As in Syria, where communications firms like Valent created, trained and instrumentalized media organizations to further regime change objectives, they have covertly recruited a famed British YouTube influencer to lend their carefully calculated messaging campaign an authentic flavor.
According to internal documents, Valent plans to design a “mass appeal social media campaign fronted and owned by prominent social media figure Abigail Thorn,” the founder of Philosophy Tube. Valent’s research on British citizens who reject official policy on COVID-19 “will be used to devise a campaign that utilises YouTuber Abigail Thorn’s existing platform to achieve a measurable cognitive shift in the target audience,” the files state.
I dont know what to think of all this. Grayzone is my most trusted news source, but I have I big soft spot for Abby.
I’m still parsing through it, but something that jumps out is this quote:
Then there is Shaun, a British BreadTuber whose recent attack on left-wing political comedian Jimmy Dore’s criticisms of government Covid restrictions
They portray this as a bad thing.
They also try to link philosophy tube to :funny-clown-hammer: and of all the shit they could have said about him the thing they chose to whine about was him being mean to “female high school athletes who complain about being forced to compete against biological males”. They’re siding with the terfs to own breadtube.
If you’ve followed Max Blumenthal’s twitter recently that’s not surprising. :sadness:
Holy fuck I was not prepared for the damage that would cause. I knew it was bad, but fuck. One of their latest tweets btw:
Julian Assange is responsible for as many American deaths as Omicron: zero
:agony-deep:
Even if it’s technically true (that article is almost three weeks old) that’s like saying “the falling anvil that’s 40 feet above my head hasn’t killed anyone yet”.
BMF level ratio here
I upvoted because I enjoy the conversation surrounding the tragedy of Max Blumenthal the Wise.
This is just grayzone going on that borderline anti vaxx anti lockdown nonsense again.
Max Blumenthal has been absolutely terrible on covid as of late
I’m not reading another article by him on anything to do with COVID 19. It’s guaranteed to be bullshit.
Their twitter is full antivaxx calling the vaccines a “novel pharmaceutical product”, in the context of defending Americans that are anti vaxx, so I’m guessing nothing good.
It’s just very sus that anti-imperialists can side-step this issue, oh well, still will keep drinking that garbage listening
So the article spends a long time going through how Valent Projects is an evil imperialist regime-change apparatus, but as far as I can tell their accusation is that Valent is bringing colonialist repression home on Foucault’s boomerang in the form of… getting Abigail Thorn to make a handful of pro-vaccine comments she probably would have made anyway?
The Grayzone’s a mixed bag. Some of them are contrarians like you say, but some are more principled. I haven’t seen Maté or Norton push any of this weird antivax conspiracy stuff. They seem to stay focused on imperialism. Unfortunately, I think Blumenthal’s the site’s sugar daddy.
It’s Blumenthal. His dad’s pretty famous. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Blumenthal
Probably why his brain got so warped. I doubt they get along very well.
Yeah, the antivax movement in Latin America is weird. I follow Mexican Anarchist pages and there’s a pretty decent amount of that from the left there, and there’s this anarchist songwriter who has an antivax ballad lol: https://youtu.be/DIfM8CTxgj8
This reminds me of some other South African “leftists” that decided to try force an irrelevant plane crash into the forefront of left SA Twitter and :reddit-logo: discourse. Basically the plane that crashed was some super rare plane, but whatever. And the pilot and passengers were killed, which is sad.
But these :galaxy-brain: geniuses tried to argue that the plane crash and people dying was good actually, because the plane was originally designed as a concept for the police, so it crashing and people dying is good actually. Because they were all police admirers somehow? Obviously owning a collectors item plane like that is bourgeois shit and I’m not going to shed a tear or anything, but trying to argue that the pilot and passengers were all cop sympathisers somehow and it was good that they died because of that has to be some exquisite:brainworms:
Yeah, I forgot about that. Those guys are absolutely bonkers. Latin America fucks people up…
