Leftists Love Oppressors, as Long as They’re Anti-West
In October 2025, a photo of New York Assemblyman and NYC mayoral race front-runner Zohran Mamdani smiling next to Ugandan politician Rebecca Kadaga went viral. Both are beaming, shoulders close, as if posing for a victory shot. To the casual viewer, it looks harmless, just a US politician meeting another official abroad. But to anyone familiar with Kadaga, it’s a gut punch. This is the woman who championed laws to jail LGBT people for life in her country, laws she referred to as a “Christmas gift” to Uganda. And beside her stands a man who claims to fight for justice, equality, and inclusion in New York.
When the photo surfaced, the Internet exploded. Some defended Mamdani, saying it was just a quick meeting and that he didn’t know who she was. Others called it hypocrisy. But to me, as an Iranian who watched my own country collapse under the weight of moral blindness disguised as progress, this is larger than Mamdani. This is about a pattern. Every few decades, people who claim to stand for freedom find themselves smiling beside those who destroy it. They tell themselves they’re standing against imperialism or defending “the oppressed.” They think they’re being forward-thinking, progressive, and sophisticated, when what they’re really doing is opening the door for hatred and tyranny. Everyone else saw a photo. I saw a warning.
What Mamdani did is nothing new. Every generation has its leftists who wrap themselves in the language of justice, yet somehow unfailingly find themselves cozying up to authoritarians and defending the enemies of freedom. The examples are everywhere. The feminists who stay silent about the jack-booted morality police in Iran who force women into hijabs because “we shouldn’t judge another culture.” The activists who chant “resistance” while defending Hamas, a death cult that murders its own people and uses children as shields. The left-wing intellectuals who slam Western countries as imperialist bullies while engaging in apologia for illiberal thugs like Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. The politicians who claim to stand for social justice but pose with leaders who jail LGBT people. The pattern is always the same.
The modern left has replaced ethical values with unthinking hatred of their own societies. Their moral compass doesn’t point north; it only points away from the West. As long as someone hates America, Israel, capitalism, or the West, even if they’re brutal autocrats or murderous zealots, leftists will find a way to excuse them. For example, philosopher Judith Butler framed October 7 as “an act of armed resistance,” a formulation many adopted rather than flatly condemning the massacre, despite extensive documentation of war crimes from human rights groups. On campuses, student groups and some faculty organized protests and encampments that featured chants, banners, and actions glorifying Hamas. Many prominent progressives and left-leaning publications also have a history of praising socialist dictators such as Fidel Castro or minimizing their repression. And activists who claim to stand for equality still turn a blind eye to anti-LGBT oppression from figures like Uganda’s Rebecca Kadaga.
Misogyny, homophobia, racism, theocracy, dictatorship, genocide — none of it matters as long as the oppressor isn’t Western. Many leftists call this double standard “anti-imperialism.” I call it moral collapse.
It’s the same sickness I saw back in Iran. The belief that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, that standing against the West automatically makes you righteous, is how murderers, fanatics, and tyrants are reborn as heroes in the eyes of gullible idealists. It’s how you get progressive-minded people to tell themselves they’re fighting for “the people” when in fact they are paving the road for oppression.
My generation was born into the ruins of a promise. Before 1979, Iran was far from perfect, but it was taking meaningful steps toward modernization and freedom. Then came the alliance that destroyed everything: the Iranian left and the Islamic clerics joined hands under the banner of “justice” and “anti-imperialism.” They called it a revolution. It turned into one of history’s greatest betrayals.
The left thought they could use the Islamic establishment to get rid of the ruling Shah. They believed the clerics were allies against tyranny. They reasoned, “We’ll deal with human rights later. First, we must fight imperialism.” But later never came. The clerics took power, and the left was executed or exiled en masse. Women were forced into hijabs. Journalists were silenced. Dissenters were hanged. Those who shouted “Death to the oppressors” became their next victims.
I lived through the consequences of this ill-fated alliance. I grew up surrounded by the wreckage of those illusions. I saw the fear, the censorship, the forced piety, the poverty, and the hypocrisy. All of it born from the same delusion: that opposing the West mattered more than defending freedom. The Iranian left didn’t fight for liberal values. They fought for revenge. And when they won, freedom was the first casualty.
The political far left has mastered a dark art. They steal the language of freedom to wage war against it. They talk about “justice”, “equality”, and “human rights”, but those words no longer mean what they used to. They have become hollow slogans used to disguise an agenda that, at bottom, stands in opposition to the West, not against any coherent and defensible conception of “oppression.”
When liberals say “equality”, they mean individual rights and equal opportunity. When leftists say “equality”, they mean top-down control: speech codes and cancel culture, bureaucratic quotas that dictate hiring and promotion, and centralized rules that shape curricula, funding, and who gets a platform. When liberals say “justice”, they mean the rule of law. When leftists say “justice”, they mean revenge against whomever they label as “the privileged.” They talk about “decolonization,” but what they really mean is dismantling the liberal order that freed billions from poverty and dictatorship. They attack Israel as a “colonizer” while cheering for Hamas, a group that executes gay and bi people. And they defend the regimes in Iran and Cuba because those systems claim to resist the West.
Let’s be clear, the far left is not actually interested in human rights, only in deconstructing, illegitimizing, dismantling, and ultimately destroying the civilization that created them. They get away with it because they have hijacked the symbols of moral virtue. They drape their hatred in empathy. They shout about oppression while siding with the oppressors. They claim to be the heirs of liberal progress while working to erase everything liberalism achieved. The “anti-imperialist” and “decolonialist” left is a scam built on stolen words — a counterfeit morality sold to the naïve.
It wasn’t leftists who built freedom. It was liberalism. In the US, these concepts tend to get conflated, but historically, philosophically, and globally, they are quite distinct. Liberalism was born of the Enlightenment. Its emphasis on reason, secular government, and the dignity of the individual produced free speech, science, democratic government, and individual rights. Liberalism gave women the right to vote, minorities equal protection under the law, and LGBT people the right to marry. Liberalism separated religion from the state and law from superstition. Every step toward a freer world came from the liberal idea that the rights of the individual must take precedence over the desires of the tribe, because the tribe is comprised of individuals. A violation of one person’s rights inevitably leads to the violations of others, and so to protect one’s own freedom, all must be equally protected.
Leftists had nothing to do with that. At every turn, they were late to the fight and quick to take credit afterward. When liberals were defending free expression, leftists were silencing anyone who disagreed. When liberals were standing up for women’s autonomy, leftists were making excuses for mullahs who forced them into veils. When liberals were standing with Israel as a democracy surrounded by regimes hell bent on wiping them out, leftists romanticized those tyrannies as freedom fighters. Leftists hijacked liberal success in an effort to turn the West against itself. But liberalism stands on its record. It created the freest, most prosperous, most humane civilization in human history. It made a world where even its loudest critics can speak without fear — something that leftists, given the power, have never and would never allow.
This divide exists even within the Democratic Party in the US, where many moderates still hold firm to liberal values, while a faction of far-left, often self-identified progressives, embodies the self-destructive radicalism discussed throughout this piece. It is the Democrats’ left-wing flank that spent more than a year protesting Democratic President Joe Biden around the country, calling him “Genocide Joe” because of his support for Israel. These are the same people who tried to shout down Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris during her 2024 campaign with chants of “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide!” They also worked hard to convince Muslim voters and young progressives who would otherwise have voted Democratic to stay home or even vote Republican in protest. This contributed to Trump’s victory, an outcome that cannot be said to be a boon for American Muslims, LGBT people, or any other category of “marginalized” people. Just as leftists seek to undo liberalism, they also seek to unravel any liberal political coalition they cannot transform.
Left-wing anti-Biden protesters in Michigan, 2024. Source: The Guardian.
We lost Iran because people refused to see what was right in front of them. The revolutionaries thought they were fighting tyranny when they were handing it power. They thought they were fighting for social justice when they were helping to build a theocratic police state. Their slogans were beautiful and their intentions noble, but the result was slavery.
I’m watching the same blindness grow in the West. Leftists talk about human rights while siding with their enemies. They defend extremists who hate everything liberalism has built, as long as they shout the right buzzwords about “colonialism” and “oppression.” They have convinced a whole generation that moral objectivity is arrogance, that patriotism is disgraceful, and that standing up for liberal values is somehow chauvinistic and imperialist. This is the same toxic brew that poisoned Iran, just poured into new bottles. The same set of people who once excused Khomeini now excuse Hamas. The same arguments, lies, and self-righteous folly dressed as compassion.
This is not progress. It’s the slow suicide of a civilization that forgot how to tell right from wrong. Liberalism is not perfect, but it is the most potent force in history for building lasting freedom, prosperity, and human dignity on a global scale. Everything else — communism, fascism, Islamic tyranny, etc. — has brought only death and chains.
I write this warning not as a spectator, but as someone who grew up in the ashes of what happens when West-hating would-be revolutionaries succeed. At the same time, the answer does not lie on the political right either; they too have completely abandoned liberalism in their quest to turn back time and restore society to some imagined authoritarian past. It will fall to liberals — as always — to stand up and lead the way. I have seen what happens when freedom dies — slowly at first, then all at once.
Thankfully, despite what leftists would have us believe, the politics of NYC socialists don’t currently translate at the national level, but every failed revolution has to begin somewhere.
Published Oct 21, 2025
