New documents reveal a covert British military-intelligence smear machine meddling in American politics
The
Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation
campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing
foundation money, this massive “political smear unit” is
infiltrating the US.
by
Max Blumenthal and Mark Ames
Part
8 - Reanimating the “red-brown” grifter
The
presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked
political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb
relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network
of “red-brown” alliances and “syncretic media”
conspiracies controlled by puppeteers in Moscow.
Ross is
a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no
scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students have
given him dismal marks at Rate My Professors, complaining about his
“terrible monotone lectures” and his penchant for
“insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class.” But with
a book, “Against the Fascist Creep,” distributed by the
well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling
academic has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.
Before
the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a
military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie
of pundits and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the
group’s Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even
retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.
In a
series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last
year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories to
the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author
of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher
Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of
international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists
secretly controlled by the Kremlin.
The
articles ultimately generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of
public retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty
Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein
for discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry
of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate
Ross as a sought-after public intellectual.
Before
the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a
rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance
puppeteered by Russians: “The alt right takes from both this
‘red-brown,’ it’s called, or like left-right syncretic highly
international national of nationalisms, and from the United States’
own paleoconservative movement, and it’s sort of percolated down
through college organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets
anti-imperialism. Right?”
In a
strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity
Initiative’s Seattle event alongside Emmi Bevensee, a
contributor to the left-libertarian Center for a Stateless Society
(C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, “a left market anarchist
think-tank” expresses its core aim of uniting far-left anarchists
with free-market right-libertarians.
Bevensee,
a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona and self-described
“Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto,” concluded her
presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative news
site, Zero Hedge, and the “physical militarized presence
in the borderlands” of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like
Bevensee, Ross has written for C4SS in the past.
The
irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the “Center for
a Stateless Society” auditioning before The State – the
most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to
attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be
overstated.
But
closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony
into something much darker and more unsettling.
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