In today’s Vatnik Soup REBREW (lucky Max is the first REBREW, where I re-soup a previously souped vatnik), I’ll re-introduce an American propagandist and social media personality, Max Blumenthal. He’s best-known for his great admiration towards authoritarian regimes, and for launching the fake news blog The Grayzone.

Max started his career as a fairly mainstream left-wing journalist, publishing in the New York Times and elsewhere. His father Sydney is a former journalist and distinguished adviser to former US President Bill Clinton. He’s an intimate associate to both Bill and Hillary.

Blumenthal Senior stood a good chance of entering the White House again in 2017, had the presidential election in November 2016 gone a different way. As we know, Russia intervened in that election in every way possible to help Donald Trump win:

Russiagate

Being a longtime anti-Israel activist, in 2015 Max was writing for a Hezbollah-aligned website called Al Akhbar. He was then opposed to the genocide perpetrated against Syrians by dictator al-Assad and even resigned publicly in protest of the outlet’s pro-Damascus bias.

Things did not go well for Max from there, as he was out of a job and out of money. Couch surfing at friends’ houses — mainly those still sympathetic to his pro-Palestinian activism. But then a curious thing happened. He was invited to Moscow to speak at…

… RT’s 10 year anniversary gala — the same event that Donald Trump’s disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn attended, as did pro-Kremlin Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Here they are sitting at Putin’s table.

While there, Max participated in a panel with Charles Bausman, an American blogger and founder of Russia Insider, a notoriously anti-Semitic and pro-Kremlin website. Bausman would eventually participate in the January 6 insurrection in DC, after which he defected to Moscow.

Naturally the Kremlin paid for all travel expenses and accommodation, and the Russian special services evidently had more ambitious plans for Max on that RT panel.

Finally Max had found someone who’d be ready to pay for his shitty propaganda, what a lucky day!

Upon returning to the US, Blumenthal founded The Grayzone. It was initially attached to a far-left news outlet called AlterNet, although staffers there say they didn’t fund The Grayzone, and that “Max brought his own money”. I wonder where it came from…

The website, founded in 2015, has become one of the largest spreaders of disinformation and conspiracy theories on the Internet, always eager to defend whatever authoritarian regime is opposed to the United States and its allies. Among other things, it has laundered…

… FSB-hacked emails of British journalists, and two of its editors are regularly hosted at the UN by a Russian spy, Dmitry Polyanskiy. Grayzone has for years refused to disclose its donors, while of course insisting that any entity it dislikes which receives funding from, say, …

…George Soros’ Open Society or the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy, is a CIA front. Actually, one of the only confirmed donors to Grayzone is another notorious anti-Semite and Putin apologist, ex-Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters.

Soon after launching the Grayzone, Blumenthal also made a full 180 on his stance on Syria, transforming himself from an outspoken anti-Assad journalist into a pro-Assad stooge who pushed fake news to exonerate the regime for its most well-documented atrocities.

He’s also a big fan of Hamas, a terrorist group he portrays as a heroic resistance movement, even though it massacred 1200 people on October 7 — including women and children. For Max, anyone who fights the Assad regime, Russia, Iran or Hezbollah is definitely a terrorist.

Like most pro-Kremlin puppets, Blumenthal has spent a great deal of energy labeling embattled civil society and medical aid groups in Syria as jihadist fronts aligned with al Qaeda or ISIS. Grayzone was at the forefront of vilifying the White Helmets, a rescue organization…

…nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and a major target of the Kremlin’s information warfare since Russia came to save Assad’s regime in 2015. You see, White Helmet volunteers have dared to saved women and children out from under the rubble of buildings in Syria destroyed by the bombs of Max’s dear Russian friends.

As is tradition for the Kremlin propagandist, Max likes to blame EVERYTHING on the CIA. His modus operandi is INSINUATING that something happened due to deep state or “neocon warmonger” meddling. Some examples include the Euromaidan, the death of Wagner leader…

…Yevgeny Prigozhin, and “flooding” countries with weapons. In Max’s world, Ukraine is fully controlled by foreign agents, but the Russia-controlled Crimea is the bastion of free elections, telling us that we should just trust any information coming out from that region.

Of course he’s attacked Zelenskyy, too, suggesting he’s a drug addict because he wiped his nose in Kherson. Apparently the Ukrainian president is also ruled by some “global predator class”. Max has also spread the fake story that Zelenskyy’s wife went on a “shopping spree”.

In addition, Max has suggested that the Mariupol theater airstrike that killed women and children was a “false flag attack” by Ukrainian AZOV batallion to trigger NATO intervention.

Was bombing of Mariupol theat…

Max has also tried his wings as a stand-up comedian. Watching him make jokes is absolutely excruciating, as he’s even less funny than his good friend Jimmy Dore or “comic” Dave Smith. I could only watch the first half, but it’s safe to assume that the rest wasn’t any funnier.

But how do we know Max is working for the Kremlin? The Grayzone boys have been a transparent go-to for one Dmitry Polanskiy. Technically working as Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, Polyanskiy is in fact an SVR officer working under diplomatic cover, …

…according to three different Western intelligence services. His prior posting was in Warsaw, Poland, where Polish counterintelligence tracked his movements:

Dmitry Polyanskiy

One can only guess, but one motive for Max to simp for the Kremlin could be hatred towards his much more successful father.

After all, agents of Russian intelligence in the West are simply losers and rejects who detest their own society for not letting them succeed.

In the next REBREW, we look at Max’s short and stout friend Aaron Maté.

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Pekka Kallioniemi (@vatniksou…

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