That’s why he’s spent years trying to discredit evidence of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, calling them “false flags” staged by rebels or the White Helmets, even as multiple investigations confirmed regime culpability.
That’s why he’s spent years trying to discredit evidence of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, calling them “false flags” staged by rebels or the White Helmets, even as multiple investigations confirmed regime culpability.
It’s why he denied Russia’s bombing of a Mariupol theatre sheltering civilians, instead suggesting Ukrainian forces blew it up themselves, a claim rejected by survivors, investigators, and satellite evidence.
The pattern: if human rights groups report abuses by anti-Western regimes, Blumenthal attacks the messenger. He’s smeared Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the OPCW, Syrian rights monitors, and myself and Bellingcat.
Blumenthal doesn’t just argue, he delegitimises. He casts journalists as CIA agents, NGOs as Western fronts, and war crime witnesses as liars. It’s a strategy of epistemic destruction: if the facts don’t serve the narrative, destroy the facts.
This isn’t principled scepticism. It’s ideological selection bias. He doesn’t apply the same scrutiny to claims made by Russia, Syria, or China, only to those that challenge them. His bar for evidence shifts depending on political alignment.
He claims to fight propaganda, but frequently appears on Russian and Chinese state media, speaks at events hosted by the Russian UN delegation, and spreads narratives those regimes then use to deflect scrutiny.
This sounds a lot like how American journalists have treated Israel. Do you believe we should discount people who did this same thing for them too (like discrediting the Health ministry as "run by Hamas")?
Exactly, he is an op
The result is a body of work that functions not as journalism, but as narrative laundering: taking authoritarian disinfo, wrapping it in leftist language, and feeding it back into Western discourse as “independent” critique.
Reminds me of Caitlin Johnstone, now gets quoted a lot by the pro-Palestinian side... completely forgetting/ignoring the fact that she was an Assad-apologist who denied his war crimes.
Blumental and Johnstone are very much cut from the same red-brownist cloth
This is precisely what @realbaddiel.bsky.social called out about nine years ago now, aiming specifically at Trump (and acolytes) and Farage:
His framing appeals to people disillusioned with US foreign policy, understandably, but it replaces one distortion with another. It doesn’t expose power. It shields it, as long as that power wears the right uniform.
If your anti-imperialism requires denying atrocities, attacking victims, and shielding dictators, it’s not anti-imperialism. It’s just inversion, reactive, predictable, and morally bankrupt.
Hasan Piker also does this.
It's a lazy way to make yourself look smart, but it's just shallow intellectualism.
Was so depressing when Chomsky became a cheerleader for the Serbian regime.
Max Blumenthal is hardly unique in that approach, so its worth calling it out for what it is.
Man, you put a lot of effort into explaining why Blumenthal is a POS. Honestly, if people know who Blumenthal is and can’t figure out by themselves why he’s a horrible little gremlin, then I usually assume that there’s no point in trying to explain it to them.
it could also just be that they're paying him. that's what I've always assumed. I don't know how else he would get the resources to do what he does with Grayzone.
This thread could apply to Roger Waters too - and we all know his reason for being anti-West.
Max Blumenthal is pretty much the textbook example of somebody with daddy issues making it everybody else's problem.
See also: Jimmy Dore
💯... This indeed also apples to the supposed leader of the left in France, Mélenchon: supporting anything or anyone against the USA, etc.
The Inversionists demonstrate their approach to reality when their assumptions are challenged, like when they wrongly assert that Bellingcat only targets the enemies of Western imperialism.