Permanently Deleted
I was disappointed to see Max Blumenthal get on that shit too. Will make me take his foreign policy takes more skeptically now.
Max Blumenthal does associate with some libertarians (Scott Horton being one of them) for his anti-war journalism, so I guess it’s not too surprising to see that start to rub off on him. It’s a shame though that he ended up adopting one of libertarianism’s worst positions in being basically opposed to a lot of proactive pandemic policy out of liberal fears of “authoritarianism”, “violations of informed consent ”, and it being “draconian”.
While he acknowledges that American covid vaccines are effective at reducing hospitalizations, severe illness, and deaths and that high risk populations need to get vaccinated, he still opposes mandates, “vaccine passports”, and lockdowns because he apparently thinks that these policies are “draconian”, racist, and anti-working class. His naive stance here is in opposition to the proactive pandemic control policies of socialist governments like Vietnam and China that have had more success in combating the pandemic. I know other writers at the Grayzone disagree with Max on this issue like Aaron Mate and I believe Ben as well. It would be nice if they could do more to knock some sense into Max on this issue so he doesn’t keep embarrassing himself with these tangents that greatly detract from his foreign policy work. I had assumed that he leaned more ML, but I suppose it’s possible that he may have always had more libertarian sympathies than I had thought. Regardless, it’s disappointing to see.
