By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
According to one “official” representative of the Iranian
regime, the number of demonstrators killed in the ongoing uprising against the
Islamic Republic stands at about 2,000. The network of activists outside Iran estimates that
the number of protesters killed in clashes with security forces is closer to 12,000. Two
sources inside Iran who spoke with CBS News reporters pegged the number closer
to the activist’s figure, but they could not rule out the prospect that “as many as 20,000 people have been killed.”
Whatever the scale of the carnage the Iranian regime and
its security forces are meting out to its citizens, an unspeakable massacre is
underway. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the government’s fatality figures
— which were surely provided reluctantly in the first place — oversell the
scope of the slaughter.
Additional videos circulating online, which are too graphic
to reproduce here, further underscore the scale of the regime’s violence.
The mullahs have flagrantly disregarded the president’s
self-set red line, and they have mocked Trump’s thus far lethargic response to
their impertinence. That was unwise. As Nicolás Maduro might attest, the
president doesn’t enjoy being taken for a fool.
Both Trump and Republican
lawmakers have pledged to the suffering Iranian people, who are risking
their lives to bring down the most malignant regime on the planet, that “help
is on the way.” It remains to be seen what form that help takes, or precisely
how helpful it is to the anti-establishmentarians’ cause. Democratic lawmakers,
too, have
expressed their hope that the protesters topple the theocracy in Tehran.
And while many are wary of the unintended consequences that could follow the
use of U.S. airpower in support of the demonstrators, some have expressed
support for, for example, cyberattacks on regime targets.
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and almost all hands
have heeded the call. But where is the activist left? It’s not just
conservatives pointedly asking what happened to the all-consuming empathy for
civilian casualties that was broadcast by movement progressives the past two
years running.
In her contribution to the New Republic’s pages,
contributor Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani paints a grim portrait of conditions on the
ground in Iran:
The police are using machine guns
on protesters. Doctors are warning about hospitals not having capacity to deal
with the influx of injured patients. “Around 38 people died. Many as soon as
they reached the emergency beds. . . . Direct shots to the heads of the young
people, to their hearts as well. Many of them didn’t even make it to the
hospital,” one hospital worker in Tehran said. “After the morgue became full,
they stacked them on top of one another in the prayer room.”
One would think that those who claimed that elementary
human decency justified their opposition to Israel’s defensive operations in
Gaza after the October 7 massacre would race to voice support for the Iranian
people. And yet, as Varkiani notes, the activist left’s failure to even
acknowledge the slaughter of Iranian civilians is conspicuous.
“Rather than focus on any of these facts, many of those
on the American left are doing the Iranian people dirty,” she wrote. “They’ve
either greeted the pain and suffering being meted out with total silence, or
they’ve fallen back on familiar hobbyhorses, using Iranian pain to issue
threadbare critiques of U.S. imperialism.”
Varkiani writes of having to endure the psychological
torment of being compelled by principle to sidle up alongside “some of the most
reprehensible people on the planet.” They may be Republicans, or even
MAGA-adjacent right-wingers, but at least they can discern friend from foe. The
author wrings her hands over the solidarity she has experienced with the likes
of Elon Musk, Ric Grenell, and Ted Cruz — figures whose politics she abhors but
who nevertheless recognize the Iranian regime’s evil and are striving in
support of the uprising.
By contrast, establishmentarian Democrats like Gavin
Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed their camaraderie with the
protesters too late for Varkiani’s liking. But at least they eventually found
their way to the morally righteous side of this ongoing fight. The anti-Israel
left and the alternative podcast universe — the folks in whom Varkiani placed
her trust when the object of their shared hatred was Israel — have been silent
or, worse, hostile to the demonstrators’ cause.
Indeed, the author appears to be revulsed and insulted by
their echoing of regime propaganda, which attributes the uprising to the covert
work of Israeli agents, as though the Iranian people lack “agency” and haven’t
been “protesting against this regime from its very beginning.”
It’s almost like the anti-Israel activist set is just
obsessed with Israel and never had any interest in the full human flourishing
of the Palestinian people.
Varkiani doesn’t go that far. But the ineluctable logic
of her argument will take her there if motivated reasoning and partisan
political imperatives don’t intervene first. And when she arrives at that
rationally consistent place, she’ll find that “the most reprehensible people on
the planet” are standing foursquare by her and the Iranian people.
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