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Max Blumenthal / Ben Norton / The Grey Zone Project (10 posts)

  1. truthmod
    Administrator

    Max Blumenthal has been doing some very provocative reporting recently. He and Abby Martin a few others seem to be the only ones deconstructing the US narrative on Venezuela, Syria, Nicaragua, Ukraine, and other issues. They are constantly accused of being Russian agents.

    Blumenthal was a Nation fellow but they seemed to have stopped publishing his stories in 2015. He is the son of Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal.
    https://www.thenation.com/authors/max-blumenthal/

    They are also critiquing Democracy Now on such issues as supposed propaganda on the China Uighur issue:

    https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/10711347...

    Blumenthal runs this site:
    https://grayzoneproject.com/

    Posted 5 years ago #
  2. truthmod
    Administrator

    Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal run the Moderate Rebels podcast:

    http://moderaterebelsradio.com/

    https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels

    Posted 5 years ago #
  3. truthmod
    Administrator

    Max Blumenthal's new book is "The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump"

    https://www.amazon.com/Management-Savagery-America...
    Here's what someone said in an Amazon review:

    Blumenthal addresses and properly dismisses 911-Trutherism, Russiagate, and other misdirections. The 911-Truthers, he believes, “inadvertently ran interference for the imperialist power elite they claimed to disdain.” By this, the author means that the Truther focus on the absurd and minute details of the September 11th crimes and ludicrous theories as to how they were committed, took attention away from what the U.S. government had done to provoke those crimes and to allow them to occur.

    Posted 5 years ago #
  4. BrianG
    Member

    At the Media Reform conference in 2007 a guy reacted quite angrily when I pitched him with some 9/11 materials, He said it was a distraction. He didn't say what the more important thing was.

    If I remember right, Chomsky's view of the JFK (and presumably 9/11) mysteries was to say who cares? We all know Imperialism is evil; we needn't waste our beautiful minds on trivial detective bullshit. (Dr. Keven Barrett retailored that line to say we've already proven eleven ways from Sunday that 9/11 was an inside job, so we needn't concern ourselves with such trivial issues as credibility.)

    Maybe the Truth movement has been a big distraction. Maybe we were deliberately lured into this so as to marginalize us and waste our time. Maybe, for instance, the Pentagon videos were held back simply to inspire a lot of speculation about what they did or didn't show. Maybe NIST declined to analyze the collapses of the twin towers because they knew that would inspire a lot of speculation about what NIST was hiding.

    Posted 5 years ago #
  5. truthmod
    Administrator

    I think I was at that conference, in Santa Cruz? It was an interesting mix of alternative media activists along with 9/11 truthers. I stayed with an old friend when I was there. He was a more mainstream lefty. He told me, "Well, Noam Chomsky thinks it's bullshit," when I told him I was working on 9/11 stuff. That always sounded like an unthinking cop-out to me. But maybe we were duped, in a lot of ways.

    Maybe the Truth movement has been a big distraction. Maybe we were deliberately lured into this so as to marginalize us and waste our time. Maybe, for instance, the Pentagon videos were held back simply to inspire a lot of speculation about what they did or didn't show. Maybe NIST declined to analyze the collapses of the twin towers because they knew that would inspire a lot of speculation about what NIST was hiding.

    I have found myself speculating along these lines recently.

    Posted 5 years ago #
  6. BrianG
    Member

    I should have said that the 2007 Media Reform conference was in Memphis. There were about 150 booths on the floor, and from the balcony upstairs you could look down on the floor and see that the 9/11 table was consistently among the top three in terms of onlookers. I cut off my ponytail and shaved my beard for the conference because it appeared that most of us looked like refugees from Woodstock Nation. I met Jonathan Simon there -- he was one of my heroes from the electoral integrity movement.

    The Santa Cruz Truth Emergency conference was later. Ray McGovern left a coffee cup sitting at my table for about 20 minutes and then he came back and drank it down. There was a San Jose Real Estate guy who was making a real pest of himself because he said there was going to be a crash in the real estate market. I knew him from the impeachment movement and he was a real zealot. My association with him probably cost me the opportunity to hang out with Lenny Charles. Lenny was a mensch, and a great loss to the truth movement.

    At the Santa Cruz conference I met Josh Mitteldorf, another one of my heroes from the electoral integrity movement. Recently he has co-authored a book on geriatric medicine with the son of Lynn Margulis and Carl Sagan.

    What I remember most about that conference:

    Barrie Zwicker declaring that "credibility is over-rated" over Kristina Borjesson's bitter objections.

    A British space-alien advocate (Ian Crane) who said that the aliens' fabricated events always contain clues about their fabrication so the aliens can dismiss us all as morons. I remembered that when I learned that Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission.

    A prominent truther (David Kubiak) declaring that when corporations were first authorized in the early days of the USA, their charters were limited to 6 years, and when the charters came up for renewal, the corporation had to demonstrate that its activities were still in the public interest.

    Confronting the winsome Annie Machon in the parking lot as I was leaving. I wasn't looking for her, I was headed to my car. But there she was. She brightened as I approached, expecting that I would praise her for speaking out. I said I was very disappointed in her that she had supported that hero janitor feller, because she was much too smart to believe his story for even a minute. She took a long two seconds to respond. She said: "Well we all have to live with our disappointments, don't we."

    Many of the best and the brightest of the hippies were lured into spending their energies engaging in organic subsistence farming in the marginal farmlands of the USA, and thus removing themselves from effective activism.

    9/11 may have had a similar effect.

    Posted 5 years ago #
  7. truthmod
    Administrator

    Sometimes you're right, but you still lose by engaging in a battle with an opponent who can define the terms and environment of the debate.

    Maybe we we're trolled.

    Posted 5 years ago #
  8. mark
    Member

    I'm glad I didn't go to the "truth" conference or the media reform conferences. I heard about them, then. If there was a better filter for fact checking they could have been effective.

    As for the suggestion that 9/11 half truth was a distraction, that is half true. Of course the Pentagon hid the best video of Flight 77's impact, they had so much fun watching the "truthers" make fools of themselves. And of course the conversion of the truth movement into the 9/11 was controlled demolition science fiction effort was similarly run.

    These days I'm more interested in how the environmental movement has been steered into ignoring the limits to growth on a round, abundant, finite planet. Being concerned about ever increasing fossil fuel use for decades to come is laudable but innumerate. If it wasn't for the toxic threats of fracking and tar sands we would already have energy rationing, but I don't know of any environmental group willing to say that in public.

    Misdirecting social movements is important to the status quo.

    Getting people to expand practical tasks such as growing food and regenerating degrading soils is much more important than the thermite fantasy.

    Posted 5 years ago #
  9. mark
    Member

    http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/05/cyni...

    ... consider the Pentagon crash, and the confiscation of the video from the service station security camera. That the video has never been released is regarded by many as damning evidence that authorities are trying to hide the true nature of the crash: that the video must reveal that it wasn't Flight 77 but a missile, or a fighter jet. But think: perhaps the video remains hidden because some people are quite happy to mindfuck the conspiracists and perpetuate an erroneous line of inquiry. Would they want to lay to rest a mistaken hypothesis, when it misdirects the efforts of so many? It may be that the question is not What have they got to hide? but rather, Why do they want us to think that they're hiding something?

    Posted 5 years ago #
  10. mark
    Member

    an extra comment about growing food:

    for middle class people to focus on food production is much more radical than handing out "9/11 was an inside job" stickers

    and as things unravel more, practicalities are going to matter most. it might even bridge a few gaps.

    in the peak oil awareness efforts, the wisest tended to focus on food after going through the five stages of grief and acceptance. of course, if one is a breatharian, then it's easy to see food as a distraction (but one has to change their name to "Pierre")

    Posted 5 years ago #

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