To Oppose One Man, They Sided With a Regime That Hangs People From Cranes

December 7, 1941. The Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans. That same day, a group of core members from the America First Committee gathered for a meeting. They hated Franklin D. Roosevelt — had hated him for years. Hated his New Deal, hated him for dragging America into Europe's quagmire, hated his smile that looked like a con man's. Aviation hero Charles Lindbergh was their poster boy, once shouting to crowds of tens of thousands at national rallies: "The British and the Jewish races are using propaganda and fear to push America toward war." After Pearl Harbor, they didn't shut up. They started making excuses for the Japanese Empire: it was Roosevelt's oil embargo that forced Japan's hand; the White House deliberately ignored intelligence and let Pearl Harbor happen; Japan was merely acting in "self-defense." They hated one man to such a degree that defending the enemy who bombed their own country still weighed less, on their moral scales, than admitting Roosevelt had done one thing right.

History's verdict on these people is clear. They weren't traitors. They were American citizens who genuinely believed they stood on the side of justice. But they were wrong. Unforgivably wrong. And their error wasn't that "anti-war" is inherently a bad position — it was that to oppose one man, they surrendered their judgment.

Now, back to 2026.

88%

The Economist/YouGov poll released on March 19 shows: among Democratic voters, 88% oppose U.S. military action in Iran. Only 6% support it. Six percentage points. The Reuters/Ipsos numbers are similar: Republicans 77% in favor, Democrats 6%. Independent voters' net approval plunged from -23 to -39 in a single week. Overall national opposition surged from 43% on the first day of war to 59%.

What do these numbers tell us? At first glance: "Americans don't want war." But look closer at the partisan breakdown and you'll find the issue isn't "whether to support the war" — it's that for anything Trump does, Democratic voter approval hovers around 6%. This isn't a difference of opinion. It's doctrine.

Trump himself said it at the World Economic Forum in Davos: "If I came up with the cure to cancer, they'd say, why didn't you do it fast?" This is an unfalsifiable system. Strike Iran and you're a warmonger. Don't strike and you're weak. Negotiate and you're naive. Don't negotiate and you're a dictator. When your criticism holds true for every possible outcome, it's no longer criticism — it's faith.

Psychology has a concept called Splitting. It's a defense mechanism: the brain cannot simultaneously hold both positive and negative assessments of the same object, so it simplifies to black-and-white. If Trump equals "absolute evil," then his geopolitical adversaries must be automatically tagged as "not that bad." You don't need the internet slang "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to explain this phenomenon. Splitting is precise enough. And it's not an insult — it's a diagnosis.

The Knife They Handed Over

The most devastating rebuttal doesn't need to come from me. They wrote it themselves.

On March 18, 2026, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee. She submitted written testimony stating, in black and white: the 2025 joint U.S.-Israeli operation, Operation Midnight Hammer, had "obliterated" Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, with no signs of reconstruction since. During her oral testimony, she skipped this section. Forty minutes of hearings, she said she was "saving time." Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner pressed her. Senator Jon Ossoff pressed her. She acknowledged the written assessment indeed said "obliterated," but added: determining "imminent threat" is the President's authority, not the intelligence community's role.

The contradiction in this hearing is lethal — but not in the direction most commentators interpret it. Critics use it to prove Trump lied, because on March 4 he told Congress Iran was "two weeks away from obtaining nuclear weapons," while his own intelligence director's written assessment said the facilities were destroyed. This is indeed a question that demands an answer. But this knife cuts both ways. If the nuclear facilities were indeed destroyed, it was precisely because the U.S. and Israel acted to destroy them. You can't simultaneously say "the nuclear facilities are already destroyed so there's no threat" while opposing the very decision that destroyed them. It's like saying: "This person's tumor has been removed, so the surgery was unnecessary."

Next comes the real boomerang. Not one prepared by others — one they sharpened themselves in 2022.

In September 2022, 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini showed a few centimeters of hair beneath her hijab, was dragged into a police van by the morality police, and died in custody three days later. The "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement swept the globe. The Iranian regime's response: live ammunition, tear gas, mass arrests, executions. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris took the podium to push for Iran's removal from the UN Commission on the Status of Women, declaring: "No nation that systematically abuses the rights of women and girls should play a role in any international or United Nations body charged with protecting these very same rights."

In March 2026, the same Kamala Harris told media: "Donald Trump is dragging the United States into a war the American people do not want. I am opposed to a regime-change war in Iran."

So what was that speech in 2022? A policy position, or performance art for social media? She said Iran "systematically abuses women's rights." The UN Human Rights Council Fact-Finding Mission determined in March 2024 that Iran committed "crimes against humanity of persecution on the grounds of gender." In all of 2024, at least 975 people were executed (Iran Human Rights), including 31 women — a 17-year high. 30,629 women were punished for not wearing hijabs (HRANA). A new law passed in September 2024 stipulates that peaceful advocates against hijab laws can face the death penalty. Homosexuality is a capital offense under Iranian law.

Now let's make a table. No words necessary — the table is the argument.

| What they say they defend | What the Iranian regime does |

|---|---|

| Women's bodily autonomy | Morality police enforcing mandatory hijab, violators face death |

| LGBTQ+ rights | Homosexuals publicly executed by hanging from construction cranes |

| Democratic elections | Supreme Leader for life, son directly "inheriting" the position |

| Freedom of speech | "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement crushed, protesters executed |

New York Representative AOC said after Amini's death that she was killed by "the same patriarchal and autocratic forces repressing women the world over." In 2026, she called the Iran conflict "not an inevitability" but Trump's "deliberate choice of aggression": "Violence begets violence. We learned this lesson in Iraq."

Fine. So here's the question: facing forces you yourself defined as "patriarchal and autocratic," what's your plan? Decades of sanctions, countless UN resolutions — the morality police still patrol the streets, the gallows still turn, and 2024's execution count hit a new high. The lesson you cite was learned in Iraq, but Iraq had no active nuclear program. Iraq's WMDs were fabricated intelligence. Iran's nuclear facilities are real. When IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi says "no evidence of building a bomb," he's saying "building a bomb," not "enrichment." The distinction matters: you can have every component of a nuclear weapon but claim you're not assembling one — until the day you do.

Hong Kong political commentator Chip Tsao made an analogy: "Iran says its nuclear materials aren't for making bombs — they're for generating electricity. Back in the day, Hitler invited young people to go gliding together, very wholesome recreation. But in his mind, he was already preparing to build the Nazi air force."

In another episode, Tsao delivered an even sharper blow. He turned the camera on those who hope America loses: "All your June Fourth, your 2019 protests — watching civilians crushed by tanks — don't you dare ask the world for help." The logic is simple: you can't simultaneously demand the whole world pay attention to your human rights while hoping a human rights catastrophe-machine wins the war. These two things cannot both be true.

If Your Dream Comes True

Let's run a hypothetical: the opposition wins, America withdraws from Iran, the war ends in defeat. Then what?

First domino: Iran's theocratic regime keeps power, plus a new "defeated America" divine mandate card. Khamenei's son Mojtaba Khamenei has already "inherited" the Supreme Leader position — no theological credentials, pure bloodline and military machine. How determined would a regime that defeated America be in purging internal dissidents? After America withdrew from Vietnam in 1975, the Khmer Rouge massacred 2 million people in Cambodia. Chip Tsao speculated on his show: if America "loses" in Iran, the domestic purge would be "at least one million by conservative estimate." The participants of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement — those women you said you'd "stand with" in 2022 — would be the first sent to the gallows.

Second domino: nuclear sprint. If America can't even handle Iran, why would Saudi Arabia or the UAE trust America to protect them? Saudi Arabia would immediately launch its own nuclear program. A multi-polar nuclear arms race in the world's most unstable region.

Third domino: the dollar. Your retirement fund, your mortgage, your job — all built on the premise that the dollar is the global reserve currency. American military defeat in the Middle East = the beginning of petrodollar order collapse. Brent crude has hit $119 a barrel. U.S. national debt has surpassed $39 trillion. 70% of Americans say gas prices are already up. 57% expect inflation to keep worsening.

While you're at your oat milk latte party in Brooklyn shouting "No war," the bill you're signing isn't one you'll pay. The bill is paid by female university students in Tehran, by gay men in Isfahan, by dissident journalists in Qom. Sociologists have a concept called "Luxury Beliefs": opinions that cost nothing to hold but yield high social returns. You support American defeat in Iran because you'll never bear the consequences of that defeat. You won't be seized by the IRGC. You won't be hanged from a gallows. You won't even pay higher gas prices, because you ride an electric scooter.

Nixon said during the Vietnam War: "North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that." Fifty years later, the statement still holds.

The Bill

Let me be clear about a few things.

This article is not a defense of Trump. In "Tyranny Must Fall," I devoted an entire paragraph to criticizing his 18-month timeline from "No new wars" to declaring war — that timeline "is itself a complete indictment." That judgment hasn't changed. The constitutional controversy over the War Powers Act is real. Civilian casualties are real. The economic shock of $119 Brent crude is real. These are all legitimate spaces for criticism.

But legitimate criticism does not include: using "anti-Trump" as your sole criterion for judgment, then — to maintain that criterion's consistency — speaking in defense of a theocratic regime that executes nearly a thousand people a year, publicly hangs homosexuals from construction cranes, and uses morality police to beat 22-year-old women to death. When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said on March 10 that the U.S.-Israeli attacks were "unraveling international law, the Geneva Conventions and the legitimacy of the United Nations," his language was nearly identical to what Iran's foreign ministry says at the UN. An American senator and a gallows regime using the same language to describe the same event. Can he not hear himself?

In 1941, not a single person in that group was a Japanese spy. They were American citizens who genuinely believed they were defending peace. History remembers them in a way completely different from how they saw themselves. In 2026, these people aren't Iranian proxies either. They are progressives who genuinely believe they are opposing tyranny. But tyranny doesn't only live in the White House. Tyranny also lives in Tehran's Evin Prison, in Qom's religious courts, on the crane arms from which people are publicly hanged. You've aimed all your moral accusations at Washington. Turn around — Tehran's gallows are still spinning.

Not all anti-war stances are wrong. But to oppose one man, siding with a gallows regime, and then pretending this is "progress" — history won't remember you the way you think.