Grayzone, Grifters and the Cult of Tank

The sordid origin story of Max Blumenthal’s huckster cadre

A photo of US freelance journalist Carl Goette-Luciak with a Nicaraguan Sandinista that Max Blumenthal misrepresented on his blog Grayzone to grave consequences (Photo: Twitter)

The first in a three part series on the toxic influence of pseudo-journalists in the digital age and the danger they represent to the self-determination of peoples across the globe.

Professional liars, conspiracy theorists and old-fashioned fanatics have existed since the dawn of civilization, but in a digital age where clicks are driven by outrage and sensational headlines, these bad actors find themselves in possession of a megaphone with global reach that has never before been seen in human history. But not all grifters and yellow journalists are created equal. That is to say, in media platforms prone to consolidation and driven by outrage, the most extreme voices have a tendency to dominate the field.

The game of exaggerations, baseless accusations and dictator apologia for cash and clout is becoming increasingly dominated by a small and particularly unhinged group of smear-merchants who boast a cultish group of very-online and very-aggressive followers. These electronic minions of misinformation spread the exaggerations, denials and half-truths they receive from their grifter masters with evangelical zeal, and an apparent imperviousness to facts or reality ¹.

Enter Grayzone, a supposedly leftist crew of “journalists” with opaque financing and Russian support.

This all-caps charge against responsible journalism is led by son of a wealthy Clinton advisor, Max Blumenthal and his zany “never met a Human Rights violation we didn’t like” cohorts at Grayzone ². They receive helping hands from a number of shady media organizations and fringe voices that include Russian disinformation network RT, TeleSur in South America, reknown racists Richard Spencer, Tucker Carlson, a nazi school shooter and even ex-KKK wizard David Duke.

Though they claim to write from the left, their digital fog-machine defies political boundaries, incorporating anti-semetic smears about Soros that have white-supremacist origins, genocide denial tricks pioneered by European fascist parties and the “always discredit or insult rather than respond to fact” tactics of sociopaths like Alex Jones.

Every social movement in the world they dislike is the fault of the CIA, and every government they support, which are unfailingly disturbingly authoritarian, can do no wrong.

These fearless champions of state-violence cheer police forces brutalizing protesters, deny well-documented death squads and rationalize oppression at every turn.

Despite Blumenthal’s attacks on journalists who work for publications funded by Soros, he has had no problem accepting money from that source in the past, such as when he worked for the Nation, whose parent company, TYPE Media Center is funded in part by grants from the man he so often demonizes, nor from his time at “Media Matters” which has also enjoyed Soros funding. Oh, and also AlterNet, who helped him develop Grayzone until 2018, when they fired him, presumably because his conspiracy theory mongering was damaging their reputation.

Nor has he been above accepting gifts from the regimes he writes so flatteringly about. Blumenthal and other writers at Grayzone have also been exposed accepting “journalism prizes” from pro-Assad lobby groups.

What are their motives? That varies from personality to personality, but they all share two traits: an inability to realize the world does not in fact revolve around the United States and the certainty that they know what should happen in countries they don’t live in infinitely better than people who do.

As David Smilde, senior fellow at human rights group WOLA and Professor at Tulane aptly stated, they “instrumentalize the realities of the global South for their own purposes — whether that be personal identity work or political battles they consider important — and it’s a form of colonialism”

It’s American exceptionalism turned on its head — an inability to imagine that people in other countries have the agency to form their own social movements and revolutions without help from the U.S. This worldview leads them to de-legitimize and dismiss protesters in Hong Kong, Iraq, Iran, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Venezuela as illegitimate, and to deny horrific human rights abuses in a score of countries across the globe from Russia to Bolivia.