Iran Paradox: A Theocracy Built & Defended By Leftists (Understanding Why)

In this eye-opening episode, we dive deep into one of the most bizarre political phenomena of our time: How did Western leftists (and especially progressive women) once celebrate the 1979 Iranian Revolution… only for the regime they helped bring to power to later execute tens of thousands of them?

We show the iconic photo of two leftist women holding up Khomeini’s picture — one was executed 10 years later, the other fled to Sweden after escaping execution.

And shockingly — many modern leftists (Hassan Piker, Jackson Hinkle, PinkNews-aligned voices, etc.) are STILL defending or downplaying the current Iranian regime during the massive 2025–2026 protests while simultaneously claiming America is worse.

But we don’t just dunk — we try to seriously understand the psychology: audience capture, sexual/ethnic progressive hierarchies, anti-Western civilizational loathing, the “screaming girl exponential effect” (South Park style), and why atrocities against protesters (machine-gunning crowds, false-flag kill-zones, body-bag photos) simply don’t register for many on the far left.

Then comes the uncomfortable mirror: A significant faction on the dissident right (Groyper/Fuentes-adjacent) enthusiastically cheers for a vision of government that is structurally almost identical to the current Iranian theocracy — just swap “Supreme Leader + Council of Experts” for “Catholic autocracy / monarchy / inquisition / 12th century governance” and remove democracy entirely.

We go through direct quotes and show why cheering for this vision is functionally the same mistake the 1979 leftist women made.

Episode Transcript:Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. People are wondering why we haven’t done the Iran one yet, and I wanted to wait until we had a really interesting and mentally engaging take that we could do on this.

Yeah. And we are gonna be focused on two core areas today. We are going to be focused on how modern western leftists help bring in this regime. And moderate secular leftists brought this regime into power even was in Iran. And. Why they’re fighting against it falling apart. But then we’re also going to, no, if you’re, if you’re surprised by that, here is an image of two leftist girls.

You can see they look like hippies celebrating in 1979 right in holding up his picture, you know, the the current leader and the ayatollah. And it said he later had 30,000 leftists executed. And these two specific girls in this pictured the girl in front, Maria Rafi, was executed by Islamist 10 years [00:01:00] later.

And the girl at the back, Sahara Mohammed, escaped from Mar Grand and took asylum in Sweden four years after the revolution.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: And this is, didn’t work

Speaker 3: out for them.

Malcolm Collins: This is one of the types of things on our new subreddit that’s like huge now. That we need mods for. So do reach out if you’re interested in that.

Because we are now the largest conservative Reddit on Reddit, bigger than Joe Rogan, bigger than Asma Gold definitely bigger than any of the mainstream conservative ones. But I think if you look at the comments on the Reddit and stuff like that, people were laughing at this.

They were laughing at this and saying stuff like, it’s a shame that she had to escape the regime that she brought into power. And I would actually like to hold a mirror to many people on right, right now, which is being as stupid as these two girls were putting a regime into power that told them exactly what it planned to do to people like them exactly the way it wanted to operate. The other thing that we’re gonna go into a lot, which I find to be a very interesting topic to discuss is all of the [00:02:00] modern leftists, you know, whether it’s Asan or anyone else, and we’ll go over who they are, what their platforms is, like pink news and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm. Who are standing the regime right now saying the regime really isn’t that bad, that it’s worse to be in America than it is to be there. And that all of these atrocities that we’re hearing about aren’t really happening. And I find this to be very fascinating because I wanted to, like, I, I know you can gaw and point at them and say, ha ha, look at the, the idiot.

Right. Which I think a lot of people on the right are, are justly doing right now. But I also wanna be like, I, I don’t, I want to understand how this ideology works in their heads. Right. I want to understand, yeah. Like what are they

Speaker 3: saying about the pictures of body bags?

Malcolm Collins: How do they actually think?

But it’s No, but it’s not just that. It’s like, the, they were able to find endless, like the larger leftist machine was able to find. Endless atrocities in Gaza, and yet they’re literally just opening machine guns on civilians here. [00:03:00] There have been cases recently where they dress up like protestors to lead other protestors to kill zones.

Oh, what? And they do this to specifically, so descent among the protesters. ‘cause they all hate each other.

Speaker 3: Oh. At least distrust each other. That’s,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. But I, I wanna like go, go into. Like, how, how is it that they actually don’t care about this? Because I, I know that it’s getting through to some of them to some extent, right?

Like, and, and they’re trying to downplay it because it goes against whatever their larger agenda is. And people will say, well, they just hate the west. They just hate the, you know, America. I wanna understand like. But why so pathologically that it in any sort of logically coherent framework leads to these outcomes.

And I think that a part of it actually comes from, if I’m just gonna lead whizzes, it comes from the effect discussed in South Park

Speaker: What’s the garlic effect? The law of physics that states, if one girl screams for something, it will make other girls scream and then [00:04:00] it grows exponentially until all girls within a five mile radius of screaming.

Speaker 7: So how do boy bands use that? All they do is make videos showing tons and tons of girls screaming for the boy bands. Once you get girls screaming, you can’t stop ‘em. They’re crazy.

Malcolm Collins: ? And that a lot of the modern leftist movement is just basically delusional women standing for a form of like authoritarianism that it’s, it’s not, it’s not whether they understand it or don’t understand it, they find it to be alluring.

And this sort of wider social movement sort of bubbles some people to the top and some perspectives to the top that don’t need to pass any sort of logical filter. That that’s not the. Point of the opinion, it’s about filling a certain Hmm. For a larger zeitgeist. Mm-hmm. So that’s, that’s what we’re gonna go into there.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: But before I get into that, I want to go in, into what I was saying and I said that there is a [00:05:00] portion of the right that is just as foolish as these two girls hanging outside of a cab. Right. And this portion of the right is of course the groupers in the larger Fuentes movement. And people know that I’ve, I’ve said like things like I’m, I’m against the cancellation of him.

I am for platforming him. I think the ways that people like Ben Shapiro have treated him has been absolutely atrocious. But I also just want to be like, but. He is not shy about the type of government he wants to set up. And so if you look at the government that we have was in Iran right now, if you’re not familiar with it, it is a religiou