Ken Silverstein takes on the ALLEGEDLY "thinking outside the box" stenos

I'm talking about the likes of Max Blumenthal (and his lapdog Mona Holland), Aaron Maté, Ben Norton, more and more Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, and their sometime fellow traveler Matt Taibbi, and more and more Glenn Greenwald.

 For these people, I even invented the label "allegedly outside the box thinkers." 

(Mona Holland is not a "name" other than the [former? still not sure on that one] lapdog of Glennwald. But, she's included for, within the last month or so, tweeting that Max is "factual." Max ain't Factual or Factor, except a factor in being lead suck-up to authoritarians of various types.

Well, Ken Silverstein, focusing on Max, has their number.

Per what Ken and I have written, he's a HUGE peddler of Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid, for example. He has been or is on the control of Russian or Chinese state media. And, hey Max and Mona, this is NOT like the New York Times. It's like Max would be working for Voice of America.

Ames and Levine fooled me for a while with their "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear." But, now that we know that Guccifer 2.0 hacked both RNC and DNC, that right there has put paid to their bullshit, as I noted with an extensive overhaul of my original Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear thoughts.. So has the involvement of Disobedient Petulant Media, the batshit crazy of Bill Binney and Ray McGovern and more.

Related? I've directly Tweeted Maté more than once to ask if he's a Seth Rich conspiracy theorist. Crickets. Same applies to most the others above. I think Holland is grounded enough to not be that crazy, but when you play with fire and become fellow travelers with arsonists, you leave yourself open to suspicions.

And, yes, "fellow travelers" is the right word. In all its Tankie glory.

(Update: Ken has a new piece on Aaron, who now looks like as big a dipshit as Max.)

Look, it's easy to say Xi Jinping is committing cultural genocide AND that the US and much of its media is hypocritical for piling on. If you can't walk and chew gum, or walk and fart at the same time (that's what LBJ actualy said about Jerry Ford) on this, take your twosiderism out the door.

That also goes for Green Party nutter fellow travelers like Margaret Flowers and the late Kevin Zeese, along with 2020 prez nominee Howie Hawkins. Flowers said we should treat Xi on the Uyghurs "in Chinese terms," which almost got her a Godwin's Law rebuke on Twitter, and will if I ever see her doing that again.

It goes in spades for Tulsi Gabbard, who, per Jeff Morley, is surely not a Russian agent, but who knows about whether she's one for the government of India?

Back to Ken's piece, as not to hijack it too much.

Besides Max taking Russian and Chinese teevee money, Aaron is reportedly wining and dining on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's dime. Per Ken, some of the stenos, including Max and Ben (Rania Khalek also gets thrown under the bus) have wined and dined on Venezuelan kleptocrat Nicholás Maduro's dime. (I'm less sanguine about Hugo Chavez in some ways than Ken is, but yes, he was more the real deal than Maduro.)

Per Ken's piece, specifically, Tweets by Grayzone-mocking Crayzone, Max's sense of humor is appalling. Disgusting. Glenn Greenwald level or worse of disgusting.

Third, on Syria, as far as something more nuanced? "Fisking" and all, I learned far more about Syria from the late Robert Fisk than from any of these folks.

Fourth, in general, Max in particular, as Ken notes, has even less in the way of journalistic ethics than Glennwald, it's arguable. And, that's pretty low.

Fifth, at a link within his piece, to a 2019 piece by Stew, I think, Ken notes the real problem with Maxie: Like his dad, he's an unrepentant Hillbot. That's why he hates Nader. Why he semi-hated Obama. Why he hated Sanders. And, why he's a neoliberal leech. 

Sixth, since originally posting this, I've called out Aaron and some of his sycophants for not answering Josh Frank's tweet and included the Seth Rich conspiracy theorist wondering. Moar crickets! (Aaron does claim that only Cenk and other Young Turks are attacking him, and he did so, per Twitter, with another appearance on the show of KNOWN Seth Rich conspiracy theorist Jimmy Dore. This was the same Dore to whom alleged lefty Maté blubbered last fall that "we" just "have to elect Status Quo Joe" or words to that effect.)