'Informant' Gives Brandon Darby an Unnecessary Propaganda Megaphone

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Jay Edgar Hoover's FBI program Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, stood as one of the primary disintegrating forces in America's countercultural movement. It's purpose: the fracturing and destruction of the counterculture's revolutionary potential. Any means were justified, even lies.

It was never about keeping tabs on possible domestic terrorism, but about bringing the entire countercultural movement, with its various nodes (the Black Panthers, SDS, psychedelic mind expansion, etc.) down. The idea being that America had its revolution in 1776, and it didn't need another one; or, rather, several running in parallel.

COINTELPRO's legacy is one of paranoia, disgust, coercion, lies, totalitarianism, and, to borrow Walter Sobchak's expression, unchecked aggression. It is the America that Hunter S. Thompson so perfectly eulogized in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas's “Wave” narrative. The era that Thomas Pynchon so masterfully distilled in kaleidoscopic fashion in the tragically underrated Vineland; a novel that serves as a startling satire of what America's children—in and outside of the state, irrespective of political ideology—did to one another.

Brandon Darby, the subject of the new documentary film Informant, lies on this continuum. His legacy is synchronous with COINTELPRO and every other effort to neutralize America's various revolutionary and progressive movements. He just doesn't know it. These instruments of the state, these pawns never do.

Darby attempts to earn audience sympathy early on in Informant. He projects the image of a somewhat broken man. One who tears up when thinking of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. None will deny that the ruined landscape could do this to a person, even a person with as interesting a psychological profile as Brandon Darby.

See, eight years ago he and scott crow took a boat to New Orleans in an effort to save Robert King Wilkerson. Full of equal parts hope and sadness, and the will to do something about the Katrina situation, he actually did something instead of watching the news. For that he (and crow) deserves credit. Most Americans are content sitting on their asses as the world crumbles around them. But, anyone who knows the Brandon Darby narratives (emphasis on the plural there), who has heard NPR's This American Life program on the story, spoken to his former associates, or recently seen Informant, will know that there is more to the story. And they will know that unwrapping and decoding the competing narratives is a difficult task. That isn't to say that a clear picture doesn't exist in the Darby nararatives (more on that below).

The film's director, Jamie Meltzer, essentially visualizes for audiences what has long been known about Darby's activities with the Common Ground Collective, New Orleans police, the FBI, Riad Hamad, the RNC Welcoming Committee, David McKay and Bradley Crowder's molotov cocktails, which Darby—ever the storyteller—describes in the film as “napalm" bombs. It was a pleasure to see McKay, in the much publicized HuffPo Live debate, take Darby to task for this wild exaggeration. It convinced me that Darby's future lies not so much as a Breitbart mouthpiece, or in this absurdist persona and one-man anarchist-turned-Tea Partier industry, but as a writer of fictions. Who knows, he could become a latter day John le Carré. (Darby: since I'm sure you're reading this—because you love any kind of press—I want royalties if you write spy novels.)

Read the rest over at Motherboard.