When I saw that commentator Max Blumenthal was going to speak in Washington, DC, about his recent trip to Iran, I couldn’t stay away. I have long been fascinated by Americans—especially privileged, well-connected Americans—who, alienated from their own country, show interest in distant authoritarian countries.
Blumenthal, the son of Clinton family adviser and former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, was one of those people. 400 pro-government convince them was invited by the Iranian government to cover the funeral earlier this month of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US-Israeli air strike on February 28. Speaking last week at the downtown bookstore and restaurant Busboys and Poets, Blumenthal portrayed the man who oversaw the massacre of Iranian protesters who presented as the leader of the Iranian protests in January. it was inspired not only legally but also an inspiration to the world. Khamenei’s assassination, he told the standing-room-only crowd, should have sparked more outrage than it did. “Imagine,” he said, “if a violent foreign nation went and killed the pope, how many Catholics would feel.” This analogy feels a little out of place: Sharks are not commonly known shoot the gun in Mass or call to the death of the whole country.
Blumenthal has become part of an embarrassing tradition. In the early 1930s, a Pulitzer Prize winner New York Times journalist Walter Duranty he wrote news stories denying the famine that Joseph Stalin’s forced labor policies were causing in Ukraine and ridiculed journalists who reported the truth. “Russians Are Hungry, But Not Starving,” read the headline of one of Duranty’s messages, which repeatedly advocated revolutionary violence: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Blumenthal does not have a magazine status of record behind him. But a good relationship is no longer necessary to get an audience. On X, Blumenthal has nearly 860,000 followers. He appears frequently Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Iranianand of Venezuela state-sponsored media. He founded a website, The Grayzone, whose list of contributors includes Kremlin-backed alumni. the media. (Blumenthal did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
On many platforms, Blumenthal has proven to be the world’s worst killer. At the invitation of Russia, Blumenthal addressed The United Nations Security Council, where he denounced Ukraine and described the West’s support for it as “an international Ponzi scheme.” He rejected who removed from power President Bashar al-Assad of Syria use chemical weapons against his people and he has hinted that’s what the Syrian rebels did. He rejected Hamas’ systematic sexual harassment of Israeli women on October 7. “A darling of the Chinese state media,” according to AxiosBlumenthal has ignored it evidence that the Chinese government is oppressing its Uyghur Muslim minority.
Outside of Busboys and Poets before Blumenthal’s talk, two young Iranian women held a flag to commemorate protesters killed by Islamic Republic forces during two days of protests in January. On his way into the store, Blumenthal paused scold them. “Zionist Spear,” “Sellouts,” and “Persian kiss,” he shouted at them.Gusanas is the feminine form of the Spanish word for “worm”—what Fidel Castro called Cubans who fled his dictatorship.)
When Blumenthal entered the hall, he received a standing ovation. Seated on a podium beneath portraits of the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., he began with an analysis of “Operation Epstein Fury,” insisting that President Trump launched a war against Iran to distract the American people from his relationship with deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But the real instigator of the conflict, Blumenthal explained, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the “real president” of America, who visited the White House Situation Room in February and took “the unprecedented step of sitting at the head of the table, and putting Donald Trump on the side.” (The more detailed account of the meeting, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Timesput Netanyahu on the side of the table, opposite Trump). It was at this meeting, according to Blumenthal, that Israel (“the center of evil in the world”) ordered the United States (“the most evil power on the planet”) to attack Iran.
Blumenthal portrays himself as a courageous truth-teller whose work is daring for the corporate media. But mainstream outlets are full of criticism of every aspect of the war, including Israel’s role in it. Indeed, outside of Trump-friendly media outlets, daily coverage of the conflict has been almost exclusively negative. But there is a market for darker and more secret information about how the world works. Blumenthal offered just that—a description of the Jewish power conspiracy, the evil of the United States, and the righteousness of the Islamic Republic. When he mentioned the mourners at Khamenei’s funeral holding banners KILL TRUMPapplause broke out.
Blumenthal then returned to a country Iran’s leaders call “Little Satan.” Do we really believe that the United States would be attacking Iran right now if Israel did not have full control over the Trump administration?” Blumenthal asked. He emphasized that Miriam Adelson, a Jewish Republican donor, had bribed the president to attack Iran, and accused the Jewish state of trying to “use weapons of mass destruction to deceive Trump.” Israel would be “indirectly responsible” for Iran’s attempt on Trump’s life, which would be “reversing the special relationship with Israel.” In other words, whatever happened to the president would be Israel’s fault.
Assessing the real intentions and intentions of the Tehran regime is difficult. Because Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that regularly arrests and in some cases executes journalists, Western journalists hoping to cover the country must work in secret or submit to government supervision. Blumenthal mocked his mainstream media colleagues who revealed in their stories that they were reporting from Iran with the permission of the Iranian government. “So basically they’re trying to say Iran is this authoritarian country that controls their broadcasting,” he said. Blumenthal also defended the administration’s surveillance of foreign journalists due to America’s “long history of surveillance and espionage and sabotage.” Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post former writer he was found guilty of espionage and imprisoned for 544 daysmay beg to differ with Blumenthal’s analysis.
In defending the Islamic Republic, Blumenthal made one false or misleading claim after another. He disputed the government’s claim that 35 million people attended Khamenei’s funeral, “probably the largest gathering in human history.” He has said that women are a higher percentage of the Iranian Parliament than the American Parliament. (In fact, only 5 percent of Majlis members are women, compared to more than a quarter of Congress.) He described Israel’s accidental bombing of a Tehran synagogue as a deliberate act; The presence of the Jewish exile community in Iran “undermines Zionism,” in Blumenthal’s words. The exiled news network Iran International, he said without evidence, “is run by Israeli intelligence,” and “there is so much American air power concentrated in Israel right now that Israel will not allow American planes to be at Ben Gurion International.” In fact, Tel Aviv airport has he leaned back to accommodate the US Air Force, at one point reduce his ability to flee civilians to one-third normal.
Blumenthal was especially the desire to reduce the brutality of the Iranian regime to its people. The administration maintains that more than 3,000 people were killed during January’s anti-government protests, which Blumenthal described as “riots.” Reporting by human rights groups and other journalists tells a different story. According to Timeso many people were killed in those two days of protests that “the government’s capacity to remove the dead” was “overwhelmed.” Two senior health ministry officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told this newspaper that the 30,000 dead (and possibly more) was the most likely figure, and one that was supported by a group of first responders who secretly collected data. Blumenthal stressed that a death toll this high was impossible. Estimates by government opponents of 40,000 or more dead, he said, are “bogus numbers.”
Blumenthal was even more disdainful of Iranians who do not share his favorable opinion of the late hayatollah and the brutal democracy he led for nearly four decades. He described Masih Alinejad, an Iranian refugee who the government bravely he tried to kill in Brooklyn and who wears a flower in her hair to protest the forced hijab, as “basically a CIA asset” and “a woman with hair.” His flower, he said, “should be bathed in blood.” Blumenthal showed no patience for the Iranians he met who blame their government’s economic mismanagement, and not America, for their problems. “I mean, as stupid as you think Americans are about sanctions, there are many Iranians who don’t see the role of sanctions in the dire economic situation,” he lamented.
Presidents of both parties have provided critics of American foreign policy with endless reasons for valid criticism. But the work of Blumenthal and others like him reveals the contemplative, if not hostile, nature of the United States and its allies, to the point where criticism is insufficient. Too often, they resort to disparaging or even condoning government corruption and illegal movements simply because they take an “anti-imperialist” stance.
Sadly, there is a large and growing audience for this reactionary analysis. “One of the reasons I opened Busboys and Poets was to educate people,” the chain’s owner, Andy Shallal, said before Blumenthal took the stage. Shallal praised the importance of freedom of expression, freedom of expression, international law and international norms. These are good principles, the basis of any decent society. What is surprising is to hear them being asked on behalf of a person who does public relations for an administration that despises each and every one of them.
