As the news of Fidel Castro’s death became known last Friday, hundreds of Cuban-Americans took to the streets of Little Havana to celebrate. Throughout the night, the home of the largest Cuban exile community in Florida was flooded with jubilant crowds chanting, singing and waving both Cuban and American flags to celebrate this historic event. Upbeat music, blaring car horns, reverberating pots and pans and joyous cries of “¡Cuba libre!” resounded throughout the neighborhoods of Miami.

These demonstrators were people whose parents and grandparents fled Cuba in desperation, risking their lives in the hope and pursuit of a better one. They did whatever it took to escape the communist regime which had usurped their government.

Yet sadly enough, these sentiments were not reciprocated in the headlines of mainstream media outlets, the statements of democratically elected Western politicians and the social media posts of American college students. In fact, if one were to learn about Castro and his oppressive regime exclusively through these sources, one could be forgiven for coming away under the false impression that Fidel Castro was a paragon of moral virtue akin to Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.

Prime Minister of Canada and dreamy-eyed liberal icon Justin Trudeau released a statement proclaiming the “deep sorrow” he felt upon learning of Castro’s passing. He referred to the brutal dictator as a “legendary revolutionary and orator” and a “remarkable leader” whose “tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people” resulted in “a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’”

U.K. opposition party leader Jeremy Corbyn admitted that Castro had “flaws” but ultimately praised him as a “champion of social justice.”

Most ironic of all were the social media reactions of prominent leftist activists on our own campus, many of whom posted trite, drawn-out eulogies on Facebook and Twitter in reverence of the dictator.

These same “revolutionaries” who routinely demonize the College Republicans for our supposedly “anti-black” Ben Shapiro event mourned the death of a tyrant whose fellow revolutionary Che Guevara infamously stated that “the Negro is indolent and lazy.”

These same outraged students who marched throughout I.V. in the middle of the night to protest the election of the “fascist” Donald Trump — crying out that he was somehow “not [their] president” because of his supposedly authoritarian viewpoints — praised a man who murdered and imprisoned political dissenters.

These same “liberals” who were outraged that America had the audacity to elect such a “homophobic” vice-presidential candidate as Mike Pence are celebrating a dictator who herded homosexuals into labor camps.

It brings me no surprise that radical leftists are exhibiting this sort of hypocrisy. They do it for the same reason that they are “anti-fa” (anti-fascist), but not anti-communist, despite communist regimes under Mao, Stalin and the Khmer Rouge killing far more people than fascism ever did.

They do it for the same reason that they constantly profess to be appalled by the extremely small minority of Christians who are members of the Ku Klux Klan, by the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984 and by the Crusades of centuries ago, while taking offense anytime someone brings up the alarming number of Muslims today who believe in death for apostates, adulterers and homosexuals.

They do it for the same reason that they criticize Israel for its human rights violations yet disregard the authoritarian Islamic theocrats who head the Palestinian resistance through Hamas and Hezbollah.

They do it for the same reason that they are disgusted by the off-color comments Trump made 10 years ago about women while (even if begrudgingly) supporting a candidate whose foundation took money from a Saudi regime which punishes adulterers by stoning and forces women to wear the hijab.

The reason for all this is that radical leftists do not care for consistency. Their sole purpose is to attack and demonize anything and everything that is a fruit or cornerstone of Western civilization — capitalism, Christianity and so on.

As Sam Harris, a secular liberal renowned for his books on atheism, religion and psychology, once put it: “Liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. They’ll criticize white theocracy, they’ll criticize Christians … but when you wanna talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free-thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us.”

Harris was right, but this hypocrisy does not merely exist when it comes to the topic of Islamic theocracy; it is evident in other realms of discourse as well, such as when leftist professors paint the narrative that the indigenous tribes of Northern and Central America were peaceful, civil and advanced peoples with humane ethical practices, in contrast to the barbaric colonization, conquest and crimes committed by the Spanish.

In fact, the Native Americans, although less technologically advanced, were every bit as warlike as the Europeans or any other people, and if they had been the ones to colonize Europe, they undoubtedly would have treated the Europeans every bit as brutally as the Europeans treated them, if not more so.

History will not be kind to Castro. Thousands of Cubans — those who starved or suffered ailments under his failed economic policies, those who died as political prisoners or execution victims and those who drowned or died of fatigue trying to escape his reign — are not with us today because of his unconscionable regime. Still thousands more now live in the United States, separated from their home and their families because they were forced to flee oppression.

Nor will history be kind to those leftists who seek to smear conservatives with accusations of bigotry, racism, sexism and homophobia while at the same time celebrating some of the most bigoted, racist, sexist, and homophobic figures in history, the most recent being Fidel Castro: brutal dictator and corrupt oppressor of Cuba.

Allow me to join with Castro’s innumerable victims in saying: May he rot in Hell.