The Anti-Imperialism of Fools
The enemies to your left
In 1894, the German socialist August Bebel, leader of the Social Democratic Party and one of the most morally serious figures of his political generation, was attempting to describe a peculiar phenomenon he kept encountering on his own side of the political map. Among the people who called themselves socialists, there was a tendency to direct the rage that ought to have been directed at capitalism instead at the Jews, on the grounds that Jews were the visible face of capital and therefore the proper target of working-class anger. Bebel disagreed. He thought the move was a corruption of socialism, a redirection of legitimate grievance into illegitimate channels, a substitution of the easy hatred of an identifiable group for the hard work of analyzing and confronting the actual system. He called it the socialism of fools. The phrase passed into the language. It became the standard term for any politics that wears the costume of liberation while serving as a delivery mechanism for an older and uglier hatred.
I want to borrow Bebel’s frame this morning and apply it to a phenomenon I have watched grow in my own political adjacency over the last twenty years.
There is, on the left, a politics that calls itself anti-imperialist. The politics opposes American wars, American sanctions, American military bases, American influence in the affairs of other nations. So far so good. I oppose those things too, when they are wrong, which is a great deal of the time, and the piece I published yesterday was a long accounting of one of the largest cases in which they were wrong. American empire has done enormous damage to the world. The dead of Iraq and Vietnam and Indonesia and Chile and Iran and Guatemala and Nicaragua and the Philippines and a hundred other places where we put our boots or our money on the wrong side of a struggle that was not ours — those dead are real. The case against American empire is documented and overwhelming.
But there is a place where the politics of opposing American empire goes wrong. There is a place where it stops being a critique of one empire and becomes an apologetics for every other empire that opposes it. There is a place where the slogan anti-imperialism stops referring to the principle that no nation should rule others by force and starts referring to the strategic position that whichever nation is rivaling the United States this week is by definition the side of liberation. That is no longer anti-imperialism. That is multipolarity worship. That is the conviction that the world is made just by being made bloodier — by adding more poles, more fists, more rival hegemons, more spheres of influence in which strongmen can crush their domestic populations without American interference.
This is the anti-imperialism of fools. And like Bebel’s socialism of fools, it is almost always, when one follows the money, funded directly or indirectly by exactly the imperial powers it claims to be defending against the dominant one.
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The doctrine has a name in the academic literature. It is called campism. The term comes from the Cold War — the conviction that the world was divided into two camps, the imperialist camp and the anti-imperialist camp, and that the duty of every leftist was to support the anti-imperialist camp without qualification, without criticism, and without regard to what the rulers of that camp were doing to the workers and dissidents and minorities and journalists and ordinary people inside their own borders.
Campism was always a betrayal of socialism. It was the position that allowed Western communist parties to defend the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the murder of every Polish and Czech and Hungarian and East German worker who tried to organize a real labor movement against a regime that called itself the workers’ state. Campism was the doctrine that justified all of it, every time, on the grounds that to oppose Moscow was to objectively serve Washington, and that to serve Washington was the one sin from which no leftist could be redeemed.
George Orwell, who knew the type, called them the renegades. He had served alongside them in Spain. He had watched them denounce the POUM and the anarchists as objectively fascist for the crime of being anti-Stalinist. He had watched them defend the Stalinist murder of Andreu Nin and the thousands of others who refused to subordinate the Spanish revolution to Moscow’s foreign policy. He spent the rest of his life writing against them. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are, among other things, prolonged meditations on what happens to a politics of liberation when it accepts the discipline of an imperial center that wears the costume of liberation.
The Soviet Union fell. The discipline did not. The campist habit of mind survived, looked around for new centers to defer to, and found them. The new centers were Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Caracas. The new costumes were multipolarity, the global majority, the rising South, the resistance axis. The new vocabulary was lifted, sometimes word for word, from the foreign ministries and state media outlets of the regimes the new campists were defending. The new media ecosystem was built on platforms — YouTube, Substack, X, Rumble — that allowed direct unfiltered transmission from the foreign-ministry talking point to the English-speaking activist’s eyeballs without the inconvenience of editorial review. The new funding flowed through a system of nonprofits and intermediaries that the United States Department of Justice and the United States Treasury Department and the United States Department of State have, by the time I am writing this, been investigating for over three years.
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The document this time is not in a magazine. It is in The New York Times.
On August 5, 2023, the Times published a long investigation, conducted over months by Mara Hvistendahl and David Kirkpatrick and Ishaan Jhaveri, with the headline A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul. The investigation documented the funding network of a man named Neville Roy Singham. Singham is a former technology executive who sold his consultancy firm, Thoughtworks, for an estimated seven hundred and eighty-five million dollars in 2017 and then moved to Shanghai. Since that move, by the Times’ accounting, he has funneled at least two hundred and seventy-five million dollars through a network of American nonprofits — many of them with no real physical address beyond UPS Store mailboxes in Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York — into a constellation of left-coded media outlets, think tanks, and activist organizations that consistently produce content aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy positions.
The recipient organizations include Code Pink, which the Times documented as having received over one and a third million dollars from Singham-linked sources since 2017, and which is run by Jodie Evans, who is married to Singham. They include The People’s Forum in Manhattan, which received over twenty-two million dollars from a single Singham-linked nonprofit. They include BreakThrough News, the YouTube channel and media operation. They include No Cold War, a coalition that organizes against American criticism of Chinese policy. They include NewsClick in India, which was raided by Indian authorities in late 2023 on charges of foreign funding violations. They include Brasil de Fato. They include outlets in South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, and several other countries.
Singham is photographed at Chinese Communist Party propaganda forums. He has co-owned, with Chinese state partners, media companies that operate in coordination with municipal propaganda departments. His network’s content is regularly amplified by official Chinese state media, including the Global Times and the China Daily, in a feedback loop that produces the appearance of a grassroots Western anti-imperialist consensus that just happens to mirror the position of one specific imperial power on every contested question.
The Times called and emailed every organization in the network. Most declined to respond. The ones that did respond denied taking direction from any foreign government. They did not deny taking the money. The structure they described was one in which the money came from American nonprofits, the nonprofits in turn received their money from intermediaries, and the intermediaries received their money from Singham — and Singham, the man at the head of the chain, lives in Shanghai, attends Party workshops, and co-produces propaganda content with Chinese state entities.
The structure is the same structure I described yesterday on the right. A funding apparatus that purchases not loyalty but compatibility. A funding apparatus that does not need to issue instructions, because the recipients have selected themselves for ideological alignment and the funding merely enables them to do at scale what they would have done at small scale anyway. The money does not buy positions. The money buys volume. It buys reach. It buys the multiplication of voices saying the things the funder wants said, and it buys the silencing — through opportunity cost, through career incentive, through community pressure — of the voices that would otherwise have said the contrary things.
This is what Singham bought with his two hundred and seventy-five million dollars. He bought a Western left that, in the year of our Lord 2026, when the Chinese government has built a system of internment camps in Xinjiang holding an estimated one million Uyghurs, when it has crushed the Hong Kong democracy movement, when it is mobilizing for the possible invasion of Taiwan, when it operates a social-credit surveillance state more comprehensive than anything Orwell imagined — a Western left, parts of which can no longer bring themselves to issue an unequivocal condemnation of any of it. He bought the silence. And in some cases he bought louder than silence: he bought the affirmative defense.
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I want to name the figures. Not all of them — the network is too large for any one piece — but the most clearly documented, because the piece does not work as accusation by category. It works only as accusation by name, with documents.
Jackson Hinkle is a self-described MAGA communist whose YouTube and X channels reach an audience in the millions. He attended a conference of the Houthi rebels in Yemen in 2024. He was present at the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, when Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike. He was designated, by the second international gathering of the Russophile Congress in Moscow in 2024, as an official Western representative. The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers, in a report cited by the New York Post in May 2025, identified him as having publicly claimed to have vetted Russian intelligence and strong ties with both Russia and Iran. He denies, on his channels, accepting direct payment from any foreign government. The denial is not the question. The question is what business an American citizen has serving as the designated Western representative of a Russophile Congress in Moscow during an active Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.
The Grayzone, edited by Max Blumenthal and featuring Aaron Maté and Wyatt Reed, has for the past decade produced content defending the Assad regime in Syria, the Maduro regime in Venezuela, the Ortega regime in Nicaragua, the Russian government’s positions on Ukraine, the Iranian government’s positions on basically everything, and the Chinese government’s positions on Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Blumenthal has stated, repeatedly, that the outlet receives no state funding from Russia or China. In June 2024, The Washington Post reported that hacked documents revealed Wyatt Reed had received approximately five thousand five hundred dollars from the Iranian state-controlled broadcaster Press TV for occasional contributions to its programming in 2020 and 2021. The 2023 European Union sanctions package identified the outlet as receiving financing from the Russian government. A 2024 New Lines Magazine investigation documented a thirty-thousand-dollar single donation to a Grayzone GoFundMe from the legal name of Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd bassist who has spent his retirement years offering himself as a spokesperson for the Russian position on Ukraine and the Chinese position on Xinjiang.
Tucker Carlson, who is a man of the right but who I include here because the horseshoe is real, traveled to Moscow in February 2024 to conduct a two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin in which he allowed Putin to deliver an uninterrupted lecture on the historical illegitimacy of the Ukrainian state and the supposed Nazi character of its government. The interview aired on Tucker’s X channel and was promoted by Russian state media for weeks. Tucker has since traveled to Russia repeatedly. He has spoken at Russian government conferences. He has been featured in Russian state media as the proof that the Western elite consensus on the war is breaking down. He is not paid by the Russian government as far as anyone can document. He does not need to be. The platform he occupies and the audience he reaches are themselves the payment, and the access is the consideration he gives in return.
The Tenet Media indictment. In September 2024, the United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment alleging that two employees of RT, the Russian state media company, had channeled nearly ten million dollars through shell companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Mauritius to a Tennessee-based content firm called Tenet Media. Tenet Media in turn paid the right-wing influencers Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson — Pool reportedly receiving one hundred thousand dollars per video, Rubin reportedly receiving four hundred thousand dollars per month plus a hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonus. The influencers say they did not know the money came from Russia. Whether they knew or not, the money came from Russia, the content they produced was consistent with Russian foreign policy goals, and the operation worked. The mechanism on the right is the same mechanism on the left. The funder does not need the recipient to know the source. The funder needs only the volume.
Code Pink I have already covered. The figures are public: one and a third million dollars from Singham-linked sources, twenty-five percent of their funding since 2017, the husband-wife structure with Singham and Jodie Evans, the photographs of Singham at Chinese Communist Party propaganda workshops, the consistent alignment of Code Pink’s foreign policy positions with the positions of the Chinese government from Hong Kong to Xinjiang to Taiwan.
I could go on. Jeffrey Sachs, the once-respected development economist who has spent the years since the COVID pandemic delivering speeches at Beijing and Moscow conferences in which he restates the Russian and Chinese foreign-ministry positions on the war in Ukraine and the origins of the pandemic. Glenn Greenwald, whose journalism on the surveillance state was once important and who has, since moving to Brazil and founding The Intercept Brasil and then leaving it, become a Rumble-and-Tucker-circuit voice whose every position is the Kremlin position. Tulsi Gabbard, who flew to Damascus in 2017 to meet with Bashar al-Assad during the chemical-weapons campaign against his own people, who appeared regularly on Russian state media for years afterward, and who now sits as Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.
There are others. The list is long. The list could be longer. The list would, if exhaustively compiled, account for a substantial percentage of the English-language commentary that is currently presented to American audiences under the label independent journalism on platforms that have been built specifically to bypass the editorial gatekeeping of the legacy press. Some of these voices were independent journalists once. Some of them still produce work that contains real information. The point of the piece is not to denounce them root and branch. The point of the piece is to name the structure they sit inside and to ask the question their audiences cannot apparently bring themselves to ask.
If your analysis of every contested international question is the analysis of Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Caracas, you are not an anti-imperialist. You are an asset.
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The deeper problem is conceptual.
The campist mind imagines that the world is made just by being made multipolar. Whatever crimes the rival powers commit, they commit, in this imagination, in service of resistance. The dissidents they imprison are agents of the West. The journalists they murder were spies. The minorities they sterilize were terrorists. The wars of aggression they launch are defensive responses to NATO expansion. The election they steal at home was actually a defense of democracy against Western interference. The genocide they commit against a people inside their own borders is counter-insurgency. Every word the rival empire uses to justify its crimes is accepted at face value, and every word the American empire uses to justify its crimes is interrogated to the bone, and the interrogator never notices that he is doing the work of one of the regimes he claims to oppose by selectively suspending his analytical capacity in front of its propaganda.
The conceptual error is the assumption that the rival is, by virtue of being the rival, the morally superior pole. This is not anti-imperialism. This is the politics of choosing the imperialism one happens to find aesthetically more congenial. And the choice is almost always made on grounds that have nothing to do with the conditions of the workers, the dissidents, the women, the minorities, the journalists, the gay people, the Muslims, the Christians, the Falun Gong practitioners, the trade unionists, the protest organizers, the political prisoners, or the disappeared inside the borders of the resistance power. The choice is made on grounds of vibes. The vibes are the vibes of Cold War nostalgia, of the sense that there was once a left that mattered because it had a state behind it, of the desire to belong to something larger than the dwindling congregation of American social democrats. The vibes are paid for by Singham and by Putin’s foreign-ministry budget and by the Iranian Press TV budget and by the Saudi-funded conferences and by the Qatari think-tank money that, on a different but parallel circuit, also funds the Doha-based commentariat that produces a different but compatible set of takes.
The vibes are the product. The vibes are what the money buys.
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I want to come back to Hitchens, because he spent the last decade of his life on this question and I do not think the piece can close without him.
Hitchens broke with the campist left over Bosnia. He had watched the British and American left of his generation, the people he had marched with against Vietnam and against Reagan and against the South African regime, decline to support intervention against a clearly genocidal Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims because the intervention would be led by NATO and would have an American component. He had watched them produce, in the pages of the London Review of Books and The New Left Review and the comment sections of every other publication of his political milieu, denialist and revisionist accounts of the Srebrenica massacre, of the Sarajevo siege, of the systematic mass rape of Bosnian women, on the grounds that to acknowledge these crimes would be to objectively support American imperial intervention against a sovereign socialist state.
It was over Bosnia that Hitchens decided the left he had grown up in was finished. The left had failed the Bosnian test. The left had said: the suffering of Muslim civilians in Europe is not a sufficient warrant for action if the action will be led by the United States. The left had said: the principle of non-intervention overrides the principle of human solidarity in the face of genocide. The left had thereby revealed that its anti-imperialism was not a moral position. It was a tribal position. It was a uniform.
Hitchens stopped wearing the uniform. He spent the rest of his life arguing, sometimes with extraordinary brutality, against the people who continued to wear it. He called them, in print, the renegades, the apologists, the ventriloquists’ dummies, the smelly little orthodoxies, the regiment of useful idiots. He had Orwell’s vocabulary. He had Orwell’s targets. He spent his last book, Hitch-22, in significant part settling accounts with the people he had once marched with who had now decided that any opposition to any tyrant who happened to oppose the United States was neoconservatism in disguise.
The trap closed on Hitchens over Iraq. The trap was that the campist left had been so consistently wrong about so many other interventions — about Bosnia, about Kosovo, about Afghanistan in 2001 — that when the question of Iraq came up, Hitchens had spent his moral capital and his analytical capacity on the assumption that his opponents would, once again, be defending a brutal regime against a justifiable removal. He could not, by the time the Iraq question was on the table, see that this time the campists were right by accident — right not because they had analyzed the situation correctly but because they were against the war for the same reflexive reasons they were against every American war, and the war this time was as they reflexively assumed it to be: a war for the oil, a war for the donor class, a war that would produce hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and a generation of new jihadism and the eventual rise of the Islamic State.
Hitchens was wrong about Iraq for the reasons I laid out yesterday. The campists were right about Iraq for the wrong reasons. Both things are true. The piece I wrote yesterday and the piece I am writing today have to be read together, because each is incomplete without the other.
The lesson is not that one side was correct and the other was deluded. The lesson is that there are two distinct failure modes available to people who set themselves up as critics of empire. The first failure mode is Hitchens’s — to be so impatient with the apologists for the rival empire that one ends up co-signing the operations of one’s own. The second failure mode is the campists’ — to be so impatient with one’s own empire that one ends up co-signing the operations of the rival. Both are failures of judgment. Both are produced by the same underlying confusion, which is the confusion between opposing imperialism and taking a side in a contest between imperialisms.
The actual anti-imperialist position is the third position. It is the position that opposes the crimes of every empire on the basis of the principle that no people has the right to be ruled by force, foreign or domestic, against its will. It is the position that defends the Uyghurs against Beijing and the Ukrainians against Moscow and the Iranian women against the Iranian regime and the Saudi dissidents against Riyadh and the Palestinians against everyone who has been using them as a chess piece for seventy-five years, and also the Iraqis against the United States, and the Vietnamese against the United States, and the Chileans against Kissinger, and the Iranians against the United States in 1953, and the Hondurans against Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and on and on.
It is the position Hitchens started from and lost his footing on. It is the position the campists never reached. It is the position that has no state to fund it, no foreign ministry to amplify it, no think-tank circuit to platform it, and very little media infrastructure to carry it. It is the position I am trying, in these pages, to recover.
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The deepest scandal is that the same forces that have purchased the postliberal right that James Pogue documented have also, through different channels, purchased significant portions of the campist left. The same petro-AI rentier coalition that funds J. D. Vance and Curtis Yarvin through the Thiel apparatus and through the Saudi PIF stake in xAI and through the Qatar Investment Authority’s stake in Anthropic also funds, through different intermediaries, the left-coded media ecosystem that defends every regime hostile to the United States. The right end of the horseshoe and the left end of the horseshoe both bend toward the same source of money. The donors at the right end are buying a postliberal political class that will dismantle American democracy from within. The donors at the left end are buying a campist commentariat that will provide cover for the actions of the donors’ own home regimes against their own home populations.
The horseshoe is not metaphorical. The horseshoe is a literal description of the funding topology of the contemporary American discourse. If you map the donors of the postliberal right and the donors of the campist left onto a single sheet of paper, you find that the two ends of the supposed political spectrum touch in the petro-states and the technology firms those petro-states have purchased. Tucker Carlson interviewing Vladimir Putin in February 2024 and Code Pink defending Chinese policy in Xinjiang in 2026 are not opposing political positions. They are two arms of the same operation. The operation is the demolition of the American constitutional order’s capacity to resist the rentier coalition’s claim on the next century.
This is what the anti-imperialism of fools serves. The fools imagine they are speaking truth to American power. They are speaking the lines a different power has written for them, and the different power has, in some cases, written checks. The right end of the same operation imagines it is speaking truth to liberal hegemony. It is speaking the lines the same powers have written, and in some cases the same powers have, again, written checks. The two ends will, when the moment comes, find that they have been doing the same job for the same people the entire time.
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I want to close with a small remark about what this piece is and what it is not.
It is not an endorsement of American empire. American empire has done what I have already said it has done, and I will spend whatever years I have left writing against the part of it I can reach.
It is not a defense of the Cold War. The Cold War was a mutual production. The crimes of one side did not excuse the crimes of the other. The Iranian coup of 1953 and the Chilean coup of 1973 and the Indonesian massacre of 1965 and the Guatemalan coup of 1954 and the murders of Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende were American crimes. The Hungarian massacre of 1956 and the Czechoslovak invasion of 1968 and the murders of Andrei Sakharov’s friends and the Solzhenitsyn camps and the Cambodian genocide and the North Korean prison state were Communist crimes. Both columns of crimes are real. Both columns of crimes are documented. A serious leftism would have opposed both columns. The campist leftism opposed only the American column and treated the other column as the cost of resistance.
It is not a defense of the American intelligence community. The Senate Church Committee documented in 1975 a long history of American intelligence agencies engaged in operations that no democratic country should tolerate. The intelligence community has done enormous harm. The intelligence community has also, in many cases, told the truth about adversaries who really were adversaries and committed crimes those adversaries really had committed. The fact that the messenger has lied before does not mean the message is always false.
It is, instead, an argument for a kind of leftism that has become rare. It is an argument for the leftism of Bebel, who could see that anti-capitalism that becomes antisemitism has lost the plot. It is an argument for the leftism of Orwell, who could see that anti-fascism that becomes Stalinism has lost the plot. It is an argument for the leftism of Hitchens, who could see that anti-imperialism that becomes apologetics for rival empires has lost the plot — even though, in his own life, he could not see that anti-campism that becomes co-signing one’s own empire has also lost the plot.
The plot is the human person under power. The plot is the worker, the woman, the dissident, the minority, the journalist, the gay person, the religious person, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the killed. The plot is them, in every country that holds them, against every regime that holds them. The plot is not the geopolitical chess game. The plot is not the multipolar order. The plot is not the resistance axis or the global majority or the rising South or any of the other phrases the foreign ministries have planted in the mouths of the people who are paid, directly or indirectly, to repeat them.
The plot is the person under power. The whole plot.
If your politics has lost the plot, your politics has lost. It does not matter how many likes the videos get. It does not matter how many subscribers the channel has. It does not matter how many conference invitations and free hotel rooms and translated editions and tote bags reading Communications as Solidarity arrive in the mail. The plot is the person under power. If you have stopped defending the person under power because the power doing the holding happens to be in the camp you have chosen, you have stopped doing the work the word left was invented to name.
You have become an anti-imperialist of fools.
There is still time to come back. The door is open. Bebel left the door open. Orwell left the door open. Hitchens, when he was at his best, left the door open. I leave the door open here.
The work is on the other side of the door.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend
Great piece. Thank you 🙏