In early September, Dr. Thomas Alter II—author of the well-regarded book Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022)—was fired from his tenured position teaching history at Texas State University after he gave an online talk at a socialist conference.
Alter’s talk was secretly recorded by Karlyn Borysenko, a self-declared anti-communist cult leader who edited the recording to distort Alter’s comments and then shared it on her social media, which went viral.[1]
A psychologist by training, Borysenko is founder of a group called “Decode the Left,” which declares its mission as being to “provid[e] unparalleled evidence-based intelligence, analysis, and education for anyone who needs to understand the radical left.”
The website further notes that Borysenko “doesn’t just analyze Marxist philosophy. She infiltrates modern leftist organizations and events from the inside to expose them in real time.”
This is much like an actual intelligence agent would—and has done in the past under the FBI’s counter-intelligence operation (COINTELPRO) among others.
In the Footsteps of a CIA-Linked Psy-Warrior
Borysenko interestingly fashions herself as a modern-day Yuri Bezmenov.
And just who is Bezmenov? He was an alleged KGB defector turned CIA asset who publicly claimed in the 1980s that the Soviet Union had a long-term goal of ideologically subverting the U.S. by “brainwashing” the U.S. population.
Defecting to Canada in 1970 with the assistance of the CIA,[2] Bezmenov claimed to have worked for the KGB as a propaganda agent on staff at Novosti Press Agency and said that one of his main jobs was to plant Soviet propaganda in foreign media and to spread disinformation in foreign countries.[3]
In 1984, Bezmenov wrote a political pamphlet under the pen name Tomas Schuman, Love Letter To America, claiming that the Soviet brainwashing plan in the U.S. had four phases, the first of which was designed to demoralize the population.
The latter, Bezmenov believed, was hastened by ex-hippies taking on positions of power in the 1980s.[4]
According to Bezmenov, the 1960s generation was “contaminated” by Marxist-Leninist values through a form of Pavlovian conditioning, in which the Soviets were well versed.
The youth of the era were taught to be contemptuous of their leaders and law enforcement agencies and the military whom anti-war protesters called “war mongers” and to turn away from religion, which was designed to set the groundwork for a left-wing revolution.
Once the population was demoralized, Bezmenov claimed that the Soviets would work to precipitate a nation-wide crisis and destabilize society by targeting the U.S. economy and foreign policy.
Bezmenov disseminated his views through the John Birch Society, which warned about a diabolical communist plot to subvert American society from within.[5]
Love Letter To America advanced CIA disinformation, as in its allegation that the Soviet Union carried out chemical warfare in Laos, which was actually carried out by the CIA in a false-flag operation.[6]
Bezmenov further claimed that the Soviets were behind the popular television series M*A*S*H, which he said “presents your military as a bunch of very humorous, hysterically funny bunch of psychotics, queers, alcoholics and otherwise rather unruly characters.”[7]
Disturbingly, Bezmenov’s writings have been taken up not only by the far right but also by what passes for the mainstream left in the U.S. today—which makes Borysenko and the work of “Decode the Left” all the more ironic.
In May 2019 testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Michael R. Carpenter, then the Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center who previously held various high-ranking positions in the State Department, White House, and Defense Department under Democratic administrations, referenced Bezmenov directly in warning about Moscow allegedly carrying out a covert influence campaign in the U.S. along lines Bezmenov had claimed it was doing in the 1980s.
Carpenter quoted Bezmenov as having been prescient in warning that Russian “influence operations” ultimately seek “to change the perception of reality of every American.”
These comments epitomize how Biden Democrats have been adopting rhetoric similar to the John Birch Society and other Cold War-era far-right groups that warned about Soviet-led communist subversion from within U.S. society.
Taking up Bezmenov’s Torch…Sort of
Borysenko has taken up Bezmenov’s torch not only in her efforts to ridicule and malign the American left, but also to depict it as an alien force engaged in psychological warfare operations against the U.S. public and brainwashing previously adopted by the Soviet Union.
The end goal, as in the latter case, is to subvert society from within and impose alien values that will weaken the U.S. and enable foreign countries to destabilize and ultimately destroy it.
Like ex-Communist and Socialist Party defectors during the McCarthy-era, Borysenko claims a special authenticity in exposing the left because she was a “left-wing” Democrat for 20 years who says she once considered everyone who voted for Donald Trump to be “racist” and “deplorable” (as Hillary Clinton famously called them).
What turned her was the supposed obsession of the so-called “left” with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and the thrill of experiencing a Trump rally first-hand in 2020, which she said felt like being at a rock concert.
Since then, Borysenko has developed an online following as a journalist going undercover to expose the left’s supposed depredations.
These include:
a) segregated employee training in Seattle where white city employees had to learn about their supposedly internalized racial superiority;
b) instructing women how to have an abortion at a reproductive health/feminist conference at Hampshire College;
c) the President of the American Library Association saying that libraries should be sites of socialist organizing; and
d) how Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools hired a drag queen and adult industry “sexpert” to teach middle school students.
Ironically, for someone who worships at the altar of Yuri Bezmenov, these latter exposés along with much of the material on the “Decode the Left” website have nothing to do with alleged Russian or foreign government or leftist subversion of the U.S.
Rather, they deal with cultural war issues that have come to dominate political discourse—to the delight of the country’s plutocratic elite, which wants to sideswipe debate over growing economic inequality, corporate malfeasance, runaway militarism and declining public services, and to prevent development of an inter-racial working and middle-class progressive movement.
Columbia University and the Plague Doctor
The “Decode the Left” website includes an “intelligence” report on the campus encampment movement and the organizations supposedly funding it.
Noting that a number of the organizations (notably Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow) are Jewish, the report calls the protest an insurrection and claims the majority of the groups behind it are not only anti-capitalist but against liberal democracy and want to spark a worldwide socialist revolution that undermines Western power (which Israel is seen as a center of).
Borysenko suggests that it is no coincidence that the heart of the encampment movement was at Columbia University, which she says is where the left-wing “invasion of America” started when members of the so-called Frankfurt School, whom she emphasizes were Jewish, took up faculty positions there in the 1930s.
The undertone of anti-Semitism in the above comments fits with a fascistic mindset.
The main symbol of “Decode the Left” is a plague doctor who is willing to “enter contaminated territory” to “treat the infected” and “try to save those who can still be reached.”
This kind of rhetoric centering around sickness and disease is reminiscent of European fascists who presented Jews and Communists in similar terms.
McCarthy-Era Lineage
“Decode the Left” can be seen as a contemporary of Canary Mission, an Israeli-Likud intelligence front financed by a wealthy Israeli lawyer that smears college students and professors who are supposedly anti-Israel; Myrotvorets, a CIA-linked Ukrainian website that compiles a blacklist of supposedly pro-Russian journalists and activists;[8] and the late David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine which compiles blacklists and mocks the left.
Like Borysenko, Horowitz was also an ex-leftist, a red-diaper baby and former editor of the counter-cultural magazine Ramparts, who took a hard turn to the right in the 1980s.
Myrotvorets website produced in Langley, Virginia. It celebrates when blacklisted journalists are murdered by Ukrainian terrorists trained by the CIA. [Source: eir.news]
Borysenko’s attempt to revitalize a Cold War demonology is evident in her creation of Red Menace Press, which publishes anti-communist books, including a novel she wrote attempting to puncture certain popular illusions about Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto (“The Communist Manifesto: A Revolutionary Fairy Tale”).
A counter-revolutionary book club that Borysenko formed lists books on queer theory, polyamory as a challenge to the traditional nuclear family, and queer anarchism, which the club criticizes and dissects.
In a section that tries to map out variations of left-wing views, Borysenko depicts progressives as “the entry drug for socialists” who “traffic in justice…as a branding exercise… to smuggle in collectivist control” and are really “pulling the rope left.”
More Odious and Ignorant Views on Display
Running for governor of New Hampshire on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2022, Borysenko stated that “fascism might actually be our only option to actually defeat the left.”
According to a profile in Salon written by Russell Payne, Borysenko wrote on social media—in posts since taken down—that “Hitler went to heaven” and that she and her classmates were traumatized in school with World War II “atrocity propaganda” and that “Hitler was [legitimately] fighting communists and made multiple attempts to end the war. Most deaths in the camps were from typhus.”
Bezmenov himself never espoused such views, though he did claim that Lenin was far worse than Hitler because the political-economic system he created caused 66 million deaths, ten times more than the number of Jews Hitler killed (which Bezmenov did acknowledge),[9]
On her podcast, Borysenko disputed Payne’s characterizations of some of her views, saying she believes all human beings go to heaven, not just Hitler, and that “Hitler was the worst human being ever” and that “up to 10 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.”
However, Borysenko in that same podcast reiterated her belief that fascism may be the best way to defeat the left, and called Payne a “faggedy communist;” saying that we know the latter because “Payne wrote for Jacobin magazine.”
Jacobin is actually a social democratic publication, not a communist one.
It does not inspire confidence that, besides using offensive language, someone who purports to offer great insights into the American left is so ignorant that she does not even know the difference between a social democrat and communist, nor apparently that the Bolsheviks hated the social democrats and persecuted them.
Further Spread of Misinformation
Borysenko’s definition of the “left” is generally distorted.
She claims that, if leftists take over the U.S., people will no longer be able to own homes or businesses and will lose their parental rights and ability to travel when they want and to cook their own food.
Borysenko also claims that U.S. public schools “turn kids into queer zombies.”
On Fox News, Borysenko warned that the left’s “primary goal is the violent overthrow of the federal government.”
Both historically and in the present, left-wing groups in the U.S. have actually almost never advocated for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was imprisoned in the 1950s for her membership in the Communist Party USA and had a long history of involvement in left-wing organizations, significantly, stated that “the transition to socialism would come if, and only if, the people wanted it.”
Doing the Deep State’s Bidding
Traditionally, leftists favor policies supported by most of the public, including raising taxes on the wealthy (and forcing them to actually pay taxes) to fund social programs, public education and health care; cutting the military budget to reasonable levels; breaking up corporate monopolies; and supporting strong labor laws and labor rights.[10]
In Borysenko’s universe, however, the left is an alien and malicious force that wants to break up the family and destroy the social fabric of society.
The latter is the view America’s plutocratic elite wants people to have so that they will vote against their class interest and for right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump, who blames immigrants for social problems and whose economic, tax and foreign policies favor the 1%.
America’s billionaire class has invested a significant chunk of its fortune over the years advancing right-wing propaganda and demonologies of the left that have succeeded in shifting the political spectrum far to the right.[11]
Back in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s day, the DuPont and Morgan families financed the Liberty League to spread incendiary propaganda equating the New Deal with socialism and which lent support for a right-wing coup against Roosevelt directed by General Smedley Butler who refused to go along with the plot and exposed it before Congress.
Sadly, people on the left at times play into the right’s hands by behaving in ways that could subject them to legitimate criticism or ridicule.
An example is their enforcement of mask-wearing at public gatherings years after the COVID-19 outbreak when this should be a matter of personal choice and when studies are determining that mask-wearing is ineffective in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and other diseases.
Borysenko claims to be independently financed through her readership, but it would not be surprising to learn that she is clandestinely financed by wealthy right-wing businessmen, the Republican Party and/or government intelligence agencies fronting through philanthropic foundations.
Borysenko is clearly performing a service for the latter by promoting her undercover reporting on left-wing gatherings and groups and by trying to ridicule and discredit these groups.
In many ways, her operation is a testament to the left’s growing political strength, which has necessitated establishment of watchdog bodies run by turncoats who are a relic of the Cold War.
Alter actually criticized a confrontational strain of anarchist thinking that was displayed at protests over Cop City in Atlanta, though the video released by Borysenko made it seem like he was advocating for violence. Alter was fired without even being granted a hearing or explanation for what he had said and in what context. Also at the conference, he spoke as a private citizen and not as a Texas State University employee. Alter has since been reinstated by court order though is not teaching any classes this semester and is under a formal university review, which could lead to his permanent dismissal. ↑
Working at the USSR Embassy in India when he decided to defect, Bezmenov allegedly left behind everything—his family, his career, and his homeland—to warn Americans about the dangers of ideological subversion. Then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau granted Bezmenov asylum. The CIA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) assigned Bezmenov a new name and identity when he settled in Canada. He then went to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) but was fired after a complaint from the Soviet ambassador and then moved to Los Angeles. Under the pen name Tomas Schuman, he authored numerous anti-Soviet, anti-communist tracts, including: Black Is Beautiful, Communism Is Not (1985); and World Thought Police (1986). ↑
Wikipedia raises questions as to whether Bezmenov actually worked for the KGB or at least its upper-reaches that would have given him actual knowledge of its operations. It is entirely possible that he was a con man who was used by the CIA and far-right to advance its own agenda. ↑
Who exactly these ex-hippies were is uncertain since Ronald Reagan, the great foe of the hippies, took over the White House in 1981. ↑
Founded by wealthy Boston businessman Robert Welch, the John Birch Society was named after an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent allegedly killed by the communists in the Chinese civil war. It accused such hawkish cold warriors as Walt Rostow and Dwight Eisenhower of being communist agents. See Matthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (New York: Basic Books, 2023). ↑
See CovertAction Information Bulletin, Summer 1982 issue. Bezmenov wrote that: “Recently I saw a film titled ‘Rage,’ where the Pentagon is depicted as a cruel experimenter, testing chemical weapons on unsuspecting American farmers. And it is shown on TV exactly at the very same time when Soviets are using chemical weapons in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Laos, and provide the same to their Iraqi ‘brothers’ for their fraternal genocide in Persian Gulf.” Bezmenov goes on to accuse the Soviet government of exterminating thousands of Cambodian villages. This is a reference to the Khmer Rouge who were independent of the Soviet Union and came to power after a ferocious U.S. bombing campaign that radicalized much of the population. ↑
M*A*S*H writer Ring Lardner Jr. incidentally was one of the so-called Hollywood Ten of blacklisted writers. Bezmenov’s accusations were right out of the playbook of Joseph McCarthy. ↑
This author is on the blacklist of both Myrotvorets and Canary Mission. ↑
In Black Is Beautiful, Communism Is Not (1985). ↑
See Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). ↑
See David N. Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024). ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
