While a majority of Americans stood firmly for the hostages and against their kidnappers, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a self-proclaimed Trotskyist revolutionary party, took the opposite position and insisted that the hostages were CIA agents, according to the Daily Beast. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders joined SWP in 1980 and served as a presidential elector in Vermont, advocating for the party’s candidates who ran on a platform that defended Iran’s keeping the hostages, the website reported. At a rally, SWP’s presidential candidate Andrew Pulley condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the US hostages.”

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