https://quillette.com/2022/02/22/expelled-from-a-progressive-think-tank-for-the-crime-of-denouncing-antifa-violence/
On February 2nd, I wrote an opinion piece entitled “Beware the Anti-Fascists, for they have become what they oppose,” on behalf of the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR)—a research centre for which I served, until recently, as a policy and practitioner fellow. That article began as follows:
I am increasingly concerned at the rate at which the so-called “CVE field” [countering violent extremism] is being infiltrated by activists describing themselves as “Anti-Fascists” who advocate for committing criminal offences in furtherance of their opposition to the radical right. This has exploded since the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for which a large number of criminal investigations are still ongoing. As someone who has spent more than a decade delivering and studying state responses to counter the radical right, as well as other forms of terrorism, I feel compelled to challenge the implied narrative that the only way to oppose the radical right is by emulating their tactics.
One might think that this wouldn’t be a controversial opinion. Yet it was met with an avalanche of abuse and hit pieces emanating (and apparently coordinated by) Antifa-linked social-media accounts in the United States. Despite the fact that I had written numerous articles for CARR over the last four years (17, according to the website), it was suddenly (and ludicrously) claimed that my former career as a police officer meant that my supposed “bias against antifascists” had always been lying in plain sight.
CARR, as per its website, is dedicated to “the study and countering of radical right extremism and intersecting phenomena (e.g., populism, gender, antisemitism, and Islamophobia) that aims to support a variety of mainstream groups, from government agencies to grass-roots charities, through podcasts, commentary, research reports, presentations, media interviews and commissioned work.” As a former senior counter-terrorism officer who’s served in the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Counter Terrorism Command (SO15), as well as the author of a book on state responses to right-wing extremism (based on my PhD research), I was invited to become affiliated with the group in mid-2018.