The reason the ultra-left run into so many ideological inconsistencies is because they are underdogphiles. They see the underdog through a highly fetishized and sympathetic lens. Support for the underdog isn’t a bad thing—and in fact, it’s actually highly necessary in many cases—but their fetishization amounts to blanket support, meaning there is no discernment as to who, what, or how far. Anyone claiming the title of “underdog,” good or evil, will be backed. For that reason they end up supporting oppressive, fundamentalist “underdogs,” who are ironically fighting to be the same overdogs they claim to hate—often considerably worse. When the Taliban were powerless mujahideen fighters, the ultra-left would (and did) support them as the underdog. When they took over Afghanistan, the same ultra-left cried, “let Afghan girls learn!” When the Islamic Republic was just Khomeini and his loyal band of followers, the ultra-left condemned the shah as a dictator, scorched the streets from the earth to the sky, and ushered in the underdog Islamists as the brave “opposition to western imperialism.” When the Islamic Republic became the overdogs, the same ultra-left cried, “stop executions in Iran!” When Hamas kidnapped, slaughtered, raped, and beheaded Israelis, the ultra-left hailed them as “freedom fighters” who were “resisting the occupation.” If Hamas were to succeed and establish an Islamic state “from the river to sea” under Sharia law, and even extending out to collapse neighboring states’ borders in securing a caliphate & becoming the regional overdogs, the same left who supported their movement would cry, “gender apartheid!” “stop lynchings in Hamas’s Islamic Republic!” and “support LGBTQ rights in the Middle East!” The cruel irony of the ultra-left’s underdogphilia is that they condemn millions to the worst fate of all time, then once their underdogs become the oppressive overdogs we warned they’d be, they throw flimsy regard to the victims, send thoughts and prayers, retweets and hashtags, and move on to the next underdogs, never seeing the pattern in their ways. Their underdogphilia perpetuates a cycle of destroying nations with promises of revolution that only ever end in shattered glass on unswept streets, the sound of silence where once there was joy, and creaking nooses on cranes swaying threateningly in the wind on the corner of public squares. The only ideologically consistent position is to never support terrorists, or support them through to their bitter end. Decide.