Don’t Link To CounterPunch
If you are a progressive then the chances are you will have seen a link to the online magazine Counterpunch - or even posted one yourself.
In a staggering expose Elise Hendrick may make you think twice as she shows that white supremacist and racist authors far outweigh the odd Jeremy Scahill or Noam Chomsky piece. She says:
In writing for, and sharing articles published on, CP, Leftists are unwittingly helping to promote the agenda of the far right.
In addition to the authors relied on by CP for its left cred, ‘America’s best political newsletter’ also regularly publishes ‘independent investigative journalism’ by a wide variety of white supremacists, including Paul Craig Roberts, editor of the white nationalist website VDare, Ron Paul (who poses for photo ops with neo-Nazis and warns of ‘race war’), and Alison Weir, holocaust denier Israel Shamir, and that perennial saboteur of the Palestinian solidarity movement, Gilad Atzmon, author of the racist The Wandering Who.
Although there are some who have expressed concern on this problematic mix, when I have raised this issue in discussions with others in left activist circles, I have often found that it is dismissed as a triviality. In these discussions, the white supremacist contingent tends to be attributed to an unwillingness to bow to ‘political correctness’ or a mere desire to ‘piss off liberals’, and generally believed to be an insignificant deviation from an otherwise clear leftist editorial line, the sort of thing only an ‘ideological purist’ could get excited about.
My own research into the editorial practices at CounterPunch shows otherwise. Not only have white supremacist authors long been a fixture at CP; their ideology is shared by members of the editorial collective. All in all, it is entirely reasonable to say that the formation of a Querfront (an alliance between the far right and the left) is a longstanding project of the newsletter, consistently endorsed by the decisions taken by CP editors and their own stated positions. In the following, I will examine the relationship between the CP editors and the racist Right via individual case studies and several statistical investigations.
