‘Delulu Is THE Solulu’: How the Radical Left Went Silent on Iran

While the radical left busied itself karening through public life—thugging around with cliquish silent stares to shame non-socialist conformity, in ways uncomfortably reminiscent of Khamenei-style intimidation—the streets of Iran have been on fire since December 28, 2025. What erupted across all 31 provinces marked the largest wave of democratic movement since the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in custody after being arrested by Iran’s hijab police for allegedly violating compulsory hijab laws.

Unlike earlier protests that flared unevenly and then dissipated in fragments, this movement distinguished itself through scale, coordination, and synchronized leadership. Bazaar merchants shuttered their shops in lockstep with nationwide strikes by students and industrial workers. Ethnic minorities mobilized along the periphery, while the global Iranian diaspora amplified the uprising abroad in real time, transforming local dissent into a transnational political moment.

This mobilization was not spontaneous rage but the product of a deep structural rupture. Decades of economic stagnation and systemic corruption had pushed Iranian society beyond the threshold of endurance, leaving virtually no space for reform within the existing order. By December 2025, inflation had surged past 52.6 percent, while the rial had collapsed by more than 80 percent year over year—material conditions that rendered political quietude untenable.

The Islamic Republic, in the end, responded to this democratic challenge as it always has: by killing its own people. Iran International estimates that by mid-January 2026, between 12,000 and 20,000 protesters had been killed in a brutal nationwide crackdown—a textbook campaign of mass repression—alongside roughly 330,000 injuries and more than 18,000 arrests.

When the Radical Left’s Romanticism Turns into a Political Theatre

Despite their cadre-bred reflex to wrap grand social causes in revolutionary garb—and their near-compulsive urge to politicize them across Facebook timelines—the radical left in the West has remained conspicuously silent on the bloodshed in Iran. This silence, bitterly felt across the Iranian diaspora over the past one month, has been so complete as to verge on erasure, especially when contrasted with the movement’s vocal and relentless solidarity campaigns for Gaza.

Angered by this identity-denying deafened hush, Iranian-American human-rights activist Masih Alinejad, for instance, has directly criticized the radical left’s posture as “beyond hypocrisy”: not an accidental omission, but an ideological silence that, in her words, exposes how readily parts of the radical left “sympathize with… Islamic terrorists” so long as their violence is rhetorically framed as resistance to the West. Her charge is blunt: solidarity collapses the moment the victims refuse to conform to the approved script.

Even outlets hardly hostile to the left have noted the same void with a similar diagnosis. The Atlantic, in its essay The Silence of the Left on Iran, observes that Iranian exiles are “dismayed by the lack of sympathy from the American left,” largely because they are “viewed through the thick lens of (radical left anti-imperialist) ideology”—not as victims of repression, but as imagined agents of hostile power.

Right-wing publications have, unsurprisingly, been the most vocal in amplifying criticism of the radical left’s silence. In a January 13 article titled Why are the world’s loudest ‘human rights’ voices silent on Iran?, The Telegraph traces this silence to a deeper anti-Western intellectual lineage shaped by figures such as Michel Foucault and Edward Said. According to the piece, this tradition furnished the ideological scaffolding that enabled a revolution-romanticizing Western radical left to form what it calls a “strange union” with the ayatollah—reframing the Iranian Revolution not as the consolidation of theocracy, but as an anti-imperialist struggle for liberation.

The outcome of that union, however, was not the emancipation the radical left had imagined, but betrayal. As the article recounts, it produced systematic purges, mass executions, and the criminalization of secular allies throughout the 1980s. Yet despite this historical reckoning, the same moral relativism that excused the ayatollah’s betrayal in that decade has remained deeply embedded in the “anti-Western brain rot that intellectually cripples our students today.” The radical left’s inherited truth, thus, is simple: “the (radical) left loves nothing more than a revolution—but only when it harms the West.”

This entrenched reflex, the article suggests, has not disappeared; it has merely reemerged as silence, shaping attitudes even within international institutions. The Telegraph points, for example, to UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, noting that he posted not a single image of the ongoing massacre in Iran, while readily uploading self-congratulatory video selfies of himself “bravely helping the Palestinians.”(To be clear, as of January 23, 2026, this silence among the radical left has persisted even while the UN Human Rights Council convened its 39th special session of the Human Rights Council on the deteriorating human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran—documenting mass protests, thousands killed in crackdowns, mass detentions, internet blackouts, and executions—and passed a resolution extending the Fact‑Finding Mission for two years. In this context, unless the UN explicitly bans radical-left activists—and anyone who supports or excuses criminal radical-left activities—from holding UN positions, and enforces strict political neutrality across the organization, it will continue to undermine its own moral authority.)

In a similar vein, The Spectator expresses its abhorrence of the radical left’s moral relativism on Iran. According to the magazine, the “ugly truth of the left’s creepy silence” lies in the fact that the “privileged keffiyeh classes of the West” have “fallen down the well of moral relativism,” becoming so intoxicated by the delusion that Islamic terrorists function as a bulwark, propping up the very bourgeois ideological white elephant they pretend not to see.