Permanently Deleted
He was always someone you had to take critically. They do have some good reporting on a lot of things, but they did seem to have this kind of general contrarian and Anti-America vibe. Which if you pull random US foreign policy issue, is most likely the correct angle and means that they often take the correct stance on their reporting. But isn't accurate 100% of the time, which is why they had some bad takes(I forget some other good examples, but Mizokon noted going soft on the Myanmar Junta), and will directly steer you wrong when the US establishment is telling you to take a vaccine.
Warning that on "The West Wing Thing" he and Josh (co-host) will sometimes shit on China and North Korea when getting really riled up about stupid things going on in the US. So like, most of the time things are super cool and good with the occasional "nails on a chalk board" thrown in.
They're cool with the USSR most of the time at least. Still worth a listen
Absolutely!
Its just a thing that happens very rarely and kinda comes outta the blue. Its a bit of a shock when it happens.
didn't he support Myanmar junta because they were kinda anti-US? some of their takes have been always kinda sussy.
Blumenthal's hatred for America sometimes trumps actually knowing things.
Max Blumenthal does associate with some libertarians (Scott Horton being one of them) for his anti-war journalism, so I guess it’s not too surprising to see that start to rub off on him. It’s a shame though that he ended up adopting one of libertarianism’s worst positions in being basically opposed to a lot of proactive pandemic policy out of liberal fears of “authoritarianism”, “violations of informed consent ”, and it being “draconian”.
While he acknowledges that American covid vaccines are effective at reducing hospitalizations, severe illness, and deaths and that high risk populations need to get vaccinated, he still opposes mandates, “vaccine passports”, and lockdowns because he apparently thinks that these policies are “draconian”, racist, and anti-working class. His naive stance here is in opposition to the proactive pandemic control policies of socialist governments like Vietnam and China that have had more success in combating the pandemic. I know other writers at the Grayzone disagree with Max on this issue like Aaron Mate and I believe Ben as well. It would be nice if they could do more to knock some sense into Max on this issue so he doesn’t keep embarrassing himself with these tangents that detract from his great foreign policy work. I had assumed that he leaned more ML, but I suppose it’s possible that he may have always had more libertarian sympathies than I had thought. Regardless, it’s disappointing to see. We really don't need more weird Glenn Greenwaldesque left-libertarians.
Blumenthal and Grayzone in general have always had a politics of contrarianism and allegiance-over-substance. So why is this surprising to anyone at all?
