I want to talk to you about Theo Slade, also known as Theodopodopodus, Ishkah, WildVirtue, NihilistDelight, ZonkerStout, and dozens of other monickers. He’s the person behind the Ted K Archive, thelul.org, StealThisWiki, the ActivistJournies Wordpress, the Ishkah Youtube channel, the Ishkah podcast and a giant assortment of anarchist subreddits which he has steadily seized control of over the years for reasons that this expose will make clear.
In his essays, he admits he has been infiltrating anarchist events and platforms, including going to Earth First! gatherings for years in order to “deprogram” anarchists from having “dogmatic beliefs”. For example, he claims anarchists he worked to “save” were “promoting the Cambodian genocide”, which is a ridiculous fantasy of his own concoction, but nonetheless allows him to claim a moral high ground, pretending he’s working to rid the world of imaginary genocidal anarchist tyrants who, he insists, want to create Pol Pot-style communist dictatorships to commit mass-murder.
He gains control of subreddits of philosophies he abhors, such as r/anticiv, r/EgoistCommunism and r/AnarchistNihilism in order to continue this malicious agenda, pushing his largely fallacious critiques of these philosophies and censoring topics and literature that would risk promoting them. In his many essays, he describes openly how he “trolls” anarchists by occupying our spaces, seeding them with his liberal ideology, which he explains corrects our “delusions”. He calls this self-admitted trolling a “long running joke” that he plays on us.
To be clear: He doesn’t admit openly to being a liberal. He identifies as a “big tent libertarian socialist with the expertise to build democratic institutions”, but make no mistake — every ideological position he holds completely conflicts with anarchy and aligns with the establishment.
He also squats the subreddits for Hindu anarchism, Islamic anarchism and indigenous anarchism, despite having no affiliation with those identities as a white British man. He uses his "NihilistDelight" Reddit account to spread anti-nihilist rhetoric across the several nihilist subreddits he controls, further illustrating his disingenuous entryism.
His often-repeated goal is to rid the world of “extremist” or “purist” anarchists, and his methods for achieving this include stalking them, gathering troves of data on them, surreptitiously logging their conversations and finding exploits in their websites to compile yet more data on them and their activities, which he publishes to his various websites. He then links to his creepy adventures in spycraft on anarchist platforms in order to gloat and mock us. This is quite obviously the behavior of an informant, or snitch, even if he only does it for his own amusement, which is highly unlikely given his eagerness to “expose” people he repeatedly calls “criminals”, “Satanist death cultists” and “terrorists” but who are almost always simply insurrectionist, post-left, green, egoist, indigenous, mutualist and nihilist anarchists who are guilty of nothing more than holding philosophical views he disagrees with.
His infamous one-man war against theanarchistlibrary.org and its librarians should tell you all you need to know about his unscrupulous character. He spent years logging the correspondences and activities of the librarians and then published it all on his own library, and then berated the librarians when they asked him to remove their private messages and to respect their privacy. He's been banned from their chat room countless times for his unremitting harassment and demands that they censor essays he doesn't approve of and give more space to his own sophistic essays.
He often claims to be an anarchist when he’s busy gnawing away at our defences, trying to convince us to buy what he’s selling, but in his essays he can’t help boasting about his actual inclinations. He says he sees anarchy as part of a “big tent socialism” to advocate for “workplace democracy”, but this milquetoast interpretation of anarchy is only a front for him to spread his retrogressive, establishment ideology and harass anarchists of all stripes, from hard-working mutualist librarians to elderly green anarchist writers and anyone in-between who won’t fall in line with his program to “deradicalize” anarchy.
The latest subreddit he’s added to his immense collection is r/raddle — a subreddit I made to promote the raddle.me forum I founded, before he petitioned the reddit admins to hand control of it over to him. He has refused to return it, and already it’s being used, with his jubilant approval, by a dangerous stalker to smear and harass one of the anarchists who worked on the Raddle project before being forced to leave due to said stalker.
His mission statement for the Ted K. Archive is to analyze “mentally ill” and “neurodiverse” people, including “environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists and criminals” and present them with literature he claims will act as “mental health support” and have a “deprogramming effect” on them. Yes, really.
He uses the Ted Kaczynski name for his library because he believes it gives his project some sort of pedigree, but also allows him to basely conflate anarchism with Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Of course, Kaczynski was ardently against anarchism and vocally advocated for an authoritarian government, but facts have never stopped Slade from pursuing his agenda.
In his essays, he repeatedly conflates multiple forms of anarchy with authoritarian constructs that have no relation to anarchy in order to attack the philosophy and present it as terroristic and criminal and the domain of “mentally ill” miscreants and “Satanists”. By depicting anarchy as a menace to society, he attempts to present himself as someone who can rescue the world from the dangerously insane anarchist criminals who “take pleasure in terrorizing people”.
He employs the same methods in the vegan spaces he occupies, cautioning that vegans risk becoming neo-Nazis if they develop violent tendencies. He works at “deprogramming vegans who glorify violence” and criticizes animal rights activists who would “take the risk to slash slaughterhouse truck tires” as he “could never condone risking injury to people”.
He says vegans “work up to taking unethical violent acts” by blocking fox hunts, which he says causes them to “gain the confidence to get into stand-offs with fox hunters”. He explains how sabotaging fox hunts is comparable with anti-fascist activists “blocking fascists marching through immigrant neighbourhoods”, asserting that both these confrontational actions lead activists down the path to fascism — his essays repeatedly strive to equate direct action and even non-violent resistance with fascism. He tells animal rights activists that instead of taking direct action against animal suffering, “you could have worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature.” This statement encapsulates his liberal ideological position perfectly.
When he convinced renowned anarchist author John Zerzan to sit down for an interview, Slade proceeded to mis-quote Zerzan in the transcript in order to tarnish his ideas. When it was pointed out that Zerzan actually said the direct opposite of what Slade had transcribed, Slade doubled down, insisting Zerzan must have misspoke and he was simply correcting the transcript to say what Zerzan must have intended to say. After much protest, Slade quietly corrected the transcript. This wilful misrepresentation, going as far as re-writing an interview transcript with an anarchist who has made his positions clear for decades, is the perfect example of Slade’s duplicity.
The notion that we’re mentally unfit to participate in society and need to be saved from our disgusting criminal ways by the great Theo Slade, is astonishingly patronizing. His attempts to “deradicalize extremists” by attracting anarchists to his various coercive projects and then persuading us to read supposedly pacifying literature that promotes passive resistance and working within the system to affect change through “democratic means” perfectly encapsulates his conservative (and highly ableist) ideas.
In his magnum opus, Slade talks about “disrupting the purist anarchist pipeline”, which he says leads to “more and more fringe ideologies”. In this essay, he talks about anarchy as a pipeline to far-right ideology, slavery and white supremacy. He equates anarchy with a thirst for blood, a “violent hatred for all things unnatural”. In another piece, he calls the egalitarian freedom anarchists pursue a “deluded” notion. He then accuses anarchists of wanting to “take away modern people’s positive liberties”, before insisting that anarchists want to “bomb society back to the stone age”. His irrational fear of anarchists is really something to behold, and he's often able to disguise it as a "critique" of "fake" or "extreme" or "violent" anarchists when he addresses an audience that isn't familiar with his history of unprovoked attacks on anarchists of all stripes.
It's always disheartening for me to watch anarchists ready to believe he's only after the “bad” anarchists and would never inflict damage on them when he uses emotive phrases like “conspiracy nuts”, “terrorists”, “deranged lunatics“ and “criminals” to describe many of the good people he targets.
Further down in the Purist Anarchist Pipeline essay, he claims to support a “libertarian socialist revolution” while opposing “a vulgar anarchist insurrection”, which he illustrates with a crude diagram showing his opposition to violence towards police officers, the movie Mad Max, people who wish to live in “small communities” (??) and people “terrorizing symbols of technological progress”, by which I assume he means Apple Stores, banks, Amazon warehouses and Tesla dealerships.
These can only be seen as the ravings of a frightened conservative who is willing to pour years of his life into “reprogramming” anarchists so we stop resisting the cruel systems of authority that surround us and instead work to preserve the status quo that obviously serves him so well.
He then proceeds to attack the brilliant anarchist essay “bolo’bolo” for being opposed to “humanist, liberal and democratic laws and the state that enforces them”. Yes, this supposed “libertarian socialist” won’t tolerate anyone writing against states imposing their rule of law. He insists an anti-state philosophy would “terrorize whole regions or continents, as the Huns or Vikings did. Freedom and adventure, generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering — everything goes.”
These statements are honestly indistinguishable from a Fox News commenter trying to spread panic about Antifa, but here we are. He goes on to tarnish the anarchist proposal for Temporary Autonomous Zones, claiming they enable “fascist creep” by rejecting “humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy”. He decries the “racist position of Stirnerism” (egoism) and condemns the “nihilist and insurrectionary theories” of post-left anarchism, then in a further attempt to associate anarchy with fascism, quotes Bonnano saying “Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss”, insinuating this is the definition of fascism.
He then condemns an Italian anarchist group for calling for “fires against capital everywhere”. Finally, he chides an anarchist he says attacked a nuclear CEO, saying the anarchist was “spreading fear” and sabotaging that corporation’s ambitions, before defending that industry. These ideological statements couldn’t be clearer — he’s so disgusted by the idea of violence against the system because he is the system. Part and parcel. This is not someone who only hates “lifestylists” or “individualists” or people he deems “anti-democratic”. This is a man who abhors anarchism in all its guises and has seemingly dedicated his life to eradicating it.
It’s quite an accomplishment that this person has taken control of 200 (!) subreddits, that he operates multiple online libraries that purport to be set up for anarchists by anarchists, but instead strive to debunk anarchy and promote his demonstrably conservative views.
He is a devious little man who has spent untold hours harassing anarchist librarians and publishers, which includes compiling and releasing troves of their private correspondences against their will. He’s a proud informant who takes pleasure in violating the privacy of dedicated volunteers and publicizing these logs for all to see, obviously including law enforcement.
He’s a coercive manipulative creep who works tirelessly to destroy the security culture of anarchists around the world. He's an entryist who possesses such an ego that he can’t even bring himself to deny his intentions and gleefully describes how he bamboozles people into consuming his propaganda in an attempt to "rescue them" from dangerous radical thought. He sees anarchists as mentally ill criminals and terrorists in need of de-radicalization. He perceives the state and its laws as the only obstacle separating Western civilization from barbarism. He defends the police and CEOs, he co-opts marginalized identities to colonize their spaces, he sabotages and hijacks anarchist projects and claims ownership over other people's hard work.
There’s no reason to ever entertain his games, contribute to his projects or enable his attacks on anarchy. He is, in every sense, a snake in the grass. Don’t fall for it. Don't let him lie to you and convince you his long list of projects are meant to promote anarchy or any kind of subversive, radical thought. Don't let him use our spaces to concoct his nasty campaigns against good people. He is not an anarchist in any way, shape or form.
Follows is a list of some of the subreddits he controls with his many reddit accounts (WildVirtue, IshkahYT, ZonkerStout, etc) so you know I’m not exaggerating.
• r/OrderOfTheGoodDeath
• r/DebateSocialism
• r/andykaufman
• r/LeftAnarchism
• r/AskAMortician
• r/Vegans
• r/classwar
• r/AnimalRightsActivism
• r/SolarPunkAnarchism
• r/DebateAMeatEater
• r/AileenWuornos
• r/CringyAntiVegans
• r/IndigenousAnarchism
• r/EarthFirstNetwork
• r/IntelexualMedia
• r/Reducetarianism
• r/veganPhilosophy
• r/Yippie
• r/LibraryInfoExchange
• r/DudeistPhilosophy
• r/Platformist_Anarchism
• r/abasleciel
• r/ExExVegan
• r/Makhnovism
• r/AntiCiv
• r/AngelaDavis
• r/IndependenceAnarchism
• r/MinimalistAnarchism
• r/LeftRothbardianism
• r/PhilosophicalAnarchy
• r/ContemporaryAnarchism
• r/PragmaticVeganism
• r/AnarchistLibrary
• r/Classical_Anarchism
• r/PopCultureDetective
• r/VeganvsMeatEater
• r/SaintAndrewism
• r/AntiColonialAnarchism
• r/AnarchistLibraries
• r/WorkersInternational
• r/AnarchismPlusNihilism
• r/Raddle
• r/TaraMooknee
• r/AbsurdistAnarchism
• r/CommunalistLibrary
• r/AnarchoIndependentism
• r/AntiReligiousAnarchy
• r/VeganPurists
• r/VeganAdvocacy
• r/Bookchin
• r/RadicalLibraries
• r/HinduAnarchism
• r/IslamicAnarchism
• r/AntiVegans
• r/RadicalAnthropology
• r/AfterDeathLegalReform
• r/IAF
• r/AtheisticAnarchism
• r/BreadBooks
• r/AnarchistFederation
• r/InsaneVegans
• r/ShitCarnistsSay
• r/ZoeBaker
• r/TheGrayzone
• r/EiselMazard
• r/VegansofFreegle
• r/excarnists
• r/ExAntiVegan
• r/ExCarnist
• r/ToastTube
• r/UKFreegans
• r/Bordigism
• r/CaptainHotknives
• r/Ishkah
• r/HousingCooperatives
• r/LateStageCivilization
• r/ShaunVids
• r/AntiCivilization
• r/Appropedia
• r/BoycottMeat
• r/BreadBook
• r/CommunalistAnarchism
• r/DialecticalNaturalism
• r/HobbyPublishing
• r/IndustrialAnarchism
• r/KenLoach
• r/LeftistVeganism
• r/Mexie
• r/NeoLuddism
• r/StealThisBook
• r/TheFinalStrawRadio
• r/VeganGateKeepers
• r/AnarhijaLibrary
• r/MarxistAnarchism
• r/Municipalism
• r/PuristAnarchists
• r/Reducetarian
• r/TheBlackInternational
• r/TolstoyanAnarchism
• r/AndreGorz
• r/AntiVeganOutreach
• r/AskYourselfCommunity
• r/BoycottAnimalProducts
• r/CringyAntiVegan
• r/CringyVegan
• r/CringyVegans
• r/DebateAVoter
• r/DebateCivilization
• r/DigitalFreecycle
• r/DigitalFreegle
• r/DigitalRequests
• r/EcoExtremism
• r/EcoExtremists
• r/ExExVegans
• r/Extinctionist
• r/FileExchange
• r/ForHarriet
• r/HistoricalMaterialist
• r/HumanExtinctionists
• r/InformationExchange
• r/InformationHighway
• r/InsaneAntiVegans
• r/InsaneVegan
• r/InternationalCongress
• r/IntFedAnarchistes
• r/LoompanicsUnlimited
• r/MarxistArchive
• r/MaterialistDialectic
• r/PlantBasedNews
• r/PossibilistAnarchism
• r/PragmaticAnarchism
• r/PsychoanalyticAnarchy
• r/RightWingAnarchism
• r/TheLUL
• r/Touchpaper
• r/UltimoReducto
• r/Veganarchist
• r/VegansVsMeatEaters
• r/VoteLesserEvil
• r/AgainstCollapse
• r/AnarchistPossibilism
• r/AnarchyInternational
• r/AnimalRightsDoneBadly
• r/AntiTheisticAnarchism
• r/AntiVeganExtremism
• r/BigTentAnarchism
• r/BigTentVeganism
• r/BlackRoseAnarchistFed
• r/Cantonalism
• r/CarnivoreOutreach
• r/CommunityDirectory
• r/CringeyAntiVegans
• r/CringeyVegan
• r/CringyAntiAbortionist
• r/CringyAntiFeminists
• r/CringyAntiSemites
• r/CringyAntiSJWs
• r/CringyClimateDeniers
• r/CringyNeoNazis
• r/DavidKaczynski
• r/exprim
• r/FedAnarchicaItaliana
• r/FedAnarquistaIberica
• r/FederationAnarchiste
• r/ImpossibilistAnarchy
• r/LifeoftheMind
• r/NeoLudditeHub
• r/PhilosophicalVegan
• r/PoliticalPossibilism
• r/Possibilism
• r/raddledotme
• r/SubRosasLibrary
• r/TextDebate
• r/TravellerRights
• r/TravellerSolidarity
• r/Veganism101
• r/VeganTube
• r/Wildist
• r/ZelfromAshdod
• r/OpenDistro
• r/TheLudditeClub
• r/TheModernMortician
• r/UnconventionalLives
• r/anarchistlib
• r/DoctorAvi
• r/IntersectionalVegans
• r/NihilismNow
• r/VeganGainsCommunity
• r/ARplusIO
• r/EgoistCommunism
• r/FolkPsychology
• r/FriendCollectors
• r/LeftMarketAnarchism
• r/LostInModernity
• r/MictheVegan
• r/UnnaturalVegan
• r/AmuseWiki
• r/anarchistnihilism
• r/DeepConnections
• r/DeepExperiences
• r/ExperienceCollectors
• r/ImmyLucas
• r/intentionalfriendship
• r/VeganYouTube
Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221105015650/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-disrupting-the-purist-anarchist-pipeline
https://anarchistnews.org/content/thoughts-discussion-between-left-anarchist-and-bio-primitivist
https://raddle.me/f/lobby/177748/the-ted-k-archive
https://web.archive.org/web/20230325163248/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-jay
https://web.archive.org/web/20240209032709/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-responding-to-claims-i-ve-been-attempting-anarchist-and-or-anticiv-entryism
https://web.archive.org/web/20231115003438/https://raddle.me/f/anticiv/138355/a-friendly-reminder-not-to-get-lost-down-the-eco-purist
https://web.archive.org/web/20220812194744/https://shows.acast.com/ishkah/episodes/the-bizarre-case-of-vegan-neo-nzis-deprogramming-vegans-who-
https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/197192/-
https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/210263/theo-slade-a-snake-in-the-grass/comment/433044
https://web.archive.org/web/20230616060722/https://old.reddit.com/r/veganarchism/comments/i5dxdf/the_bizarre_case_study_of_vegan_neonazis_why_we/
