Great question – and a broader question than its framing in an otherwise excellent essay.
On paper, the Khamenei regime in Iran should represent everything that Western progressives reject. The mullahs impose a severe and conservative religious code on its subjects. Women in particular experience brutal oppression in both public and private, and are treated like chattel belonging to male family members. The economy centers on the nation's military-industrial complex, with the IRGC controlling 40% or more of the nation's economic output. Iran's only real access to hard currency is oil, in a world where the Left obsesses over fossil-fuel use.
Not to mention, of course, the way in which the shari'a state treats the LGBTQ community, religious minorities, indigenous peoples, and so on. There are very few "land acknowledgements" in Iran, and even fewer rainbow flags.
Considering the nature and extreme oppression in this regime, one would expect Western progressives to cheer a popular uprising against it. However, as has been painfully obvious for the past two-plus weeks, not only has the Left not cheered, its activists and high-profile leadership have refused to even acknowledge it. In the Free Press essay mentioned above, Yascha Mounk tried to find coverage in the Left's major publications, and only discovered "deafening silence":
This silence has been evident in mainstream media outlets, from the British Broadcasting Corporation to National Public Radio, that have been oddly slow to grasp the importance of this moment. Worse, when those outlets did deign to cover the events, they often downplayed the significance of the protests; in a few especially egregious cases, reporters even seemed to harbor sympathies for the country’s brutal regime. (At the outset of the protests, The Guardian even published an op-ed by Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister.)
The silence has been even more deafening in the left-wing newspapers and magazines of the anglophone world. On Saturday morning, I searched the principal publications of the American left for any mention of Iran. There was nothing on the websites of The Nation or The New Republic or Jacobin or Slate or even Dissent.
Mounk is correct about this silence, although the massacres of people on the streets in Iranian cities this weekend have forced some outlets into more coverage. However, that wasn't enough to crack one of the banner events of the progressive elite in Hollywood, as my friend Christian Toto reports today. Last night's Golden Globes awards show featured no mention at all of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of dead Iranians rebelling against real oppression. And Christian saw it coming:
The tiny sliver of land known as Hollywood couldn’t bother to address the matter at Sunday’s Golden Globes telecast. Some predicted that sorry state of affairs.
While the Iranian government slaughters protesters by the hundreds, Hollywood stars paid tribute to a mother who abandoned her children for an ICE protest that turned deadly.
This week’s death of Renee Good, a far-Left activist who drove into an ICE agent and paid the ultimate price, coaxed several stars to wear “Be Good” pins and speak out on the matter.
Not from the stage, though. The acting community no longer rants from awards show podiums with the ferocity they once did. No, they used red carpet moments to share their outrage over Good’s death.
A handful of celebrities did express support for the Iranian people on their social media platforms, such as Pink, David Draiman, and J.K. Rowling. No mention came at the awards show, however, not even from its red carpet. John Ondrasik tore into the entertainment industry for its own "deafening silence":
Not one of our tolerant betters at the @goldenglobes found time to recognize the Iranian people who are currently being gunned down fighting to end a 46 year reign of murder, oppression, torture, and brutal submission of women by the Mullahs. Hollywood is beneath contempt. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/tXDM5jsdnW
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) January 12, 2026
Why is the Left ignoring this uprising on behalf of not just liberty, but also liberalization of perhaps one of the most repressive regimes in the world? Mounk offers the usual excuses: Trump, Venezuela, Minnesota, the lack of access in Iran, and "various outrages perpetrated daily by the White House." Mounk does explain that he approaches this question as "a man of the left," and this paragraph expresses a few rational excuses from that perspective.
However, Mounk eventually settles on an explanation that comes closer to the truth:
For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil. This creates in their minds a simple demonology: Anybody who is on “our side” must be bad, and anybody who is on the “other side” is presumptively good. As Orwell said about some of the intellectuals of his day, their “real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.”
This is remarkably honest, but it needs some expansion. The Left has sold itself on the "occupier/occupied" explanation for the world as it is, and sees the West as exclusive to the former. That misses the fact that (a) Islam has been a colonizing force, both militarily and culturally, including in Iran; (b) the Islamic Republic and its IRGC have acted as occupying forces in Iran for 47 years; (c) their proxies have colonized places like Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Syria, and even Venezuela to an extent, right under the Left's noses and without a peep of protest. The Left is so lost in their false paradigm that they overlook the fact that the only people to worship the same God and live in the same land for the last 3500 years are in fact the Jews in Israel, not the Arabs and Muslims that colonized the Levant, North Africa, and parts of Europe over the last 1400 years.
However, the truth may be even more basic and fundamental. The Left hates the West and wants it destroyed. They are willing to ally with all of those who want the same outcome, no matter the nature of the regime involved. That is their highest priority, and the deafening silence in response to the yearning of the brave Iranian people can only be understood in that context.
Update: Tahmineh Dehbozorgi goes even deeper to explain the disconnect:
Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.
This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased.
By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely. ...
Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape.
Read the whole essay. And bookmark it.
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