After erroneously stating that The Grayzone was funded by Iranian media, the Washington Post had to issue a retraction. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal explains how and why it happened.

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Everyday the Washington Post’s “democracy dies in darkness� grows evermore ironic and detached from the reality of what the publication—and legacy media as a whole—has become. In the latest clash between independent and mainstream press, one of the country’s largest remaining newspapers accused—and then retracted—a claim that The Grayzone had received payments from the Iranian media.

The Grayzone editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to discuss the attack on the publication and its dark implications for the future of media.

Blumenthal explains how publications like the Post produce articles like this in response to the factual yet inconvenient reporting of outlets like The Grayzone:

“This is what passes for journalism in the Washington Post. That in itself should be a scandal but what has happened is everyone who hates us, who wants to take us down because of our factual journalism, especially Zionists, the pro-Israel lobby, has taken this article and declared matter of factly without any evidence that The Grayzone is funded by Iran and Russia.“

With the surge in intelligence officials populating corporate media shows and frequently serving as anonymous sources in reports of global events such as the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine and other affairs, it comes as no surprise that attacks like this latest one on The Grayzone happen.

Blumenthal reflects on the media’s self awareness of their downfall, noting that their audience is thinning and independent media rightly and honorably serves as a threat. “They have put a target on my back. They can’t control me, they can’t control so many independent outlets I can think of and at the same time, their own audience is bleeding.�

Credits

Host: Robert Scheer

Producer: Joshua Scheer

Introduction: Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, and I’m having a guest back, Max Blumenthal, the editor, publisher, whatever, I don’t remember, probably both, of The Greyzone. I consider it an incredibly vital publication, read it all the time, and cribbed from it from my own Scheer Post. And, I’ve been an admirer of his work. Actually, I knew him as a kid because his father was at the Washington Post, which is germane to our subject here. His mother was in charge of White House fellows and the Clinton administration. And then he’s gone on to, I think, have a great career, wrote a very important book about Israel.

I thought it was a very gutsy book. And at the time, Thought, wow, it’s pretty controversial, but now it looks pretty lame, actually. the U. N. is way ahead of you, at least the U. N. courts. And, I don’t think you alleged any genocide up to that point. I may be wrong. I haven’t grabbed my copy off the bookshelf.

But the reason I wanted to have you here is I’m, I don’t want to say I’m freaked out, because sometimes I think it’s a comedy show and then sometimes I’m very alarmed. And what’s happened to what is legacy media? It’s not really legacy media because it’s not even owned by the same people that owned it.

I knew K. Graham at the Washington Post, for example, huh? Otis Chandler, the owner of the L. A. Times, I worked for him for 29 years. but now, the Washington Post is a different beast. It’s owned by one of the richest, maybe the richest, the second richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos. it just fired its editor.

I’m not quite sure. She wasn’t willing to make the cuts they wanted to make. and, but they went after you. And your, Wyatt Reed, your top editor, at Grayzone, in a way that I don’t recall any major publication would have ever done in the worst days of the Cold War and McCarthyism or anything else.

it really, I have to say, was unseemly is the word I would use. and, it’s hard to do red baiting because they always want to drag Russia into it. And it’s now run by. A guy who denounced communism and defeats the Communist Party in elections and so forth. I don’t know what the right word is.

It’s fear mongering, certainly. And, it’s an attempt to destroy freedom of the press. I kept thinking when I was reading the book. The article about you and then reading your rejoinder, which we did post on ScheerPost, I think about Tom Paine, for God’s sake, you think of Tom Paine as this great defender of free speech, free press and so forth.

And, even at his, in his day, people said he was an agent of the French or agent of someone else, but they didn’t go so far as to say. He shouldn’t have any free speech rights. In fact, they enshrined the free speech rights of folks like Tom Paine and our Constitution, whether they like what they had to say or not.

I’m taking too much time for this introduction. Tell the people who haven’t read your Rejoined or read the Washington Post article, which had to retract its opening, sentence. But why don’t you just take it over now? And explain what this happened. And I know for you, it’s not a joke. And for free press, it’s not a joke, but I guess it’s the theater of the absurd.

I, just don’t even get what’s happened, to, to our so called mainstream media. And by the way, it’s the main media. A lot of people read because it’s what, Apple News. features. They go, they even have news week up there in time magazine and every day, every morning I’m greeted to Apple news and it’s all, it’s publication.

I didn’t even know who owns these anymore. So tell me about the Washington post and, their attack on you and your publication and on why read

Max Blumenthal: well, This was in the Washington post full page, essentially arguing without any facts or any, argument that we should be criminalized, possibly jailed. The hook of the article.

Is that Wyatt Reed who I made managing editor. I don’t even know what that means. It was just, like a title. I don’t know what it entails. Why it does editing for me. And he writes articles, and sometimes appears on our live stream to do analysis. Four years ago, he publicly did some production and appearances on press TV.

Press TV is, a great show. It’s an Iranian state backed international broadcaster that performs the same role as like the BBC or Al Jazeera. And he said that he was a producer for Press TV on his Twitter bio. This is not something he hid. I don’t know what the facts of his arrangement were, what the details were with them, but you would assume if someone’s doing production for them and he was like covering things like Black Lives Matter protests and fairly mundane stuff.

He was also covering them getting fees from CBS News, notorious enemy of the state, CBS News for his coverage of Black Lives Matter. He was just out there, start launching a journalistic career independently. And he had no. Involvement with the gray zone, except that we would hang out together.

Sometimes he wasn’t on staff. And so that’s all they have in this Washington Post article. And with that, basically, they got these hack documents somehow, which, according to the hack documents show, Wyatt Reed got some chump change for his work for press TV. They first alleged that Wyatt violated U. S.

sanctions and therefore should be criminally punished. But they also tried to tie it to the gray zone. Somehow, because we have been busting Israel’s propaganda, and to try to create the sense that Iran is actually influencing us and even paying us, along with Russia. Which they present no evidence for and that’s why we’re a criminal outlet, the use, the author who’s the head of the digital threat section at the Washington Post.

We’ve been classified as a digital threat at the great. This is

Scheer: Joseph

Blumenthal: men,

Scheer: Is that actually, a title? It’s not a masthead title. Is it a title at a newspaper?

Blumenthal: He said, I’m the digital threats editor at the Washington Post. He approached Wyatt Reed by email and demanded to speak to his lawyer.

That’s how he approached him and accused him of violating U. S. sanctions in all sorts of ways, violating U. S. law in all sorts of ways. I’ve never seen anything like that from another journalist. And it really speaks to the hostility that legacy media, which is itself is. A conduit for U. S. Intelligence has for us.

it this article clearly was related to our reporting and, the investigations we’ve done on Israel’s lies about October 7th. He mentions it repeatedly in the piece, falsely accuses us of misinformation, then says that there’s some kind of overlap in funding between Wyatt Reed and the Gray Zone, which makes no sense, that election season misinformation is a plague and a menace, even though nothing we’ve written has anything to do with the U.

S. election. Nor is it misinformation and uses words like the complexity of misinformation. There’s a caption underneath a photo of Vladimir Putin at the top of the article, which says that Russia is seeking new ways to influence Americans, insinuating that the gray zone is one of those ways, even though there’s no.

Evidence provided at all in the article. And let’s just state Russia and Iran do not support fund the gray zone. So what is the point of this article? it’s obviously that the three letter agencies are after us. They can’t discredit us. They see that our audience is growing while the audience of the Washington Post has shrunk by 50% in the past year, and now they’re just seeking to finesse some kind of federal investigation.

If you look at. Every source in this Washington Post article, those quoted by the demonstrably mendacious author Joseph Men, they’re all funded by the U. S. government and their intelligence fronts, like the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab, which is also funded by the United Arab Emirates, kind of adversary of Iran.

Australian Strategic and Policy Institute. is quoted there about the Solomon Islands. We’ve never written about the Solomon Islands. It’s just like a complete non sequitur. But ASPI, this think tank that I just mentioned is also funded by the U. S. government and by arms manufacturers that are making tons of money off the Ukraine proxy war and off U.

S. military aid to Israel. Same with the Atlantic Council. The guy who got these, hack documents from about press TV is. A bizarre internet troll who has been described in his own emails and by others as an FBI informant. His name is Neil Rauhauser. Just a bizarre character. And down the line, in other words, every source is sponsored by the US government or a foreign government and they’re falsely accusing us of being government backed when we’re not.

And this is what passes for journalism in the Washington Post. That in itself should be a scandal but what has happened is everyone who hates us, who wants to take us down because of our factual journalism, especially Zionists, the pro-Israel lobby, has taken this article and declared matter of factly without any evidence that The Grayzone is funded by Iran and Russia.

that was the headline in Israel’s I 24 and they just state that without any evidence.

Scheer: Can you sue over that?

Blumenthal: I’d have to go to Israel to sue them, and I don’t think I’ll be allowed into Israel at this point. Yeah,

Scheer: I just was curious, because I always say it’s, bizarre, it’s not even a dark comedy, it’s a stupid comedy, except this is how you destroy freedom.

Yeah, and that’s what they’re doing. Yeah, it was pointed out, by Charlie Chaplin was a comic figure until he wasn’t a comic figure. And there’s a way of looking, look, first of all, I’m, deadly opposed to any ad hominem attacks on, on any story because you have to look at the story, see what they came up with.

And I don’t care whatever they did in their other life, the journalist or the writer, you judge it by its information. And so I personally. some of my best friends have worked for the CIA and, the Voice of America and so forth. And I didn’t ever say, okay, I’m not going to believe anything they tell me or analyze what they write or so forth.

Here, I’m not even sure what the crime is that this Wyatt Reed did, before he joined you. Because what was wrong with, doing some work for the Iranian media? or for RT or something or anybody, or for Voice of America. the point is what kind of journalism, what is that? Does it hold up?

Does it work? is it dishonest? And so we’ve lost the idea of attacking the, like your book. I brought up your book because I’d like to know people to tell me Max Blumenthal, blah, blah, blah. I said, where’s the book? What’s wrong with the book? The book is a really solid piece of reporting, not a piece, it’s a book and it’s real and what take issue with it or don’t take issue with.

So the argument is shift now. That’s why I bring up McCarthy. I bring up this baiting and so forth. cause I read the Washington Post article. There was in a single thing that the gray zone is supposed to have done wrong journalistically. and so the ad hominem attack is the basis of the whole thing.

And even not just that hominem.

Blumenthal: They’re accusing us of, committing crimes of violating U S sanctions. And they say so openly, that, what, since 2013, there’ve been these sanctions on Iran and therefore anyone who’s done work for press TV, who’s an American could and should be jailed. And that could be hundreds of people.

there have been no such sanctions like that vis a vis Russia. but hundreds and hundreds of Americans, prominent people have had, gigs at RT because it was one of the only places, one of the only international broadcasters where Americans could say certain things that were critical of U. S.

foreign policy. you can’t say it in the Washington Post. That’s why so many young journalists, who now work completely independently with no foreign backing at all. contributing to the gray zone had, worked in the past at places like RT or Sputnik because it’s the only place they could have worked where they in, all of us media.

in all of it, because progressive us media, like the, nation, for example, or truth dig, they were hijacked and wound up supporting phony, intelligence hoaxes like Russiagate, or supported the U S dirty war in Syria or support the proxy war in Ukraine. So this is like this, this is just, it’s just clear.

Scheer: I know, but I think the

Blumenthal: author of this piece knows that they’re just trying to silence us because of the work we’ve been doing to expose those wars. And that independent media is just taking on a more powerful role than it ever has. And the public trusts us more than the Washington Post.

Scheer: Okay, but I want to get at the heart of what I do think is the real danger here.

there, with what is now, what is called legacy media, and as I say, like your father, I worked for legacy media. I’ve worked for the LA Times for 29 years, and there were certain rules of disclosure, not always followed, and not always perfect, but there was certain understanding. And I think at the heart of it is, a work of art.

Journalism, politics, or anything else should be criticized, evaluated on its own merits. And that smearing, ad hominem attack, bringing up the personality, bringing up background, and so forth, should be irrelevant. I know I’m one of the first people to publish Cy Hirsch when I edited Ramparts magazine.

And even in that day, the New York Times ran our stories that we had on Vietnam because they held up. They were factually accurate, they couldn’t be disproved, and we were breaking news. What’s happened now is because the news is uncomfortable. The truth is uncomfortable. We actually have to consider maybe U.

S. policy is fundamentally wrong in basic ways. Maybe the world is more complex and so forth. So instead of challenging what you put in your book. And, or what you have on, on, on Grayzone, they’re going after this innuendo, this ad hominem attack. I keep bringing this up, and it’s illogical in terms of the pursuit of truth for journalism.

It’s just irrational. And the fact is, as you point out, the Grayzone did excellent reporting on the, horror, yes, I’ll say, of, what happened in Israel and that first day that’s triggered this off. But the narrative was spun. by the Israeli government distorted, false information was offered, and they’ve had to back off on it.

And so you had the courage to call him out. That’s what journalists are supposed to do, whether it’s Max Blumenthal or Tom Paine. That’s what he did, and when we still had a First Amendment, even though Tom Paine could be a terrible irritant, and some people thought he was a traitor, they still protected Tom Paine, probably was the person to have most in mind.

When they, insisted on the First Amendment to people who were resisting a constitution without that protection. So I want to get to the heart of the matter here, and that’s the use of this idea of establishment journalism, and who gets to define what misinformation is. the New York Times once again has disgraced itself on this very incident of, of the rapes and so forth that were claimed politically motivated, directed by Hamas, and yet their reporter is still reporting.

and the question is really, who gets to decide what’s misinformation and, as I say, in the case of, it’s not even legacy journalism because it’s not the same folks who used to own these papers who were primarily were concerned about keeping the loyalty of their readers and being honest with their readers.

There was a market. That’s why I ended up working at the LA Times because Otis Chandler wanted to convince people out there it was not just the right publication that you could have progressive journalists who could also do good journalism. And what’s happening here is a lot of good journalism is done by the gray zone.

It’s it’s done by, the intercept by a lot of people, much more, much, much more than what’s called traditional journalism. That’s really what they’re going after. They want to claim the narrative and deny anyone, the right to present an alternative view. Isn’t that really what’s going on?

Blumenthal: Yeah, at the dawn of the Trump era, we saw the birth of this counter disinformation industry, what I would call and what others call the censorship industrial complex. And the intelligence agencies, the FBI basically laundered it. It’s or concealed its fingerprints behind a series of think tanks like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which was run out of the German Marshall Fund and created this phony Russian bot tracker called Hamilton 68, which was exposed as just completely fake first by us or by me when I was writing for alternate.

the Twitter files showed that even Twitter. executives knew that it was fake and that they had no, they couldn’t produce any data. But the whole point is to declare anything that contravenes the objectives of the U. S. imperial regime to be misinformation, malinformation or disinformation or something in between.

And that’s what they did in this Washington Post article, Joseph Men. He accused us of For my reporting in October that Israel killed its own citizens, many of its own citizens on October 7th. That’s been confirmed in a UN report. That was released yesterday, an independent United Nations report confirmed that Israel enacted the Hannibal Directive on a mass scale, killed its own citizens, knowing that they would die with tank shells and Apache helicopters after they had been taken captive by Hamas militants.

This is something that I knew Israel did before, and I compiled evidence that they had done it along with testimony by Apache helicopter pilots. And, I’ve been proven right. Israeli media has reported on it, but this Washington Post reporter accuses us of misinformation for me reporting that, and his source is just Israelis.

He say, Israelis say that Max Blumenthal distorted the truth about October 7th. the greatest propagator of misinformation, as we know, Bob, legacy corporate. Media outlets like the Washington Post, and they’re doing it with us. That’s why no one should take this article seriously, along with the fact that they never produced the evidence that we’re some foreign intelligence weapon.

Scheer: But we don’t have the choice of taking it seriously because the way media is constructed now, it’s not a bond between reader who Plunks down 10 cents or a quarter to buy a paper. They can trust the New York Daily News or the New York Times or the Daily Worker or any other lefty or right wing publication.

You now have this, it’s bizarre. Apple, I thought it was going to be, AOL was going to control. They disappeared. You have something like Apple or Google News. And, The internet, and I’ve seen it because I’ve been doing, publishing or writing on it now for some 20 years, used to be pretty open and it was a fresh breath, breath of fresh air for democracy.

Readers could find you and then they could support you. They could send money, Like they do to gray zone, they could submit money like they do to share posts or like they do to NPR at which this hopefully this will be broadcast on. but the fact of the matter is that’s not what happens now. What happens is the internet is no longer free and open.

It’s tightly controlled and, the people who like, for instance, what we’re doing now, the people who will know about it, hear about it, is very limited. So there will be a crowd that will find it, but very often it’s accidental. People basically write letters all the time. God, I found you. Why should it be so hard to find me?

it wasn’t 15 years ago. You wrote something interesting. People were reading it. They pass it around. So talk about that a little bit. And also before we run out of time, I just got a notice from the intercept as a reader or subscriber, and it said that now organizations like that can lose their tax exempt status because of the new rules that are being passed by Congress.

I don’t know if you want to go into that, but what, I, really want to talk about is how. This, the idea that the internet, the positive thing about the internet, it was, relatively wide open. It’s been shut down tighter than a drum.

Blumenthal: there, there was a point when the Grayzone’s YouTube channel was exploding and on or around May 15th, 2020, it exploded.

Stopped and we are our subscribers started to come in with a trickle, even though we had 100, 000 of them. What happened on May 15th, 2020. we analyzed the data. That’s when a pandemic was declared and new rules came in, putting the clamp down on anyone, any site that was being publishing that wasn’t controlled, that wasn’t corporate media that could possibly say something that was slightly out of the ordinary, whether it related to COVID or foreign policy.

And the point was to make us make it harder to find us. If you watch like a gray zone video, like a clip from one of our live streams on YouTube, you’ll immediately be taken somewhere else. After the gray zone video away from the gray zone channel on Google, if you’re in the United States on a, IP address in the U S it’s very difficult to find our articles.

If you Google them, if you’re like in Central America, it’s much easier because the algorithm is different. mechanisms have been put in place to make it hard to find us or to, find sheer post, but it’s still not possible to control and. Suppress our influence like our live streams at the gray zone since October 7th have been getting continuously over 10, 000 views, which means over a hundred thousand views despite all of this repression suppression.

And that’s, if I was just some guy in a bar saying that Israel is pulling all of these hoaxes about mass sexual violence on October 7th, and I was clinically dissecting phony New York Times articles about it before people at the bar. Then no one would care what I had to say. I wouldn’t have to be attacked, but I have a 20 year record of writing books, doing documentaries, and amassing an audience going across the country again and again, speaking to public audiences and gaining the credibility that I think I deserve.

to analyze these issues. And so they have put a target on my back. They can’t control me, they can’t control so many independent outlets I can think of. And at the same time, their own audience is bleeding. Sally Busby, executive editor of the Washington Post had to resign in disgrace abruptly last week. They’re completely restructuring the Washington Post because they have no idea. What do you

Scheer: mean she resigned in disgrace?

Blumenthal: The publisher gathered all the employees. This is reported in Vanity Fair two Mondays ago.

Scheer: Oh, I know. I’ll let you tell that story, but it’s not her disgrace.

Blumenthal: It was her disgrace.

Scheer: Oh, okay.

She was

Blumenthal: forced to resign. she’s basically fired. And he said, we have lost 50 percent of our audience in the past year. Nobody is reading us anymore. And out of nowhere, the executive editor resigns. They’re going to create like a third, A third kind of Washington Post newsroom which focuses on social media storytelling because no one reads their articles anymore.

No one even watches their videos. And what they refuse to acknowledge is that people are sick of them just serving as stenographers for power, pushing Zionism, pushing big tech propaganda down people’s throats and doing the kind of attacks that they did on us. While people are turning, people. Who are highly politically educated, extremely motivated, believe in social justice, want to affect political change, are sick of the two parties, their geriatric war like bought off leadership, which is more and more Americans.

Are, turning to us, and more Americans trust comedians than they do politicians at this point. There have been poll, there’s been poll after poll showing that. So we’re looking at a complete crisis of confidence in the American establishment from right from left across all ages. And so we’re the targets and they have failed to control us.

They have failed to, convince the public that we’re evil. And so the only thing left for them to do is to do what they did to Julian Assange, which is to try to, see us into a prison cell somewhere and lock us away and then scare everybody else, crucify us in the town square so that everybody else gets so afraid that they won’t do what we did.

Even though what we do is completely. legal within the realm of the first amendment and ethical within what I understand to be journalistic practice. What they do is something else. and they don’t do a disclosure. Bob, like Gregg Jaffe, Washington Post, national security reporter. He’s a simultaneously a fellow at the center for new American security.

What is that? It’s the Democrats version of the law. Project for a New American Century. It’s funded by the U. S. government, by the State Department, by the Pentagon, and by the arms manufacturers. You think that guy’s gonna, you think that guy’s gonna challenge, bite the hand that feeds him? I don’t think so.

Scheer: but speaking of the hand that feeds him, it’s ultimately Jeff Bezos. Oh, yeah. Who actually used his own personal money, didn’t even have to use Amazon. To buy the Washington Post and it’s interesting because what did he

Blumenthal: do? Sorry to interrupt, but what did he do a few days after buying the post? He inked a deal with the CIA to host their cloud at Amazon for 600 million.

Scheer: That’s exactly the point I was going to make, but, thanks for beating me to it. I have to give way to younger people here, but, it’s not just the, cloud. the fact is that, Google, Amazon, These companies are deeply entwined with the military industrial complex that General Eisenhower turned president warned us about in his farewell address.

They don’t even teach that in schools anymore, make much comment about it, but this idea of our having a war driven economy. Needing, therefore, not to, prevent peace between, in Ukraine and Russia, or to prevent ultimately any solution that would acknowledge the rights of Palestinians to full human rights.

They actually benefit from this state of conflict in the world. and, exploiting it. And, the interesting thing, I don’t think if they can silence you, they can silence me, there still will be good journalists writing good stories. The Times of London had a very good story on the very subject that you’re talking about, the whole rape thing just yesterday.

There are other people will do it. The point is they won’t have careers for long. That really, you have to go to the question of the ownership of media. I promised you I’d let you go, after 30 minutes, so I’ll cut it off. But I, just, what’s really disturbing here is the illusion of a free press. And, I’ve been at this a long time, 60 years or something or more.

And, I’ve never seen a worse situation because it’s deceptive, it’s, like people don’t even know, you, oh, this is Newsweek, this is Time, no it isn’t, it’s something different, it went through bankruptcy or change or different owners, and no, your Washington Post is not the, sweat and blood of, Phil Graham and, and others, it’s, no, it’s, a toy, something different.

Over Jeff Bezos, right? I don’t know. Yeah,

Blumenthal: it’s not just that it’s the toy of Jeff Bezos. It’s that, as you pointed out, it supports a particular culture of journalists and spits out anyone who understands the world From a non imperialist perspective or is not willing to cultivate, to be an access journalist and focus on cultivating sources within the three letter agencies and the military and serve as their stenographer.

they ultimately cannot last. And then where do they work? Where is there to work in the United States? It’s the perfect propaganda model. It’s there’s nowhere for you to work or to be heard. Except R. T. And now R. T. can’t even operate inside the United States as far as I know. and if you work for them, you can never work again because the Washington Post will brand you persona non grata and speculate on whether you should be jailed.

Scheer: Let me just conclude this though, but it’s interesting. I start each morning, reading the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba, a, capitalist enterprise in China. They’re learning, the Chinese, I think, are learning there’s a much more efficient form of totalitarianism. This was the argument between Orwell and Huxley, and Huxley said, no, it doesn’t need the boot all the time.

It can be done through seduction, control. and, I see it, I read, actually they have articles that are, it’s English language, it’s gamed in Hong Kong, but it’s worldwide available. They have some criticism, they have some, people learn to play this game throughout the world. The fact of the matter is, And I want to go to the end just with that word, a non imperial, because we were all raised to never think of the United States as possibly imperialistic, even though objectively looking at its number of bases and its power and its influence and control, there’s no question.

but the real information that they want to suppress, it is the notion of American innocence, that they wanted to assert. That’s really, I, as I see it, at the heart of this whole thing. And here, Biden and Trump are joined at the hip, or when Trump said, he’s gonna make America great, and Hillary Clinton said, America’s always been great.

And the idea that this country can make mistakes, but not do anything fundamentally wrong, is the big issue in the world right now. Whether it’s coming from India, Brazil, South Africa, people are objecting. to that control of the narrative, and they’re saying, no, that’s what we mean by a multipolar world.

They’re saying we are actors in this world. We get to weigh in. That’s what the UN is doing, pushing back. And I think that is really the issue. It’s not, a non imperialist view. It’s any idea of challenging the virtue of American supremacy.

Blumenthal: Yeah, I was attacked in the, the, mainstream media attacks on me really started around Syria.

this, shouldn’t have even concerned the United States, but the way that the United States wages war and exerts its imperial influences often through proxies now, so that can do so without. Having its, being held accountable the same way that it was with what it did in Iraq, which is a purely American operation that decimated a country destabilized an entire swath of the globe.

In Syria, the U. S. Was using. Jihadist death squads that it would arm covertly or semi covertly, and then it had this, White Helmets operation of so called rescuers who would pump out propaganda from the ground and accuse the Syrian government of chemical attacks, and I played a seminal role, along with many others, in exposing them as A front for British and U.

S. Intelligence. And I was attacked in the New York review of books by journalist Janine DG Giovanni, who has very close ties to the U. S. State Department has gotten awards from the State Department, and she claimed that she You know, the, I think she claimed that the gray zone was launched by Russia, it was basically founded by the Russian government.

There’s no evidence whatsoever. The New York review of books, by the way, is sponsored entirely, almost entirely by George Soros and his operation. And Soros had been identified as early as 1991 in the Washington post as an overt operator on behalf of us intelligence doing what the CIA used to do. in secret.

He was doing it openly and sponsoring regime change operations around the world to open up more post Soviet countries to his, business interests. And he had called for regime change in Syria and the pages of the New York review of books under his own name. So there was that attack. Then we started getting attacked by mainstream publications because at the gray zone, we were busting the Narrative that the Trump administration was putting out about a genocide of the Uyghur people in northwestern China.

In order to ramp up conflict with China, justify sanctions, and we clinically dismantled this narrative, which wasn’t to say that Uyghur people haven’t faced repression there. We can see what a facile narrative that was when the U. S. is denying that genocide is being committed in Gaza, when it’s being live streamed right before our eyes and we’re seeing 100 civilians, 200 civilians killed every day, along with mass displacement and famine.

Attacks can have been continuous with October 7th, we’ve been attacked twice in major Washington Post features and the first one accused us of October 7th denialism and I think this is the key here to what’s going on when you talk about American innocence. We’re being accused of October 7th denialism.

It was a reporter named Liza Dvoskin. I clowned her by calling her live on a Grayzone livestream and demanding to know how she could accuse us of such a thing when we were publishing facts. And that didn’t work out very well for her. But her main source on the article was It was another one of these censorship industrial complex outfits called the National Contagion Research Institute.

And you take a look into what it is, it was founded by a former director of the Anti Defamation League. So it’s the Israel lobby. It has tons of former DHS on its board. And it’s been advised by a former Israeli intelligence officer, Seema Vakdan Gil, whose job was to defame and attack the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

inside the United States to attack American citizens on behalf of Israel. That was the Washington Post source. But October 7th denialism, we were attacked again in the Washington Post with all of these spook sources for the same thing, for publishing quote unquote misinformation about October 7th. So what are we doing there that merits so many attacks in such a high profile publication?

We are preventing. Israel and the Biden administration and the, I guess the U. S. from consolidating this idea of the October 7th attack as a new Holocaust. That’s what they are trying to do. They’re already setting up de facto Holocaust museums, like a Nova Electronic Music Festival exhibit in New York City.

Which is like a clockwork orange style psychological attack on all visitors to make them hate Palestinians and Hamas to the point where they support what Israel’s doing in Gaza That Israel’s turning all the southern kibbutzim that were attacked into de facto Holocaust museums And if they can consolidate this narrative of October 7th, what they can do is then Prevent anyone from putting October 7th in historical or political context of an occupied people Breaking out of their prison and attacking their occupier, which isn’t to say that atrocities didn’t occur They can completely Delegitimize the Palestinian cause, but more than that, if they can turn October 7th into the new Holocaust, they can criminalize what they call October 7th denialism, because as we know, Holocaust denial has been criminalized in many countries in Western Europe.

In fact, the world’s premier Holocaust revisionist, David Irving, spent time in prison in Austria The crime of denying the Holocaust and then it also classifies all of us who have tried to bust Israeli propaganda as David Irving as basically Nazis. And so I think that’s our real crime here is we have prevented them from consolidating that, and therefore we have interrupted and undermined Israeli and American exceptionalism, I think, on a permanent basis.

So whatever happens to us, I’m really. I’m proud that we made that contribution because I believe in history. I believe in real politics, in context, and especially critical thinking.

Scheer: All right. I said, I’ll let you go after 30 minutes, but this is 41. I want to for doing this and, yeah, it, I don’t want to go into it, but people should read your book.

What’s the title again? I forgot on Israel. I found it. It’s called Goliath. That’s right, of course, Goliath. And what was so profound about that book, because I happened to be there at the Six Day War, at the end of the Six Day War, I was in Gaza, I was in the West Bank, and so forth, and, if you talk about fake history, my God, nobody ever mentions that there was no Palestinian Air Force, Navy, or Army, or anything that attacked Israel.

In fact, the Six Day War was a preemptive war, and that, that Israel had no trouble. The great Goliath then was supposed to be Egypt, which is really had a third world army and force. Israel had the U. S. behind it with great detail of accuracy in their intelligence gathering and weaponry and everything else.

Nonetheless, Israel made peace with Egypt, which had been, controlling Gaza. They made peace with Jordan, which had been controlling the West Bank. So the whole, I loved about your book is it’s a denial of the David Goliath image. Israel was never David, the Palestinians, it’s a joke to think of him as Goliath to this day.

And so if you want to talk about fake history, that is a core right now. And as a matter of fact, if October 7th hadn’t happened, Israel was in the process of embracing Saudi Arabia, which is the center of religious intolerance of this sort, and certainly not having any trouble with Egypt and so forth. So Goliath, very important book to demystify the whole subject.

I want to thank you for doing this. I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at the NPR station KCRW in Santa Monica for hosting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer. Diego Ramos who writes the introduction and Max Jones who puts up the video and the JKW Foundation. I hope I’m not making life miserable for them, but in the memory of Jean Stein, I One of the rare American public intellectuals and writers who very early on, saw that, the Palestinians were hardly, the Goliath in this situation and, came to the support of Edward Said, one of our great scholars, asserting, this opposite view that the Palestinians are human beings like anyone else entitled to the same human rights as anyone else.

So on that note, see you next week with another edition. of sheer intelligence.