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A sharp critique of progressive double standards, arguing that Western opposition to Tehran sparks outrage—while the Iranian regime’s abuses are excused as “complex” and culturally nuanced.

It’s amazing what can awaken the modern progressive conscience.

For years, the regime in Tehran was busily perfecting the medieval arts…

Women were beaten for allowing a rebellious strand of hair to defy gravity.

Protesters were jailed, tortured, and occasionally shot for the inconvenience of dissent.

Gay men were introduced to the concept of “inclusivity” via prison cells or cranes.

The international Left responded with what can only be described as a thunderous hush.

But when Donald Trump so much as sneezes in the direction of Tehran, we’re suddenly hosting candlelight vigils for Iranian sovereignty.

One could be forgiven for thinking morality had taken a gap year.

Tactical Morality and Selective Outrage

Within a framework that believes in objective moral standards — those quaint relics suggesting that beating women and hanging homosexuals are bad regardless of geography — the Left’s posture makes no sense whatsoever.

When the Iranian regime oppresses its own people, the situation is “complex.” It requires nuance. Context. A podcast series.

But when the United States confronts that regime, we are informed that international law, sovereignty, and the fragile flower of peace have been brutally trampled by cowboy imperialists.

This disparity can only be understood if you forget that morality is fixed and imagine, as the Left do, that morality is tactical.

In the progressive cosmology, Western patriarchal capitalist Christian nations are not merely flawed; they are the axis upon which all historical evil rotates.

Colonialism, capitalism, climate change, gluten intolerance, bindies on the front lawn — all roads lead to the West.

Everyone else, by contrast, exists in a permanent state of victimhood.

Agency is for Europeans.

Blame is for Americans.

Everyone else gets explanatory footnotes.

Under this schema, Iran is not a theocratic regime that crushes dissent. It is a “regional actor.” A “counter-hegemonic force.” A “voice of the Global South.”

Its morality is, at best, culturally relative.

Its brutality is contextual.

Its slogans about wiping Israel off the map are regrettable but understandably emotive.

And if that regime happens to chant “Death to America”? Well, we all know they don’t mean “death” in the traditional sense.

“Liberating Tolerance” Weakening the West

This isn’t new.

Herbert Marcuse helpfully articulated the doctrine decades ago under the soothing title of “liberating tolerance.”

The theory is simple: tolerate movements that weaken Western power; withdraw tolerance from those that strengthen it. Tolerance, in other words, is not a virtue. It is a weapon.

Michel Foucault went one better and enthusiastically cheered the Iranian Revolution itself. Not because he had a secret fondness for clerical rule, but because he saw it as a blow against Western hegemony. The fact that the revolution would produce a regime that policed women’s wardrobes and executed dissidents was, apparently, an acceptable plot twist in the grand drama of anti-Western resistance.

This is the moral architecture of the Left.

If a regime opposes the West, it is complicated, textured, misunderstood. Its atrocities are framed as reactions. Its slogans are “rhetorical.” Its oppression is cultural.

If the West opposes that regime, it is aggression. Imperialism. Patriarchal capitalism flexing its colonial muscles yet again.

Do you notice what disappears in this equation? The actual Iranian people.

The women beaten in the streets for removing hijabs. The protesters dragged from their homes. The young men dangling from cranes as a warning to others.

The Left’s outrage, therefore, is not about human rights. It is about power. The Left are not concerned with justice, but with which civilisation is allowed to wield it.

Strip away the academic jargon, and what remains is disarmingly simple: whatever weakens the West is good. Whatever strengthens it is bad.

And if that means defending a regime that imprisons gays and brutalises women in the name of opposing American hegemony, well, pass the protest sign.

Without double standards, the Left would have no standards at all.

The real tragedy is that this isn’t merely intellectual theatre.

When morality becomes strategic rather than universal, the strongmen of the world learn a useful lesson: chant loudly enough against Washington, and half the Western intelligentsia will dutifully appear on the ABC to explain why your prison camps are culturally nuanced.

Civilisations do not collapse because their enemies are strong. They collapse because their moral confidence evaporates.

And nothing evaporates moral confidence faster than a worldview in which the only unforgivable sin is being the West.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.