Hamas is bad. Hezbollah is bad. Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Regime in Iran are bad. Maduro is bad. North Korea is bad. Cuba is bad. There’s a lot of bad with China. Russia’s government is outright rotten bad. Osama Bin Laden was bad. January 6th was bad. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were bad, and real. Ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavian Republics is and was bad. African militants, both national armies and terroristic groups, seeking to commit atrocities and ethnic cleansing, are bad. Pinochet and Pol Pot were bad. I could go on all day. Bad people and groups are bad people and groups. There is no “but” after any of them.

Of course who is good is a lot more complicated and requires caveats often. The Western World is largely a free and safe place today because the United States sacrificed literally millions of our sons and daughters to the cause of freedom. We also had slavery for our first eight decades, committed the Trail of Tears, and built Japanese Internment Camps. The British and French fought side by side with us in keeping the world from fascism, but their colonial pasts aren’t great. Germany is probably one of the best two or three countries in the world today, and for that matter so is Japan, but we’re eighty years removed from the worst war in the history of man being fought to stop them from raping and killing huge percentages of the Earth’s population. Hell, Stalin’s Soviet Union and even Mao’s forces in Russia fought on the right side of that conflict, before killing tens of millions of their own people. Lincoln and Johnson both held deeply racist views on a number of matters, and did more for the cause of Civil Rights than any President in American history. Good can be a very, very relative term, in a way that bad just can’t be.

There is no world though where whitewashing away the Holocaust and declaring Hamas and Bin Laden as freedom fighters is in any way, however minor, good. October 7th was pure evil, period. So was Pearl Harbor. So was Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The Iranian Revolution was not justified by the removal of Mossadegh, it was just outright evil too. Down is not up. There are red lines. Even if previous Presidents and Administrations didn’t enforce them, Assad was a very bad guy for crossing the red line and killing his people with chemical weapons. Yes, ISIS fighting against him was also bad. Some things are really just unequivocal.

Many of us have criticized MAGA and Republicans for accepting trash people and moral relativism in the era of Trump simply because it’s from people “on their side.” We would be remiss to accept these people on our side while criticizing them. AOC criticized protestors in a Jewish neighborhood of Queens for voicing support for Hamas. So did Mamdani. She was criticized by those on the far left. So was Mamdani. Now look, there’s plenty of reason to say she’s full of shit, and so is he, but I think any morally responsible person at least has to defend them here. Part of why I hate the far left is their inability to say up is up and down is down, so it’s nice to see they’ll do the absolute bitter minimum when forced. Bad is bad.

We all need to realize though that we are housing some folks in our “camp” who will literally side with any crazy terroristic organization or government if they are against the United States. These people are completely unacceptable. Making a joke about the Holocaust and Iranian protestors being killed isn’t a “moderate” or “reasonable” position, it’s absolute cosmic levels of freak politics. Taking the side of a murderous, hard line lunatic regime that is killing it’s own people by the thousand, while denying the Holocaust used to get you relegated to the fringes of American and Western politics, right along side of the moon howling crowd. It still should. These people are rotten to their core.

Bad is still bad. You can question plenty of things about America and our allies while still acknowledging that some people are outright bad who stand against us. Putin’s war in Ukraine is wrong. Hamas needs to be eliminated. The Iranian regime is bad. It is a minimum to understand this, even if you are criticizing Netanyahu and the Israeli government, the conduct of the war in Ukraine, or the ability of the Shah’s son to lead. If you can’t tell the difference between the troubled but civilized and the murderers and zealots, you should be cast out of acceptable democratic politics. The Democratic Party should stop equivocating on whether we want these people around. Any decent party should not.