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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 7:39 am • 290 21

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 7:39 am • 307 21 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 7:40 am • 291 18 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 7:40 am • 256 14 • view
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Goldstein (Abu Luna) @goldstein.bsky.social

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")?

aug 3, 2025, 10:28 am • 0 0 • view
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Petite Bourgie 🏴🔻 @petitebourgie.bsky.social

Exactly, he is an op

aug 3, 2025, 4:39 pm • 0 1 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 7:40 am • 323 32 • view
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Yarno Ritzen @yarnoritzen.com

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.

aug 3, 2025, 8:37 am • 12 0 • view
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Thorne 🌸 @ens0.me

Blumental and Johnstone are very much cut from the same red-brownist cloth

aug 3, 2025, 12:11 pm • 3 0 • view
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Steve H @sfh300.bsky.social

This is precisely what @realbaddiel.bsky.social called out about nine years ago now, aiming specifically at Trump (and acolytes) and Farage:

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aug 4, 2025, 5:43 am • 5 0 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 7:41 am • 289 18 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 7:41 am • 311 54 • view
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discoafterlife @discoafterlife.bsky.social

Hasan Piker also does this.

aug 3, 2025, 8:42 am • 1 0 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

It's a lazy way to make yourself look smart, but it's just shallow intellectualism.

aug 3, 2025, 8:47 am • 4 0 • view
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chatsubo657.bsky.social @chatsubo657.bsky.social

Was so depressing when Chomsky became a cheerleader for the Serbian regime.

aug 3, 2025, 7:43 am • 5 0 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

Max Blumenthal is hardly unique in that approach, so its worth calling it out for what it is.

aug 3, 2025, 7:44 am • 214 8 • view
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NM 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇬🇪 @nimern.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 8:20 am • 1 0 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

I think its worthwhile explaining as its applicable to a whole bunch of people.

aug 3, 2025, 8:32 am • 11 0 • view
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NM 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇬🇪 @nimern.bsky.social

Yeah absolutely, I commend your patience, which I definitely don’t have with these people.

aug 3, 2025, 9:12 am • 0 0 • view
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peterkrupa.bsky.social @peterkrupa.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 8:10 am • 0 0 • view
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Richard Dubourg @richarddubourg.bsky.social

This thread could apply to Roger Waters too - and we all know his reason for being anti-West.

aug 3, 2025, 7:51 am • 7 0 • view
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PuckFutin @puckfutin.fellas.army

TLDR: Because he's a russian asset. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gra...

aug 3, 2025, 8:00 am • 4 0 • view
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PuckFutin @puckfutin.fellas.army

Which is the left wing version of Tenet media. The fringes of politics are always the 3asiest to manipulate - that's where the nut jobs and cultists are. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Te...

aug 3, 2025, 8:00 am • 1 1 • view
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Richard Dubourg @richarddubourg.bsky.social

Well, I was thinking more of the death of his father, but one thing leads to another...

aug 3, 2025, 8:45 am • 2 0 • view
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Laura 4 NAFO @lmnash123.bsky.social

Quote about Roger Waters from David Glimour and his wife Polly Samson.
aug 3, 2025, 8:03 am • 4 0 • view
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Vera1 @vera1rednav.bsky.social

No wonder former band members of Pink Floyd don’t want to have anything to do with him.

aug 3, 2025, 10:15 am • 3 0 • view
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Aram Shabanian @aramshabanian.bsky.social

Max Blumenthal is pretty much the textbook example of somebody with daddy issues making it everybody else's problem.

aug 3, 2025, 7:58 am • 3 0 • view
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Jed Leonard @jedleonard.bsky.social

See also: Jimmy Dore

aug 3, 2025, 4:39 pm • 0 0 • view
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Claude Rispe @clauderispe.bsky.social

💯... This indeed also apples to the supposed leader of the left in France, Mélenchon: supporting anything or anyone against the USA, etc.

aug 3, 2025, 8:04 am • 0 0 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

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.

aug 3, 2025, 8:21 am • 157 6 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

Show them investigations into Israeli airstrikes in Gaza or Western-backed atrocities in Yemen, and they don’t reassess. They reinterpret it as performative, superficial, or just for cover. Every counterexample becomes evidence of manipulation.

aug 3, 2025, 8:22 am • 165 6 • view
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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social

This is how inversionism self-reinforces: evidence that contradicts the narrative is not absorbed, it’s reframed as proof of deeper conspiracy. It's not “maybe I was wrong”, it's “they’re more clever than I thought.”

aug 3, 2025, 8:22 am • 159 12 • view