The West should stand up to evil
A culture unsure whether it’s allowed to survive
There’s a rule many on the modern left have quietly adopted but don’t say publicly: if you’re deemed oppressed, you can do anything. Murder civilians at a music festival, commit crimes of varying severity throughout a city, the so-called “oppressed” get a blank check to do pretty much whatever they want. But if try to defend yourself or take corrective action, you’re the monster. It is really another form of luxury beliefs because if the world was fully run this way, there would be chaos.
America and Israel share something that makes a certain class of people deeply uncomfortable: they both punch back and ignore this inverse morality. To be clear, plenty of liberals remain firmly supportive of both countries, so today’s post isn't an indictment of everyone left of center (although I think more of them should be less afraid to speak up). But for those who have absorbed this framework wholesale, the act of fighting back is seen as a betrayal of the script.
And that script is rigid. The framework requires a permanent victim class and a permanent oppressor class, and once those roles are assigned, they cannot be renegotiated: not by elections, not by body counts, not by evidence. Israel is cast as the colonial power, so October 7th gets rationalized, minimized, or reframed as “resistance.” The images of families burned in their homes, young people massacred at a concert, none of it moves the needle, because the roles were already decided. And when Israel responded with the predictable force of a nation-state that just suffered its worst single-day death toll since the Holocaust, the information machine kicked into overdrive to make the defender look like the villain. This is the only way to achieve their goal of eliminating Israel and their broader goal of removing Jewish people entirely. Over the last few years I’ve watched everyone from the media to individuals who I thought were intelligent spread everything from AI content to obvious anti-Israel propaganda (which was later retracted, but at that point the damage was done). It’s truly been astonishing.
Watching this same crowd’s reaction to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran this weekend was predictable. This is a regime that has been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, that funds Hamas and Hezbollah, that’s been racing toward a nuclear weapon, has attacked us and our allies for nearly 50 years, and spent decades chanting “death to America” with the enthusiasm of a sports team. The response from the ideological left (and also the “woke right,” which horseshoes around to about the same beliefs) wasn’t to consider what a nuclear Iran actually means for the region or the world. It was immediate, reflexive sympathy for the regime. Not the Iranian people, many of whom were literally celebrating in the streets of Tehran when news broke that Khamenei was killed, but the theocratic government that has oppressed them for decades. The regime that murdered protesters, that polices how women dress and violently prosecutes LBGTQ people, they stanned for that.
It’s the same move they made with Venezuela. When Maduro finally fell, leftists didn’t cheer for the Venezuelan people who had been ground into poverty by a socialist regime that wrecked one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries. They mourned the revolution. They found ways to blame America. The actual oppressed people, the ones fleeing, starving, celebrating in the streets were invisible, because they didn’t fit that story. The dictator had the right politics, so the dictator received support and sympathy. They never actually cared about the oppressed people. Instead it’s about the ideology, or as has been said “the issue is never the issue, it’s always the revolution.”
If you watched the post-October 7th propaganda campaign run in real time and felt something was off, it’s clear why. It’s actually what would happen if 9/11 occurred today. The same people who now create content defending Hamas’s “context” would have been posting threads about America being an “evil colonial state” before the towers finished falling. The same activist ecosystem that demands no judgment of attackers, only endless interrogation of the attacked, would have found a way to make the hijackers sympathetic. In today’s world, countless educators teaching your kids now wholesale side with terrorists who embody actual evil, something many in the West continue to not think is real as they’ve never had to live under it.
This ideology doesn’t stay contained to foreign policy. It shapes everything domestic too. It’s why a city can watch someone get pushed onto subway tracks, shrug, and spend more energy debating the attacker’s mental health needs than the safety of everyone on the platform. The victim hierarchy means the perpetrator outranks the victim, and policy should follow. Don’t punish harshly. Don’t enforce. Don’t judge. The result is a permanent underclass of actual victims whose suffering doesn’t fit the narrative, so it simply doesn’t get processed. If you’re actually paying attention to base reality, it’s clear we are all far more subservient to the bottom 10% (including violent criminals) than we are to the continually vilified top 1%.
DEI is the institutional formalization of this same logic. Distribute power not by merit or results, but by identity category. Install the “right” people in media, corporations, and government, then insulate them from accountability, because criticism is simply more oppression (ironically, October 7th was the event that forced many of these beaurocrats to finally have some accountability).
What’s striking is how much of this ideology is sustained by people living in remarkable peace and safety. Comfortable places, stable zip codes, no real proximity to those who would actually like to harm them. It’s easy to cosplay solidarity with groups that want to eliminate liberal democracies when you’ll never be in range of the consequences. The Israelis living within rocket range don’t have the luxury of that abstraction.
Standing up to bullies, actual, murderous, civilization-threatening bullies, used to be uncontroversial. But groups suffering a moral inversion of reality repackaged this as aggression, colonialism, disproportionate response. The goalpost on “proportionate” shifts constantly, because the argument was never really about proportionality. It was about whether you’re allowed to fight back at all. America and Israel both decided the answer is yes. That answer still stands.
And if you've arrived at the conclusion that America and Israel are the primary sources of evil in the world, it's worth pausing to ask where that belief came from and whether it survived any contact with reality. America has contributed more to global poverty reduction, disease eradication, and post-war reconstruction than any nation in history. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. American-led institutions created the international order that produced the greatest reduction in interstate warfare humanity has ever seen. Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey, built the only liberal democracy in its region with a free press, Arab citizens serving in its parliament and Supreme Court, and LGBTQ protections that would get you killed in virtually every neighboring state. These are not the facts of an evil civilization. If your moral framework has led you to lionize theocratic regimes that hang dissidents and execute gay men while condemning the countries that would grant those same people asylum, the problem isn't with the West. The problem is with the framework. And the framework didn't build itself, it was constructed, deliberately, by people who understood if you control how someone sees the villain, you never have to win the argument on its merits. You've been told what you’re supposed to see. The question is whether you're willing to look past it and live in base reality instead.
Appreciate the moral clarity in naming the Iranian regime as evil and taking Iranian lives seriously. Where I think this piece goes wrong is in two places: the means you’re implicitly advocating, and the way you frame everyone who’s skeptical as part of a decadent or cowardly “West that can’t stand up to evil.”
On the means: you talk a lot about our duty to “stand up,” but very little about the actual track record of what standing up with bombs and regime‑change logic has done in practice. In Iran in 1953, in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Chile, etc. Those weren’t episodes where Western leaders were confused about who was “evil”; they were sold in similarly moral language, and they frequently left ordinary people with failed states, civil war, or a different brand of authoritarianism. If we’re serious about morality, we have to be just as demanding about consequences as we are about intentions.
On the politics: a lot of the piece reads less like an argument about Iran and more like a broad swipe at “the left”, as if concern about blowback, civilian harm, or double standards is mostly neurosis, self‑hatred, or secret sympathy for tyrants. That flattens a huge range of left and liberal positions into a caricature and makes it too easy to dismiss any anti‑intervention argument as weakness. There’s a difference between refusing to name evil and doubting that another Western military intervention is the best way to defeat it.
I’d love to see this same moral urgency combined with a more historically grounded and less culture‑war‑coded account of means: what concrete end‑state in Iran are we actually aiming at, what path is being proposed to get there, and what evidence from past interventions suggests that path is more likely to deliver freedom than repeat the same tragedies under a more flattering story.
Two things are true and you are ignoring #2:
1) Iran has been a state sponsor of terror for decades, an enemy of the US and the West.
2) The American President should consult Congress, address the nation, outline goals and objectives, explain the reasons for, and have a plan in place for American evacuation before launching a war against a country of 93 million people on the other side of the planet. Trump did none of this.
What President Trump is doing is unprecedented, reckless, and potentially unconstitutional. I don’t know a single pro-Ayatollah person….but I know plenty of people that are war-weary and concerned about executive overreach. The ends do not justify the means to all of us.