The streets of America are full of people protesting the idea that the United States needs to have borders. They are protesting against the notion that the United States is a sovereign nation where the government should decide who can come in and who should be kept out.
They’re also implying by their protests that 11 million people who have entered the country without permission should be given a pass and allowed to stay.
They will say that their protests are not about immigrants or immigration, but about how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is carrying out its constitutionally mandated duties.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Iranians are flooding the streets of more than 200 cities in 26 of the country’s 31 provinces, putting their lives on the line and demanding change.
Everyone, anywhere who loves freedom and justice is supporting the protesters. Everyone except Western leftists and their media mouthpieces.
STREETS OF FURY: New video shows large crowds marching through Tehran’s streets at night, with several buildings and vehicles reportedly on fire as anti-government protests grow.
The chaos comes as Iran plunges into a nationwide internet blackout, with the hardline Islamist… pic.twitter.com/ZbCjujMBUv
— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 9, 2026
Brendan O’Neill writing in The Spectator:
And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colors. They frothed day and night about a “murderous regime” – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle Eastern people revolt against their genuinely repressive rulers, they’ve gone schtum.
“These people love to yap about ‘resistance’ and ‘oppression.’ Yet the minute men and women in Iran rise up in resistance against the oppressive theocracy that immiserates and subjugates them, they go coy,” writes O’Neill.
Any uprisings in Iran over the last 30 years have been dismissed by the left as interference by Israel, the U.S., or Mossad. It couldn’t possibly be homegrown dissatisfaction with a regime that can’t give them reliable electricity, clean water, edible food, any job at all, or any sense that they control their own destinies.
Other than that, things are just peachy in Iran.
“Criticizing Iran, one of Hamas’s chief sponsors, would mean admitting the brutality they have spent years laundering just to demonize Israel,” Hen Mazzig posted on X. “So they look away. Women are beaten. Protesters are executed. And the megaphones go quiet. At least they are consistent. When outrage depends on blaming Jews, justice is optional.”
Say, I wonder whatever happened to that famous climate activist turned Hamas apologist, Greta Thunberg?
Where is self-proclaimed human rights savior Greta Thunberg’s flotilla to Iran?
Where is her solidarity with Iranian protesters against the totalitarian regime they are fighting?
Let the conspicuous silence of your social justice “heroes” be your guide.
For 2 years, they… pic.twitter.com/YS29fK5u3T
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) January 8, 2026
Perhaps most dispiriting is the silence, or careful equivocation, from sections of the progressive left and Islamist movements in the West. Movements that mobilise rapidly and loudly against injustice elsewhere, particularly in Gaza, too often fall quiet when confronted with abuses by a regime that brands itself “anti-imperialist”. In doing so, they reproduce the regime’s own framing, reducing Iranian lives to secondary casualties of geopolitical narratives rather than recognising them as victims of state violence in their own right.
Solidarity should never depend on who the oppressor is aligned against.
Fear of being labelled Islamophobic has reinforced this silence among another segment of the progressive left. Yet opposing gender apartheid, coercive religious laws and state violence is not Islamophobia; it is the defence of universal human rights. Cultural sensitivity must never be allowed to harden into moral paralysis or become an alibi for looking away.
I’m an “Occam’s Razor” guy. The simplest explanation for why the left stays largely silent about the protests in Iran is that their political enemies are supporting them. Their hatred of the right is that visceral, that all-encompassing.
Also, can’t give the Orange Man any more victories that validate his policies.
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