Max Blumenthal, a leading member of Assad & Putin’s propaganda cult, was arrested by DC police for an assault charge related to the politically pointless activity of defending an abandoned Venezuelan embassy. We should look at the civil liberty merits of his case despite his smug support for Assad’s gulag where thousands are tortured & hung to death. We’ll even look past his poisonous, dishonest, rightwing denial of the Uyghur genocide, vilification of protesters in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Hong Kong, & his writings portraying the Syrian Arab Spring as all terrorists.
Being a grandstander & publicity hound, Blumenthal wants to make himself a cause célèbre by claiming he was ‘shackled’ & ‘languished in prison for days’ because of his political writings. Flexi-cuffs are not the same as being shackled like Assad’s torturers do dissidents. Having to eat with plebeians must have been an ordeal for our man since class arrogance is written all over his face. But he was arrested on an assault charge, not for his poisonous writings about political dissidents. It’s up to a court to decide if the assault charge if false & as far as we know he will have his day in court & family money to buy the best defense lawyers in town. What’s the big deal? Why would the US persecute him for writing articles that in every instance support state power & vilify protesters? The US wouldn’t persecute a guy like that; they’d eventually make him Secretary of State.
He can’t get any authoritative media to write about his arrest nor any reputable civil liberties groups to take up his defense because he is out of jail without a hair on his head out of place nor a single mark of abuse. The murder, persecution, torture, incarceration of journalists is a serious issue everywhere in the world, especially under those regimes which Blumenthal supports. In his narcissism & stinking elitism, he wants to take attention from the defense of journalists being tortured in gulags so he can get his bona fides as a journalist rather than being ridiculed as the rightwing dilettante & sycophant that he is.