between leftists and political Islamists is nothing new. They have all the same enemies.
The Western press plays a central role in sustaining this moral confusion. As journalist Tahmineh Dehbozorgi recently observed, the uprising in Iran is largely ignored because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world. For progressive media elites, acknowledging that millions of Muslims are rejecting an Islamist regime would undermine the narrative that Islamism is merely a reaction to Western sins, rather than a totalitarian ideology in its own right.
Consequently, Islam is treated with either a suicidal moral equivalence or outright reverence. Indeed, Western progressives in the media treat Islam with, at best, a self-destructive moral equivalence or, at worst, reverence. The same journalists who portray domestic immigration enforcement as a harbinger of the Fourth Reich handle the Iranian regime which regularly executes women for alleged crimes against Islam with kid gloves. This pattern of deceptive coverage of political Islam echoes the Lefts complicity in Stalins terror in the 1930s, when atrocities were minimized or denied to protect the broader communist project.
Like the Soviet Union, the modern Iranian state is not merely authoritarian but fully totalitarian. It is built on a lattice of fundamentally illiberal doctrines and seeks to control virtually every dimension of life, from religious observance to economic activity. Worse still, Tehran is the worlds leading exporter of this brutal ideology, responsible for at least 1,000 American deaths over the years through terrorism and proxy warfare.
In Washington, a class of self-styled realists continues to rationalize engagement with this regime. Let us call the Iran-championing intellectuals who want the mullahs to obtain nuclear weapons as a counterweight to Israeli regional power the Ben Rhodes faction. For them, the regimes cruelty is a secondary concern, easily brushed aside in service of a geopolitical fantasy that treats Israel, not Tehran, as the destabilizing force.
On the other side, a segment of the populist right has allowed its hostility to Israel and neoconservatives to cloud its judgment about the Iranian threat. And lets call the Israel-obsessives on the right the Tucker Carlson faction, who find modern Western ideals, neocons and the AIPAC far more offensive and dangerous than the theological fascism of political Islam. Both factions, in different ways, minimize the danger of a regime that openly calls for the destruction of Israel and the humiliation of the West.
A successful revolution against Irans Shia radicals would almost certainly improve regional stability and advance genuine human rights. The clerical regimes obsession with Israel is not grounded in rational statecraft but in theology and the need for a permanent external enemy to distract from its own failures. The clerics fixation with Israel has little rational geopolitical reasoning. It is theologically motivated, while also useful in deflecting attention away from the regimes domestic failures.
No one can say with confidence whether this latest uprising will succeed or what might follow if it does. Of course, we dont know whether this new uprising will succeed or what would happen if it did. This isnt the first time Iranians have rebelled. What we do know is that thousands have likely already been killed and tens of thousands imprisoned, a price paid largely out of sight of Western cameras and celebrity activism.
Given the nature of the regime, it is hard to imagine it falling without either a political or military coup or some form of external pressure. It seems unlikely that an Iranian revolution would succeed without a political or military coup or some external force. The Twelver Shiism that animates the ruling clerics makes them fundamentally different from secular dictators such as the shah, who might be swayed by concern for their people or their own fortunes. Mullahs would likely rather see the entire country in flames than surrender. Just look at how much needless peril and pain they place themselves and their nation in chasing nuclear weapons.
Reports indicate that the American president is weighing military options to support the protesters efforts to dislodge these murderous fascists. The President is reportedly weighing military options to support the protesters efforts to dislodge these murderous fascists. You may support him in this effort or not.
Whatever ones view on intervention, anyone who claims to care about human rights, self-determination, and genuine freedom should be rooting unequivocally against the mullahs and asking why so many in the West are not.
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