A new essay in The Daily Telegraph by commentator George Chesterton cuts to a question that has grown harder to ignore as the conflict in Iran enters its fifth week: why do segments of the Western progressive left consistently defend, excuse, or equivocate over a theocratic regime that executes protesters, jails women for removing their headscarves, and hangs gay men — the very categories of people those activists purport most to champion?

Chesterton’s answer is blunt. “Supporting a regime that jails and kills its own people isn’t progressive — it’s moral failure dressed up as virtue.” His essay, which FFN is highlighting alongside broader analysis of this pattern, frames Iran as a uniquely revealing test case: a “weathervane” that exposes exactly where ideological loyalty ends and universal ethics begin.

The ideological mechanism at work has a name: “campism.” It is the tendency to divide the world into two blocs — the “imperialist West” and those who oppose it — and to extend moral immunity to any regime that lands in the second column, regardless of what it does to its own people.

This framework, analysts argue, is not a fringe quirk but a structural feature of influential segments of Western activist culture. It explains why, as Chesterton observes, the flags of the Islamic Republic have appeared at anti-war marches in European capitals alongside other banners — even as Iranian exiles in those same crowds beg marchers to understand what they are actually endorsing.

Any honest accounting of the moral stakes requires confronting the documented record of the Islamic Republic’s conduct — particularly during the 2025–2026 uprisings, which represent the deadliest crackdown in the regime’s history.

Rights organizations have documented torture, enforced disappearances, coerced confessions broadcast on state television, and mass graves. Children have been among those detained and sentenced to death. At least 31 women were executed in 2024, many linked to protest activity. Ethnic minorities — Baluchi and Kurdish prisoners — account for a disproportionate share of those killed.

The moral inconsistency is not abstract. It manifests in four documented, concrete contradictions between the stated values of progressive activism and its actual conduct toward Iran:

Chesterton’s sharpest observation concerns the sociology of modern activism itself. The moral impulse of the historical left, he writes, was “outward-looking, communal and about improving the lives of the less well-off.” Today’s version, he argues, has become something different: “largely the preserve of the educated activist class, who are already in positions of power and privilege — more concerned with following irrational obsessions than making meaningful contributions.”

He closes with a question that cuts through the ideological fog: “How come the Palestinians must be free but the Iranians must not?”

There is a reasonable question about whether this phenomenon — sometimes dismissed as “noise in the digital sphere” — actually shapes real-world policy. The evidence suggests it does, in at least two ways.

First, it creates a permissive political environment in Western democracies that makes it harder for governments to take decisive action — whether through sanctions, asset seizures, or backing democratic opposition — when doing so can be framed as “serving imperialism.” As Ladan Boroumand of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center noted at a recent Freedom House summit, the regime has become expert at winning “the war of narrative inside these democracies” by exploiting exactly this dynamic.

Second, as Holly Dagres of the Washington Institute has argued, when Western institutions stay quiet about Iran’s massacres while loudly condemning other human rights violations, it sends a signal to the Islamic Republic — and to other authoritarian regimes — about which atrocities carry diplomatic cost and which do not.

The Iranian people, risking their lives in the streets and reaching the outside world through satellite connections in the dark, have made their position clear. The question is whether Western progressives — and the governments they pressure — will finally make theirs.