by Crow Qu’appelle

For years, it has been undeniable that there has been a concerted COINTELPRO-style campaign targeting the anarchist left in the U.S.

This has been an incontrovertible fact since at least 2021, when the Grayzone published an expose of Alexander Reid Ross, former editor of the Earth First! Journal, author of Against the Fascist Creep, and leading antifa ideologue.

(FULL DISCLOSURE – I contributed to the Earth First! Journal for years, but I got involved after ARR’s tenure as editor. I have never had any direct contact with this despicable creep.)

THE SMOKING GUN

In March of 2021, the Grayzone published an expose of Alexander Reid Ross by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal.

The piece is important, as it is basically the “smoking gun” which proves my point – Alexander Reid Ross is a spook.

The Grayzone previously exposed Alexander Reid Ross’s audition for the Integrity Initiative, an information warfare operation aimed at generating hostility with Russia and targeting dovish officials that get in the way. The now-defunct Integrity Initiative was overseen by British military-intelligence operatives and covertly funded by the UK Foreign Office. Its existence had been hidden from British taxpayers until a series of leaks exposed the disturbing project, triggering a national scandal and outrage in the UK’s parliament.

Ross was invited to speak at what the Integrity Initiative called its “main event,” in Seattle, Washington in December 2018. There, he delivered a typically incoherent talk laying out a furtive network of “red-brown” alliances and “syncretic” communist-fascist media outlets. His presentation ended by accusing Zero Hedge, an alternative financial and news outlet, of inspiring anti-migrant militia violence on the US-Mexico border.

In January 2021, Ross was named a “senior research fellow” by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank funded by billionaires including right-wing oligarch Charles Koch. NCRI proclaims its mission is “to track, expose, and combat misinformation, deception, manipulation, and hate across social media channels.”

At the NCRI, Ross has co-authored reports with former top officials of the US national security state whom any self-respecting anarchist would undoubtedly view as an existential threat and absolute menace.

On March 11, the NCRI published a report on “Viral Disinformation of the COVID Vaccine.” The first contributor named in the list of co-authors was Alexander Reid Ross. Collaborating on the project with Ross was Kelli Holden, the former chief of operations for counterintelligence at the CIA.

THE ANARCHIST LEFT HAS NOT COME TO TERMS OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE REVELATION THAT ARR WAS A SPOOK

It annoys me to no end that the soul-searching that should have happened after ARR was exposed has not occurred.

Alexander Reid Ross was influential within the anarchist left in the U.S., and he worked closely with other authors with similarly divisive, dubious politics.

Most notably amongst these are Shane Burley and Spencer Sunshine. More on that later.

ARR was involved in the AK Press collective, and I have yet to see any sign that AK Press has distanced themselves from him or his collaborators, who represent a very distinct political faction.

You would think that AK Press, as an anarchist publisher, would want people to know that someone whose work they have promoted is an intelligence agent.

Yet AK Press continues to sell ARR;’s book Against the Fascist Creep, which we now know was part of a campaign of ideological subversion undertaken by intelligence agents in order to sow division amongst Leftists and lead potential revolutionaries into a dead end.

Why hasn’t AK Press followed the example of Southern Poverty Law Centre, who made it clear as far back as 2018 that ARR was a malicious actor?

The Grayzone explains:

Ross’ blog posts were so full of errors and slanderous attacks that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was forced to delete his entire archive. In March 2018, after the SPLC scrubbed Ross’s work from its website in humiliation, it issued an effusive apology to his many targets, including the authors of this article. When Ross’ disgrace became the subject of national embarrassment and widespread mockery, he blamed “pro-Russia trolls” and cried that he had been “censored.”

The SPLC issued a similar apology in April [2021], after retracting Ross’ libelous hatchet job targeting Cohen, the former Princeton professor and renowned Russia expert. “We take this opportunity to emphasize that the opinions expressed in it are those of the author, not SPLC, and we regret any confusion that our posting it may have caused,” the organization stressed…

The article continues:

[N]ever one to let a bit of inconvenient fact-checking get in the way of his fanatical war on the anti-imperialist left, Ross continued. This February, he sat down at his laptop and fired off a series of emails to numerous prominent left-wing media personalities, probing them about right-wing connections that existed primarily in his own imagination.

It should have been clear as far back as 2018 (if not earlier) that ARR was working for the enemy.

Indeed, some of the more perceptive anarchists did comment on ARR at that time.

In an April 2018 article, Paul Cudenec wrote that:

[Ross] is trying to use the bludgeon of an alleged ideological association with the far right as a way of silencing voices on the left who challenge the US imperialist narrative…

With hindsight, it’s clear that the aim behind Alexander Reid Ross’s book Against the Fascist Creep was not to counter actual fascism, nor even to warn the left of the dangers of fascist infiltration, but to attack and undermine anti-capitalism by claiming its beliefs are tainted with fascist associations.

The real problem faced by anarchists and anti-capitalists is Neoliberal Creep – or, in fact, a whole network of neoliberal creeps, hell-bent on ideological sabotage.

That was 2018. Now it’s 2023, and there has been far too little effort put into reflecting upon why an intelligence agent would want to promote divisive “intersectional” politics, and how deep this campaign of ideological subversion goes.

The fact of the matter is that ARR did not work alone.

One of his closest collaborators was Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today – What It Is and How to End It, which was also published by AK Press.

The page on the AK Press website promoting Burley’s book is telling:

SHANE BURLEY IS WORKING FROM THE EXACT SAME PLAYBOOK AS ALEXANDER REID ROSS AND IS ALMOST CERTAINLY ALSO A SPOOK

The fact is that Alexander Reid Ross did not act alone. He worked as part of a team, and by all appearances, that team involved Shane Burley and Spencer Sunshine.

A little bit of research will yield countless connections between these three authors; it is so plain to see that I won’t spend much time proving it. If the reader wishes to know the truth, they will have no difficulty discovering it.

This is important because Shane Burley continues to harass anarchists in the name of anti-fascism.

I personally suspect that the ARR/Burley/Sunshine goof troop was responsible for an anonymous hit piece on me called On Crow, Fascist Drifts, and People Who Are Not Comrades, which was published by It’s Going Down, Montreal Counter-Info, North Shore Counter-Info, and Anarchist News, all of which are websites I have contributed to over the years.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/LKKxn26nMqE?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Because the piece was submitted anonymously, however, I have thus far been unable to confirm these suspicions.

We do have proof, however, that Shane Burley continues to harass my fellow Nevermore collective member David Rovics, who is one of the leading Leftist critics of cancel culture.

David Rovics has also written very extensively about this harassment, including in this blog post from two year ago:

Shane Burley’s Anarcho-Puritan Cancellation Campaigning, Explained

In that piece, Rovics explains:

Shane Burley is a cancellation campaigner who masquerades as an antifascism researcher.  The main purpose of his “research” seems to be to divide and otherwise undermine left and anarchist groups, networks, and individuals, particularly those who are critical of Israel, and then label us antisemites, while denying the whole time that he is engaging in a cancellation campaign or that he is attacking us for being critical of Israel…

Shane and his fellow fraudulent “researchers” — active cancellation campaigners Spencer Sunshine and Alexander Reid Ross — have become the de facto intellectual leadership of a bizarre cult.  While striving to position themselves as representing the general opinion of contemporary anarchists and antifascists, they are actually leading a tendency which is a very marginal one, obsessed with exposing antisemitism on the left.

The harassment continues. Just a few months ago, Burley succeeded in getting a Portland radio station to cancel an appearance in which David Rovics was scheduled to speak on the subject of cancel culture.

You can’t make this shit up.

Paul Cudenec has also written about the harassment campaign against David Rovics in a piece entitled Phoney anti-fascists target the real thing.·

In that piece, Cudenec reports:

More shocking evidence has emerged of the way in which genuine anti-system dissidents are being maliciously smeared and “cancelled” by pseudo-leftists with a suspicious agenda.

The latest target for the trolls is someone whose work I have been enjoying for years, an anti-fascist folk singer/songwriter from the USA who also regularly tours in Europe and is a familiar figure on the anarchist scene.

David Rovics also happens to be Jewish – but that hasn’t stopped him from being publicly branded an “antisemite” by the fake-left Thought Police.

He writes: “They put flyers on car windshields all over my neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, with my picture and a picture of my car and with my home address, denouncing me as an antisemite, holocaust-denier, and harasser of homeless people, all completely bizarre and completely unfounded accusations”.

David explains the groupthink by which these attacks are launched. First, an anonymous post on social media or an outlet like It’s Going Down names someone deemed to be politically incorrect.

Eager unpaid volunteers then crawl through the web looking for any scrap of information, association or opinion that might be distorted and amplifed to make this person appear bad.

After the overwhelmingly anonymous members of this group of “researchers” have done their “research,” the next step is contacting anyone related to the person under attack on a very regular basis to make sure they know about the transgressions in question, he says.

“So in my case this means contacting gig organizers, venues, and anyone else I might be performing with on a tour, and letting them know that I am a Nazi, an antisemite, a holocaust-denier, fascist-platformer, and other nonsense”…

The Canceller-in-Chief targeting David is a character by the name of Shane Burley, who has positioned himself as an influencer on the American anarchist scene.

WHY DO WEBSITES LIKE IT’S GOING DOWN ALLOW ANONYMOUS DENUNCIATIONS OF GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS?

There are many suspicious aspects of the campaign against David Rovics.

One of them is why so many anonymous activists are willing to dedicate so much time to participating in it.

With all of the injustices in the world, how is it that there is such a focused campaign against a peace-loving anarchist folk singer?

Could it be that some of them are in fact professional trolls on the payroll of some police department, intelligence agency or private contractor? The possibility needs to be taken seriously.

Another question is why websites like It’s Going Down continue to publish anonymous smears against grassroots activists.

WHO IS BEHIND IT’S GOING DOWN?

There is a lot tradition of anarchists choosing to be anonymous.

Indeed, I used to be part of this tradition. Part of the reason that I went by the name Crow for so many years was to preserve some degree of anonymity. Eventually my legal name (Anton Bueckert) became common knowledge due to a series of arrests.

A CULTURE OF ANONYMITY CREATES VULNERABILITY TO MALICIOUS ACTORS

But there’s a flipside to anonymity. It allows malicious actors to preserve their anonymity and to pretend to be something they’re not for years on end.

Although I contributed to It’s Going Down for years, I still don’t have the slightest clue about who’s behind it, what their backgrounds are, or what IRL organizing (if any) they’ve been involved with. Nor does anyone else I’ve talked to.

The fact of the matter is that no one I know can tell me anything about who’s behind It’s Going Down.

Whereas I have known people over the years who have been associated with most American anarchist media outlets, including the Earth First! Journal, Slingshot, Fifth Estate, Crimethinc, and Final Straw, I have never met anyone who has been directly involved with It’s Going Down.

After figuring out how much work goes into starting and running a website which is in some ways similar, I find it extremely likely that IGD has a budget and staff.

I’m all for respecting the principle of “Let and Let Live”, but IGD has not respected that principle in regards to me, David Rovics, or countless other genuine anarchist activists who have been smeared by them.

Given that IGD has fucked with me and my friends, I think that it’s high time we started scrutinized these anonymous anti-hate haters who seem to think that punching nazis is a political program.

A quick search on IGD for “Alexander Reid Ross” turns up 24 results, none of which appear to focus on the fact that he is an exposed spook.

Indeed, the most critical thing I came across in a quick search was this, which was published in May 2021, shortly after the Gray Zone published its “smoking gun” expose of ARR.

Let me be clear – I am by no means sure that IGD is being run by professional disinformation specialists.

I am presenting this piece to publicly state that it is an active research topic. I am putting this out there in the hopes that others will come forward with information that will help me get to the heart of the matter faster.

The fact of the matter is that proving this would be a very big job indeed, and I’m going to need some help.

I am definitely not the best researcher in the world, but I know I’m onto something. Max Blumenthal, Paul Cudenec, David Rovics and others have done good work on this issue, but there’s more to be done.

Personally, I wish that a more qualified anarchist author, like Kristian Williams, Scott Crow, Gord Hill, Zoe Baker, or Peter Gelderloos, would take on the question of what impact ARR’s ideological subversion campaign has had on the U.S. Left, but I have yet to see them tackle this question.

Probably the perfect person for the job would be Will Potter, who wrote the book on the FBI’s Green Scare campaign against Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, and the radical animal rights movement.

WHERE’S WARD CHURCHILL WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

Or perhaps the even-more-perfect person would be Ward Churchill, the famed AIM warrior, who has written multiple books about counter-insurgency, including The COINTELPRO Papers and Agents of Repression.

THE FIRST STEP IS ADMITTING WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM

My hope in publishing this piece is that it kickstarts a much-needed conversation.

We now know that the U.S. anarchist movement has been successfully divided by a campaign of ideological subversion.

It’s time to admit that we’ve got a problem, and to start doing something about it.

IT’S TIME TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE SHANE BURLEY SPOOK TROOP

For at least a year, it has been obvious to me that the Left has lost the culture war.

Leftists have no one to blame but themselves for this. Over the course of the past decade, they betrayed their own values, including commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, and bodily autonomy.

Personally, I suspect that this is due in no small part to COINTELPRO-type tactics implemented in the wake of the Occupy movement.

I suspect that the Powers That Shouldn’t Be feared a populist movement uniting liberals and conservatives against the 2008 bank bailouts and sought to divide people along partisan lines through a variety of means.

I suspect that part of this involved the repurposing of the anti-anarchist task force created during the Green Scare, and that this led to the infiltration of AK Press and possibly, the creation of It’s Going Down.

Time will tell whether I’m right of not, but it is important to do a serious post-mortem on the Antifa phenomenon in the light of the ARR revelations.

This should have happened five years ago, but it didn’t.

Better late than never, I guess.

TOWARDS A NEW BASIS OF UNITY

Even more important is the creation of a new basis of unity for those left politically homeless by the descent of the Left into wackadoodled dumbfuckery.

In this, David Rovics is leading the way.·

Not long ago, the anarchist folk singer published a declaration entitled A Statement of Principles.

In it, he lists 10 principles that he proposes as a basis of unity for a reconstituted political movement assembled from the remnants of the Left which remain committed to values such as freedom, mutual aid, truth and justice.

Because I think this effort is important, I will quote it in its entirety:

What gets called “the left” in US society, and others, is a contradictory and confusing phenomenon.  People who identify their political orientation with words like anarchism, communism, socialism, social democracy, may support exclusive and even authoritarian policies and organizing tactics, while others identifying with supposedly the same ideologies engage in inclusive forms of organizing and support things like open discourse and free expression.

What gets called “the left” may include people involved with organizing workers, tenants, or members of other communities of people to stand up against the nefarious plans of the capitalists.  But it also will tend to include a lot of people engaged in grandstanding, showboating, virtue-signaling, and cancellation campaigning on corporate social media platforms.

Who are the people that believe in and are maybe even engaged in effective organizing, and who are the ones throwing virtual bombs into every space where such organizing is trying to happen?  The corporate advertisers and political dividers know who we all are, but we don’t know each other.

If you agree with the basic orientation represented by the 10 no-brainer points below and you’d like to put your name to a public statement to that effect, email me at david@davidrovics.com with your name and any other relevant info to put along with it, such as your occupation, or organization you may represent.  When we’ve got a good collection of names we’ll add them to this statement and publish it in other places.

In case it’s not abundantly obvious already, if you have come to agree with these points only very recently and up until last month you were acting like a horrible troll on Twitter, you’re just as beautiful a human being, and we want you!

Also, if you’re generally in support of these points but have suggestions for improving the presentation or content of them, or if you have profound disagreements with any of them that you might like to tell me about in an email, I’m interested in those emails, too.

1) We embrace organizing for a purpose and reject showboating and performative virtue-signaling.  Organizing is about building networks, finding common ground, establishing common goals.  Posting about who is pure enough for you to have contact with and who isn’t has nothing to do with organizing, and much better serves the purpose of dis-organizing.

2) We embrace real justice and reject anonymous attacks intended to smear people.  Although people may commit terrible offenses and holding people accountable for their behavior may be very important, anonymous attacks, smear campaigns, and vigilante justice is a terrible way to try to seek justice or accountability, and is a perfect tool for use by nefarious actors, especially when broadly accepted by a kneejerk “believe the victim no matter what” mentality that has been instilled in much of the population.

3) We embrace diversity and we reject identitarianism.  Diversity of all kinds in society is a wonderful thing, to be celebrated, not just tolerated.  And that has nothing to do with the tokenistic Oppression Olympics that has taken over left discourse.  We must not let our diversity get used against us like this, as a tool for divide and conquer, as a means of getting us all to squabble over crumbs dropped from the tables of the billionaires.

4) We embrace free discourse and reject no-platforming.  No-platforming is a longstanding, inherently authoritarian tendency rife in certain areas of the left over the past century or so, in modern times more known by variations to the theme such as cancellation campaigning or cancel culture.  It is a sort of grassroots form of censorship, it has consistently backfired everywhere from a purely pragmatic standpoint, it’s a tactic easily exploited by nefarious actors, and it’s morally repugnant for anyone who believes in free speech.

5) We embrace free expression while rejecting corporate control.  Freedom of speech is not some bourgeois idea that we should throw out along with imperialism.  Freedom of speech is a radical concept that we embrace as the thing that is obviously preferable to the alternative (censorship).  We don’t want to kick anyone off of any platform for having the wrong opinions.  But this is not an endorsement of Big Tech or their plans for world domination!  Their monopolistic practices and conflict-producing algorithms need to be exposed and opposed — but not by making the whole situation worse by calling for people or outlets to be banned from platforms.

6) We embrace being the media and reject censorship campaigns.  The fact that a handful of gigantic corporations control our means of communication and most of the news we consume is a terrifying fact.  We need to do a lot about that, by taking on these corporations and the governments that facilitate them in all kinds of ways — but not by passing laws allowing governments to censor or throttle content on social media platforms or anywhere else on the internet.

7) We embrace finding common ground and reject efforts to polarize, divide, and cancel.  The main point in talking about things that divide us is not to make some people feel guilty and others feel virtuous.  The point is to find ways to work together to achieve common goals despite these divides, and perhaps even to overcome these divides in that process.  This is very different from forming sub-groups within sub-groups in order to further highlight divisions within divisions, for no apparent purpose aside from claiming some amorphous form of higher ground.

8) We embrace communication and education and reject harassment, vilification, doxxing and other personal attacks.  Nobody learns from being attacked and harassed.  In fact, attacking and harassing people tends to just make them angry, and cause them to become more entrenched in their feelings or positions.  How did the notion become so widespread that harassing and vilifying rightwingers or other people you don’t like is useful in any possible way?  It’s not.  It’s the opposite, in fact.  It’s completely counter-productive.  We need to find common ground, build bridges, understand how we’re being used, not shout at each other, either online or downtown.

9) We embrace real organizing and reject word policing and other forms of elitism.  Real, effective, useful organizing means diverse people working together to achieve common goals, such as organizing a union at a workplace to collectively demand higher wages or organizing tenants into a tenant union to collectively demand lower rent.  Any such group will inherently involve people with all kinds of differences.  In order for a group to function, it can’t have some kind of vetting process where anyone getting involved has to know all the right vocabulary words to use in order not to offend the modern liberal.  This is not the way forward.  Popular education does not occur in the process of calling people out for using the wrong pronoun or acronym.

10) We embrace differences of viewpoints and reject ostracizing people who don’t share ours.  Yes, we can actually form a union with millions of people all calling for the same demands, even though they have different views on who killed Jesus, who invaded Ukraine, who should or shouldn’t get to have an abortion, whether there should ever be drag shows at their local libraries, and all kinds of other vitally important issues.  And, in fact, this kind of coalition is the only way anything useful ever happens anywhere.  Opposing such coalitions on the basis of someone or some group within it having the wrong views on something is a means of dividing and conquering unions, not a way to build anything, and not a way to win hearts and minds of all of those whose hearts and minds we — and hopefully not the capitalists and imperialists hellbent on global domination — need to win.

Since this piece was published, the statement of principles has been refined, and we are working on an open letter, which will feature the signatures of:

David Rovics

Ward Churchill

(AIM warrior and author of The COINTELPRO Papers, Agents of Repression, and many other books)

Keith McHenry

(founder of Food Not Bombs)

Tom Keefer

(co-founder of Real Peoples Media, Dispensing Freedom, Upping the Anti, and the Two Row Times)

Paul Cudenec

(Winter Oak Press)

Crow Qu’appelle

(co-founder of Rebel! Rebuild! Rewild! and Nevermore Media)

Margaret Anna Alice

Jordan Henderson

Kit Colt

+ MORE!

(If you would like to sign onto the letter, please get in touch with us at nevermore_media@riseup.net.)

Stay tuned!

Also, please let me drive home that investigating a surreptitious campaign undertaken by intelligence agents is sure to be a difficult task.

We can’t do this alone – we will need assistance from other researchers.

If you are in a position to be able to help with this effort, we would greatly appreciate it!

You can reach out to us at nevermore_media@riseup.net if you have useful information, or if you wish to volunteer your services.

Also, if you wish to support what we here at Nevermore do, please considering becoming a paid subscriber or at least signing up to our email list:

ALL ABOUT ALEXANDER REID ROSS:

FAKE-LEFT PRO-WAR NEOLIBERALS BREAK COVER

BY PAUL CUDENEC – April 24, 2018

DOES OPPOSING U.S. IMPERIALISM AND WARS MEAN YOU’RE NOT REALLY AN ANARCHIST?

BY PAUL CUDENEC – June 22, 2018

Covert British military-intelligence smear machine is meddling in American politics, documents reveal

BY MAX BLUMENTHAL AND MARK AMES – JANUARY 8, 2019

Alexander Reid Ross, disgraced author of several retracted articles, works with ex-cops, CIA spies, and DHS agents

BY BEN NORTON AND MAX BLUMENTHAL – MARCH 14, 2021

FASCIST SMEARS: WHAT THEY TELL US

BY PAUL CUDENEC – October 9, 2021

Mission Creep: Exorcising the “Antifascism” of Alexander Reid Ross

RHYD WILDERMUTH -MARCH 16, 2021

ALL ABOUT SHANE BURLEY:

Phoney anti-fascists target the real thing

Shane Burley’s Anarcho-Puritan Cancellation Campaigning, Explained

Embracing Reality and Finding Solutions vs. Sowing Division and Spreading Disinformation

Cancellation Campaigner Gets Cancel Culture Discussion on KBOO Cancelled