Phoney anti-fascists target the real thing

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 (pictured) 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 campaign of harassment against David reached the point where last month he was invited on to KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon, to discuss what has been happening to him.

But, incredibly, this discussion was itself cancelled simply because his chief accuser called the station’s management and said he didn’t “feel safe” about David’s presence.

Says David: “Without consulting me, KBOO management told the show host to cancel my appearance on his show”.

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

David explains that the Portland-based journalist, author, and activist “writes articles for a wide variety of publications, including mainstream Israeli newspapers, mainstream and progressive US publications, and the anarchist press as well.

“He’s very active on Twitter and elsewhere online, interacting publicly and frequently with many of the anonymous accounts that attack me and others the most.

“The articles he authors range from legitimate journalistic reports in mainstream publications to verbose and academic expositions attempting to explain how much antisemitism is a problem on the left, and specifically about why I suck so much, along with others on his long list of leftists who he doesn’t like”.

With breathtaking hypocrisy, Burley has taken David to task for criticising “Jewish antifascist writers” (such as himself) without deigning to tell his readership that David is Jewish, as well as being anti-fascist, so that, logically, Burley himself is guilty of the very same thing!

The pretext for the war against David was that one of many diverse people that he interviewed on his YouTube channel during the Covid period, was a former white nationalist activist.

He is also berated for his association with pro-Palestinian Gilad Atzmon, another dissident Jew charged by Burley with “antisemitism”.

That’s all. These two points apparently wipe out the whole of David’s long record of anti-fascism and make him an enemy of a certain wing of the US anti-fascist movement (who seem ideologically close to the Antideutsch movement in Germany – see here and here).

He comments: “We’re talking here about thought crime. This is 1984. I am so very obviously not a fascist. So very obviously an antifascist. I have written hundreds of songs against fascism, and played at hundreds of explicitly antifascist events, for decades.

“Half my family was killed in the holocaust, my nanny lived through the Blitz, one of my best friends survived one of Franco’s concentration camps. Come fucking on”.

David describes Burley and his colleagues Spencer Sunshine and Alexander Reid Ross as “a marginal sect of cancellation campaigners, calling out nonexistent left antisemitism everywhere they think they’ve found it, attacking people for engaging in any public communication with the wrong people, and doing serious damage to activist networks around the internet-speaking world”.

The inglorious career of Reid Ross in smearing any authentic resistance to the global order as “fascist creep”, and his close links to the CIA, are described in the 2021 article “Fascist smears: what they tell us“.

David sees his “antifa” opponents in the same light, tweeting: “This is a hostile intelligence agency if ever there was one. You don’t have to be Mossad to do Mossad’s job”.

What we are certainly dealing with here are disinformation and intimidation specialists, professional agents setting out both to silence influential voices challenging the system to which they owe their allegiance and to break apart movements of resistance.

Although they use the vehicle of “anti-fascism”, or “trans justice”, to launch these attacks, and enlist the help of gullible grassroots activists, this is not where they are really coming from.

“Antisemitism” or “fascist creep” are not the real “offences” for which people are being targeted, but just weapons with which to take them out of the political game and sow division in the ranks.

We saw this very clearly with the unprecedented smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn (pictured) when he was Labour Party leader in the UK.

I don’t think for a moment that fears of “antisemitism”, or even of criticism of Israel, were the fundamental motivation behind these attacks, but rather that powerful forces could not tolerate the prospect of even the mild social-democratic measures his premiership would have introduced – such as the promised re-nationalisation of the British railway system.

Likewise, I don’t imagine that Burley and his buddies care in the least that David once interviewed a former white nationalist.

On the contrary, they must be delighted that he did so, because it gives them the perfect excuse to try to destroy his reputation and livelihood with the help of a gang of useful idiots who wrongly think that their incoherent, narrow-minded, violent, woke sect has got something to do with anarchism.

David Rovics’ real “offence” is that he is, as will immediately be clear from listening to a few of his rebel songs, an inspiring voice of resistance against the global military-financial-industrial empire.

[Audio version]

A few David Rovics songs: The Commons – Iceland Told the Bankers – Reichstag Fire – Contras, Kings and Generals – Who Will Tell the People? – Resistance – We Are Everywhere – Did You Strike a Blow Against the Empire? – Glory and Fame – After the Revolution – Failed State – If I Die Tomorrow – They All Sang the Internationale – John Brown – Rich Men North of Richmond (adaption of Oliver Anthony’s viral hit)