If you don’t know who Ray McGovern is and were to search the internet on him today, you would be forgiven for wondering why anyone would have mistaken him for some kind of progressive. But let me assure you, young seeker, not long ago people most assuredly did.

McGovern was not some obscure apparatchik in the CIA. Here is a bit from his bio on his website:

Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.

https://raymcgovern.com/bio/

In 2003, when Pres. Bush started the second US invasion of Iraq, McGovern cofounded the “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” which had the seemingly helpful goal of exposing the lies the invasion was based on. Does that make them leftists? Well, not in and of itself, so to enhance that lovely leftwing flava, they partnered with Counterpunch.org, a purportedly far-left website. In fact, their email address listed in their first post on Counterpunch was simply vips@counterpunch.org.

I was one of very few folks back in the 2000s to suggest that a high-level CIA officer might have his own agenda and maybe the left should be wary of his progressive rhetoric. The left I knew was usually rather suspicious of the CIA, but he was taken at face value by many, helped in large part by the Counterpunch connection.

So I want you to pay very, very close attention to this. Because McGovern is not hiding what he is anymore, and he represents just one person in a constellation of progressive posers who are either closet fascists, Russian operatives or both.

This is Ray McGovern reposting a talk he did at a forum hosted by the Larouche Organization. No, I don’t mean he got duped into it. I mean, he links directly to their page at the top of the article on his own website. He makes no apology, provides no caveats and links to the site with “larouche” right in the URL.

If you don’t already know about Larouche then you will need to learn a bit before understanding how startling it is (or should be) to see a former high-level CIA analyst with access to US presidents openly working with Larouchites. Let’s just put it this way. Without Larouche, there would be no Q. Originally starting as a leftist in the 60s, Larouche quickly took a very hard right turn and became a fascist political cult leader.

(If you want to learn more about Larouche, a good starting place is Lyndon Larouche and the New American Fascism. )

Another thing to know about the Larouche organization is that they have a rather extensive private intelligence network. Their presence in the US is less now, but they have continued to gain a certain kind of niche prominence internationally and are taken seriously even by some world leaders.

McGovern, like Larouche, promotes a very Russia-centric worldview. If you look at McGovern’s own website, all of his articles promote Russia and condemn any US policies that oppose them. And you can find articles by and interviews with him all over Russian networks like RT.com and Sputnik.

But one might assume that someone could still be progressive while wanting to promote harmony between Russia and the US, right? I mean, that actually was the political left’s point of view before oligarchs, fascists and “ex”-KGB agents remade Russia in their own image. Nobody wants war with Russia, hot or cold.

But there is something else going on here. Something I have been watching but unable to truly grasp until recently. And seeing McGovern openly embrace Larouche crystallized my thinking on this.

There has been, for 20 years or so, an infiltration and manipulation of the left by a network of writers and activists and online influencers who appear progressive and promote certain progressive positions, but are really seeding the left with a sort of Third Positionist ideology. You may not be familiar with Third Positionism but when you start hearing a supposed progressive proclaim that the left should unite with the right to fight the “real enemy” you are likely wallowing in it.

Originally, this network was comprised of overt fascist organizations putting out propaganda and conspiracy theories that one had to work a bit to trace back to them. For a comprehensive look at that, see Right Woos Left, by Chip Berlet.

More recently, though, it has become more about influencers with a seemingly progressive pedigree putting forward the same sort of perspective. Often, that entails a lot of very pro-Russian propaganda, but are they directly working to promote Russia, or are they all dipping into the same crypto-fascist ideology that sees Russia as an ideological leader? Either way, many have no qualms about appearing on Russian propaganda channels like RT.com.

It is really hard to tackle this subject without sounding like some leftwing McCarthyite. It’s complex. Good people can want to promote harmony with Russia or have simplistic political views about the need to unify the left and right.

That said, the folks I have in mind, like McGovern, seem to have made conscious decisions to hide their full agenda from the progressive audience they cater to. But it’s their, and once you see the pattern of positions they promote in sometimes startling lockstep, it gets easier to see.

For now, I am just not going to mention other people by name. I am, of course, quite worried about labeling someone a third-positionist infiltrator who is just well meaning but politically unsophisticated. So we have to tread carefully, and ultimately, without paystubs or mindreading, I can only look at their rhetoric and body of work for clues.

Unless, of course, they decide to unfurl their fascist flag for all to see as McGovern has done with his Larouche article. That doesn’t happen often. We need to help the often naive left see who he is, and who he always was, because he’s not alone, and these networks have played no small part in empowering the growth of more overt fascist movements in America.