Disgraced anarchist researcher Alexander Reid Ross works with former CIA and
DHS officials and cops
Alexander Reid Ross, disgraced author of several retracted articles, works
with ex-cops, CIA spies, and DHS agents
BEN NORTON AND MAX BLUMENTHAL·MARCH 14, 2021
With his entire archive retracted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and a
growing record of disgrace, Alexander Reid Ross now collaborates with ex-CIA
agents, cops, DHS officials, and a GOP congressman turned Bigfoot scholar,
with funding from a Koch brother.
Through his many hatchet jobs smearing anti-war leftists as crypto-fascists
engaged in a supposed red-brown alliance with the far-right, writer
Alexander Reid Ross has earned widespread derision and the retraction of his
entire archive by one of his former publishers. Ironically, the
self-described anarchist is now openly collaborating with a network of
former cops, spies, right-wing Republicans, and Department of Homeland
Security agents at a militaristic think tank funded in part by billionaire
Charles Koch.
Ross fellowship with the recently founded Network Contagion Research
Institute suggests the US national security state has an increased interest
in undermining the progressive anti-imperialist forces he has targeted for
years and is also curiously uninterested in his long record of
journalistic malpractice.
Ross introduced his red-brown (communist-fascist) theory to a national
audience in a series of stem-winding screeds published by the Southern
Poverty Law Centers Hatewatch blog in 2018. His articles consisted of
confusing Venn diagrams and wild insinuations linking anti-imperialist and
progressive activists with white nationalists and the Kremlin.
In one entry, Ross alleged that Brian Becker, a veteran anti-racist and
anti-war activist, was in league with the Oathkeepers because he once
debated a member of the far-right group on his radio show. In another, Ross
accused liberal Nation Magazine publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel of
ultra-conservatism and Kremlin ties largely on the grounds that she was
married to Stephen F. Cohen, a top Russian scholar and US foreign policy
critic. Ross then blamed Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal for a deadly
shooting spree by a neo-Nazi because well, there was simply no basis for
his defamatory claim.
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 Rosss 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.
Alexander Reid Ross SPLC multipolar fascists
The SPLC issued a similar apology in April, 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.
Alexander Reid Ross SPLC apology Stephen Cohen
Another apology issued after the SPLC retracted a lie-filled smear piece by
Alexander Reid-Ross
Following the publication of this present article, James W. Carden, a former
State Department advisor who has since become a critic of hawkish US foreign
policy, who was also attacked by Ross in his defamatory rants, said former
SPLC President Richard Cohen called me to apologize for this morons
article. Richard could hardly believe that he was let down so badly by his
editorial team.
He was embarrassed by this Portland creep, Carden added, referencing Ross.
But never 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. Ross
wound up publishing a characteristically long and barely coherent rant at
the Daily Beast accusing his targets of playing footsie with the right.
Among those smeared by Ross was academic Norman Finkelstein, the son of
Holocaust survivors, whom he accused of Holocaust denial. Finkelstein spoke
at length about his familys suffering during the Holocaust in the interview
that Ross referenced in his article, which Finkelstein conducted on the
podcast TrueAnon. But Ross, in an especially revealing example of his
misleading smear tactics, chose to ignore his targets personal testimony.
Indeed, Ross did not mention Finkelsteins family history at all, and
omitted his well-established scholarly credentials, describing the academic
merely as an anti-Zionist activist.
Ross then attempted to link leftist comedian Jimmy Dore to the Pizzagate
conspiracy on the grounds that a promoter of the far-right narrative once
retweeted him. Next, he attacked the hosts of popular socialist podcast
Chapo Trap House for an obviously humorous comment about the US being ruled
by a cabal of cannibalistic psychotic abusers, baselessly linking them to
the right-wing QAnon conspiracy cult.
The smears went on for 4500 words, targeting a dizzying array of lefty
podcast personalities, both major and almost unheard of, in an absurdly
obsessive manifesto that ultimately said more about the paranoid mind state
of its author than any of his targets.
Like most readers, the editors of the Daily Beast appeared incapable of
deciphering Rosss scrawling. But they published it anyway, exposing
themselves and its author to widespread mockery and embarrassment when the
articles multiple falsehoods, copy errors, and generally demented quality
came to light.
Among the many false claims featured in Rosss piece was that podcaster Nick
Mullen dropped the n-word multiple times on Bill Maher. In fact, Mullen
has never appeared on HBOs Real Time with Bill Maher and it was Maher who
used the n-word on air.
The derision and contempt inspired by Rosss diatribe became so intense that
Daily Beast editor-in-chief and former Clinton operative Noah Shachtman
attempted to wash his hands of the editorial disaster, declaring that his
managing editor, Katie Baker, was singlehandedly responsible for landing
this incredibly complex, important story.
Meanwhile, the Daily Beast quietly updated and corrected Rosss article
without inserting an editors note that would have stood as a permanent
marker of the journalistic catastrophe.
Rosss disgrace soon became the subject of a Daily Dot article that
carefully surveyed his extensive record of wild smears and facepalm-level
falsehoods. Desperate to salvage his credibility, Ross issued a statement to
the Daily Dot that read as though it had been crafted by a bargain basement
reputation management specialist. He claimed that he was dedicated to
honest journalism that enables readers to work through societys
increasing divisions and negotiate common ground for a more decent,
peaceful, and just world for future generations.
Under sustained questioning, Ross was ultimately reduced to beseeching his
interviewer not to publish her report: I am concerned, based on your
questions, he complained, that your article will perpetuate the intense
and damaging campaign against me, becoming fodder for people who have very
little commitment to either truth or dignity.
With his long trail of retractions and editorial embarrassments and his
risible excuses for them it is difficult to understand how a serial
bungler like Ross continues to find work. But even as his byline has become
a dangerous liability to any journalistic institution, he has found cachet
within a new and lucrative racket dedicated to combating online
disinformation and anti-establishment conspiracy theories.
By marketing himself as an anarchist and libertarian socialist with an
inside track on both the radical left and fascist right, Ross has managed to
make himself seem useful to the national security state hardliners behind
the burgeoning counter-disinformation industry. And by impugning left-wing
anti-imperialists as conspiracy theorists [who] undermine a democratic
political consensus, he has signaled to his employers a commitment to the
shared cause of defending the US national security state against perceived
domestic threats.
So in a twist of comical irony, the red-brown researcher Ross has become a
senior research fellow at a recently founded think tank backed by
billionaires, including the right-wing oligarch Charles Koch. There, Ross
has co-authored reports with the retired chief of operations for
counterintelligence at the CIA, ex-Department of Homeland Security
officials, former police officers, and even an erstwhile Republican
congressman who proudly calls himself a Bigfoot scholar.
Having once boasted, ive been an anarchist since I was in elementary
school, Ross is now a proud colleague of cops, spies, and militarists,
helping advance their commitment to suppressing any narrative that threatens
to erode ruling-class control.
Emmi Bevensee Alexander Reid Ross Integrity Initiative event
Alexander Reid Ross (left) speaks at the main event organized by the UK
government-sponsored, NATO-funded Integrity Initiative, in Seattle in
December 2018
A self-proclaimed anarchist works alongside former CIA spies, DHS feds, and
cops
The Grayzone previously exposed Alexander Reid Rosss 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 UKs 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.
Alexander Reid Ross Network Contagion Research Institute CIA DHS report
Holden worked at the CIA for 28 years, retiring in 2019. On her LinkedIn
profile, Rosss colleague describes her former work at the notorious
coup-plotting agency:
Concluding her career as Counterintelligence Chief of Operations for CIA,
Ms. Holden served in numerous foreign and Washington-based CIA leadership
positions managing significant projects and budgets directly impacting U.S.
national security
collaborating closely with U.S. intelligence entities,
law enforcement, policymakers, military leaders and foreign partners. She
had comprehensive expertise in program management, counterterrorism,
counterintelligence, insider threat, and global risk management.
Joining Ross and Holden as a fellow co-author of the NCRI report was Brian
Harrell, former assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the US
Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Harrell got his start working as a cop at the Los Angeles County Sheriffs
Department. He then did anti-terrorist operations with the US Marines,
before moving over to a slew of private security companies and DHS.
Harrells work earned him recognition in Security Magazines list of the
most influential people in security in 2017.
Alexander Reid Ross colleague worked at DHS from 2018 to 2020. Harrell
makes it clear on his LinkedIn page that he was appointed by Donald Trump,
declaring, Thank you, Mr. President!
Brian Harrell DHS Alexander Reid Ross
Alexander Reid Ross colleague, former DHS Assistant Secretary Brian Harrell
During Harrells tenure, DHS aggressively cracked down on anti-fascists and
left-wing activists, formally classifying vandalism by supposed members of
the decentralized Antifa movement as domestic terrorist violence.
Ross claims to be a staunch supporter of Antifa, and has even sarcastically
included the description Antifa ideologue in his Twitter bio. How he
squares those sympathies with the fact that his co-author was actively
involved in a state campaign to criminalize Antifas activities is unclear.
A 2020 report in Politico cited a DHS memo that listed anarchists and
anti-fascists alongside domestic terrorist actors, warning they might
exploit the anti-racist protests against the horrific police killing of
George Floyd in order to provoke violence.
The Politico article cited Ross current colleague, Brian Harrell, who
emphasized that as cops were brutalizing protesters and arresting
journalists DHS, as the nations largest law enforcement organization,
will continue to support our state and local police and first responder
agencies, to bring a quick, safe, and peaceful ending to the disorderly
violence in the streets.
Another co-author of the NCRI report with Alexander Reid Ross is Paul
Goldenberg, who was also named as one of Security Magazines most
influential people in security in 2020.
Goldenberg is a member of the Department of Homeland Securitys Advisory
Council (HSAC), and has led numerous DHS committees focused on violent
extremism, terrorism, and radicalization efforts that often target
Muslims, Black liberation organizations, and self-styled radicals like Ross
anarchist friends.
Goldenberg previously served as the head of the transitional policing
mission for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Before that, he oversaw the New Jersey attorney generals office domestic
terrorism efforts.
Ross colleague began his career as a cop. Goldenberg worked first as a
police officer in New Jersey, then spent years as a deep undercover agent
in Florida, earning the title South Floridas Officer of the Year.
Paul Goldenberg police Alexander Reid Ross
Alexander Reid Ross NCRI colleague Paul Goldenberg, back when he worked as
a New Jersey cop who often went undercover
Another associate of Alexander Reid Ross at the Network Contagion Research
Institute a co-author of the March 2021 report with the self-proclaimed
anarchist is former New Jersey state Attorney General John Farmer.
Farmer, who was dubbed a New Jersey Super Lawyer, served as senior counsel
and team leader for the US governments 9/11 Commission.
Perhaps the most absurdly ironic association Ross enjoys at NCRI is Denver
Riggleman, a staunchly conservative, Tea Party-backed former Republican
member of Congress.
A former Air Force intelligence officer who later served as CEO of an NSA
contractor, Riggleman became somewhat of a national laughingstock when,
during the 2018 Virginia Congressional race, his opponent accused him of
having a Bigfoot erotica collection.
Riggleman had posted an image on Instagram of a sketch of a furry monster
bearing Rigglemans face, with the creatures genitalia redacted. The future
Republican congressman joked that the picture was part of an upcoming book
he wrote called The Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him.
After losing the Republican Partys nomination in the subsequent election,
Riggleman returned to writing Bigfoot fantasy fiction. Although he says he
does not believe the monster exists, Riggleman published a book in 2020
titled Bigfoot
Its Complicated, in which he identified himself as a
Bigfoot scholar.
A local newspaper summarized Ross colleague: Riggleman is really into
Bigfoot. Hes gone on hunts for the creature. He recently watched a musical
performance from a man dressed up in a big hairy suit playing the saxophone
Saxsquatch.
Riggleman worked on the March 2021 NCRI report with Ross on vaccine
disinformation. In December 2020, Riggleman also collaborated with Ross on
an investigation into the QAnon conspiracy.
Alexander Reid Ross Network Contagion Research Institute Qanon
Riggleman has no apparent expertise in technology, and aside from his outré
Instagram posts, does not seem to have anything particularly insightful to
say about social media. He spends much of his time tending to a distillery
he owns in Virginia and lobbying for less restrictive alcohol laws. Why a
think tank that claims to be dedicated to research on disinformation employs
such a figure is difficult to discern.
Alexander Reid Ross employer, the NCRI, lists its funders at the bottom of
its official website: the Charles Koch Foundation, of the notorious
right-wing oligarch, as well as the Open Society Foundations of the
staunchly anti-communist billionaire George Soros.
Network Contagion Research Institute ADL Soros Koch
Working with the ADL, a pro-apartheid outfit that spies on the left
NCRI is also affiliated with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel
lobby group with a decades-long track record of collaborating with police
agencies to spy on the US left.
During the McCarthy era, the ADL conducted espionage on progressives its
suspected of communist sympathies and reported them to the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC).
Later, the ADL spied on and attacked Black leaders in the civil rights
movement. The organization went on to surveil anti-apartheid activists,
working directly with intelligence operatives from the white supremacist
South African regime.
As it did with activists who opposed South African apartheid, the ADL has
spied on Americans who oppose Israeli apartheid, sharing the intelligence it
gathers on them with Israeli government officials, which Israel then uses to
persecute Palestinians.
In 2017, the ADL called for US police to infiltrate groups that call
themselves Antifa in order to spy on the kind of anti-fascist activists with
which Ross identifies.
Besides defending and lobbying on behalf of the apartheid regime in Israel,
the ADL openly supported the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The ADLs activities have grown so noxious that progressive American Jewish
groups organized a Drop the ADL campaign, requesting that progressive
organizations refuse to partner with the organization.
Despite the ADLs deep links to US, Israeli, and South African cops, and its
extensive right-wing ties, the self-declared anarchist Alexander Reid Ross
has been supportive of the organization.
Ross regularly shares the ADLs research, and frequently cites the league in
his work. Ross even defends its malicious operations from criticism by other
leftist activists, while echoing ADL smears to defame progressive
anti-Zionists like Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal.
Echoing the messaging of the ADL, Ross consistently portrays critics of the
Zionist movement as anti-Semites while echoing liberal Zionist talking
points.
But the connections that Ross employer have to the ADL go even deeper. In
fact, the founder and director of the Network Contagion Research Institute
that awarded Ross his fellowship, Joel Finkelstein, worked as a research
fellow at the ADL from 2018 to 2020.
Before founding NCRI, Joel Finkelstein worked at Google, a CIA contractor
that collaborates extensively with the US military and police departments,
assisting them as they spy on activists.
Joel Finkelstein is not the only NCRI staffer with a history at the Silicon
Valley Big Tech corporation. The director of research at Google, Peter
Norvig, also serves as an NCRI strategic advisor.
Network Contagion Research Institute advisors
Strategic advisors at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which
employs Alexander Reid Ross
More than footsie: Alexander Reid Ross works alongside a right-wing
homophobe and NYPD intelligence agent
Rounding out the dubious cast of spooks and cops that Ross has elected to
work with at NCRI is Jack Donohue, a veteran New York City Police Department
intelligence officer who served as former chief of strategic initiatives at
the NYPD.
According to the NCRIs website, Donohue is a former three-star chief and
32-year veteran of the New York City police department with a role as
chief of cyber intelligence and strategy, and an innovator of the now
annual Cyber Intelligence and Counterterrorism Conference who authors
expertise reports on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security
Network Contagion Research Institute Jack Donohue NYPD
Another colleague of Alexander Reid Ross at NCRI: former NYPD chief Jack
Donohue
Finally, and perhaps most hypocritically, the proud anarchist Alexander Reid
Ross works alongside a notorious anti-gay, anti-abortion, far-right
academic.
NCRI lists Robby George as another strategic advisor. In 2006, Grayzone
editor Max Blumenthal published an investigation into George in The Nation,
exposing him as a fanatically anti-choice Republican theocrat.
George previously led the National Organization for Marriage, a right-wing
lobby group that oppose same-sex marriage. In 2008, Republican President
George W. Bush awarded George the Presidential Citizens Medal, the
second-highest civilian honor in the United States.
Robby George George Bush NCRI
Alexander Reid Ross right-wing NCRI colleague Robby George with President
Bush in 2008
So while Ross falsely smears anti-imperialist leftists, claiming they are
participants in a supposed red-brown conspiracy, he is actively
collaborating with far-right Republicans who have dedicated their lives to
limiting the constitutional and civil rights of women and LGBT citizens.
It is impossible to overstate the irony of an anarchist academic huckster
engaging in a sordid alliance with reactionary securitocrats and accepting
sponsorship from a Koch brother while spinning out his retracted,
discredited conspiracies.
The mysterious making of Alexander Reid Ross as an expert
Alexander Reid Ross is mostly a fringe figure. But he does have friends who
promote his conspiratorial work with a religious-like fervor.
Ross political allies created a highly sympathetic Wikipedia article for
him, which really just amounts to a piece of crude marketing, in October
2020. A look at the pages edit history shows it was written by the same
trolls who, in blatant violation of Wikipedias guidelines, rabidly
vandalize and even delete the entries on anti-war journalists and scholars.
Among the co-authors of Ross fawning Wikipedia article are some of the
politically motivated editors who participated in the lie-filled smear
campaign that led to a blacklisting of The Grayzone on the website.
Another editor who has helped shape Ross page is Philip Cross, the
notorious British troll who edits Wikipedia for hours each day, relentlessly
pushing the hawkish propaganda line of Western governments, and vandalizing
the pages of prominent anti-imperialists, including Max Blumenthals
Wikipedia entry, to downplay their accomplishments, play up controversies,
and falsely impugn them as Russian assets.
With mysterious entities such as Cross providing Ross with de facto
marketing services, Ross has been able to survive the humiliating PR
disasters that are unleashed when his lie-filled works blow up in his
editors faces, as they so often do.
His editors appear to share his support for interventionist US policies and
a burning resentment of the anti-imperialists who challenge them. That might
help explain why Ross faced no consequences for a 2020 article in the
liberal Zionist Israeli newspaper Haaretz which has since been discredited.
In the long and characteristically confusing piece, Ross claimed that
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been supporting neo-Nazis in the United
States. As evidence, he pointed to a white supremacist group called The
Base.
However, The Base has long been suspected of serving as a front for US law
enforcement, and therefore as a geopolitical tool aimed at painting Russia
as the worlds most prolific exporter of white nationalist ideology.
This February, the DHS confirmed it has employed the leader of The Base,
Rinaldo Nazzaro. Nazzaro had previously worked as a Pentagon contractor, and
served with US Special Operations forces on counterterrorism efforts.
Given his pedigree, perhaps it is only a matter of time before Nazarro joins
Ross as a counter-disinformation researcher at the NCRI.
Alexander Reid Ross, wannabe Grayzone contributor
Before Ross made himself the laughingstock of leftist Twitter and a
collaborator with cops, he made himself known to The Grayzone. A few months
before publishing the paranoiac smear job that was ultimately retracted by
the SPLC, Ross contacted Max Blumenthal to pitch an article for publication
in AlterNets Grayzone Project, a predecessor to The Grayzone (now
independent of AlterNet).
Ross delivered his confusing pitch behind two assumed names, Lilac and
Sasha, using an email from the radical environmentalist website
earthfirstjournal.org. He proposed to write an article exposing the DHSs
surveillance of Antifa activists an ironic angle considering his
present-day work.
Ross has previously worked as an editor of Earth First Journal under the
pseudonym Lilac Sash@. In 2010, he posted a job listing seeking short
term journalistas (sic) to help with the publication: you get paid $200 a
month plus a roomy house to live in and free organic food donated from the
local co-op, Ross wrote. We also have bicycles on hand.
At the time, Earth First was a top target of the FBI, which had labeled it
an eco-terrorist organization.
Today, it is worth wondering what any of the deep green direct-action
radicals that were once a part of Rosss house-sharing activist world think
of his contemporary work with hardline former CIA agents, DHS officials, and
cops.
As for the 2017 pitch to The Grayzone by Ross or is it Lilac? it was
turned down.
Alexander Reid Ross email Grayzone
Alexander Reid Ross 2017 email pitching an article to The Grayzone
Clarification: Ross paranoiac SPLC smear job was published several months
after his pitch to AlterNets Grayzone Project, not weeks and months after
Max Blumenthals two-part exposé of the Syrian White Helmets, which Ross
framed in the SPLC as Russian disinformation.
Update (March 15): This article was updated after publication with the
statement from James Carden and further information about the SPLCs
retraction of Ross false and defamatory articles.
