Just look at the trajectory of 22-year-old activist Calla Walsh. In just a few short years, she has gone from earnest high-school Democrat, volunteering for Massachusetts establishment politicians Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, to Democratic Socialist of America organiser to… talking head for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Wait, what? That escalated quickly.

Last week, Ms Walsh was in Iran for the days-long state funeral of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Speaking to Iranian state media ahead of the funeral, she called the deceased despot the ‘greatest anti-imperialist leader’ of her lifetime. ‘He was a leader to all people of the world who struggle against imperialism, arrogance, against Zionism, against genocide’, she told Press TV.

Walsh has certainly been on a journey. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The daughter of a Boston University English professor and a Harvard writing teacher, she enjoyed a super-privileged upbringing, complete with an education at two elite Boston preparatory schools.

Her background has certainly not bred any great love of America. Today, she jets between her home in Beirut and Tehran, giving rabidly anti-Western hot takes to Iranian state media and chanting Death to America in Farsi. And she does all this while wearing the mandatory headscarf.

Walsh has been catnip for interviewers for several years now. She was the subject of a glowing 2021 profile in the New York Times because of her work the previous year, helping longtime Massachusetts senator, Democrat Ed Markey, win a primary contest he had been expected to lose – that is, before the teen’s intervention. The NYT wrote that it was only because of ‘a new class of scrappy teenage organisers [that he] emerged victorious’. Or, as the Verge put it, ‘they [memed] him into reelection’.

Walsh and her fellow ‘scrappy teenage organisers’ said they backed Markey because he co-authored the Green New Deal. Climate change, Walsh said at the time, was what drove her into politics – ‘it made me feel like I didn’t have a future’.

But it seems that Walsh soon became disillusioned with Markey over his stance on Israel. In a piece written for Mondoweiss in 2021, she complained that he didn’t attack the Jewish State vehemently enough, and that he framed the Israel-Palestine conflict as a ‘both sides’ issue. She mounted a pressure campaign against him, before claiming the experience had turned her off mainstream electoral politics for good.

By 2023, she had turned to ‘direct action’, participating in two separate attacks, one month apart, on the offices of Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems. She and two others were indicted on federal felony charges before ultimately pleading guilty to reduced charges and serving 60 days in jail.

By 2025, Walsh had fully joined Team Iran. In July that year, she featured in a ‘festival’, organised by Iran’s state media, called ‘Condemnation of Terrorism Against Media’ (sounds like it could give Burning Man a run for its money!). Walsh described it as a ‘great honour’ to be surrounded by the ‘indigenously produced drones, missiles and military equipment’, and railed against the ‘propaganda’ Americans mistake for news. Which is a funny thing to say, speaking at an event hosted by ‘Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting’.

Recently, however, Walsh’s ignorance has stopped being funny. In October last year she was interviewed by Palestinian Syrian activist Laith Marouf, whose claim to fame is to have once called Jews ‘loud-mouthed bags of human faeces’. Walsh proceeded to lay out a series of startling claims that shed enormous light on the violence inherent among ‘radical’ leftists today, their foundational anti-Semitism, and how these young fanatics give aid and comfort to the enemies of the West.

Speaking about Elias Rodriguez, who in 2025 gunned down a young couple in cold blood in Washington, DC because they worked for the Israeli Embassy, Walsh said: ‘We should be asking ourselves why there weren’t a hundred more Elias Rodriguezes, why there weren’t 10 of us to be able to evacuate him and to take out more Zionist diplomats?’

In Walsh’s moral universe, murder is the highest imperative, especially if the targets are Jews. She complains that Aaron Bushnell, an American airman who burned himself alive in 2024 in protest over the war in Gaza, wasn’t violent enough, because he did not take anyone else out with him. ‘It was not, like, you know, going on the offensive, an act of armed resistance.’ Big L for him, I guess.

Walsh’s transformation into Baader-Meinhof in a hijab is so preposterous that it almost feels like a plotline out of South Park. But actually, she is as serious as cancer. And her statements are a goldmine of information as to what the hell has happened to the left. She is worth listening to if you want to understand how the old, discredited ideas of the violent Third Worldist left are making a comeback. If you thought the Years of Lead and the Days of Rage were relegated to the dustbin of history where they belong, think again.

The authorities certainly appear to be aware of the threat the likes Walsh now pose. US secretary of state Marco Rubio recently announced that he was convening an international summit to discuss the ‘resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism’. As for Walsh, she now finds herself on the US government’s suspicious-persons watch list, thanks to her ‘expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran … as well as a spiderweb of US-designated terrorist groups’. If nothing else, Walsh’s descent is a sure sign that something is rotten among the offspring of America’s cultural elites.

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