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The Chilling Arrest of Media Activist, Max Blumenthal
With the arrest of Max Blumenthal this past weekend, we were reminded again that leftist activism and independent media in the United States are under increasing siege.
Max Blumenthal is an activist and the founder/editor of The Grayzone, a website that describes itself as featuring “original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.” His body of work has covered diverse topics including US imperialism, the Israeli war on Palestine, and independent media, among many others. But a particular focus for Blumenthal in 2019 has been Venezuela, and this arrest happened within that context.
In January, the United States attempted to engineer a coup in that nation against its legally elected president, Nicolás Maduro Moros, and replace him with Juan Guaidó, a right-wing politician. Corporate media in the US (and Europe, for the most part) had been anti-Maduro since he first took office, so with this set of events they dished out naked propaganda. US politicians on both sides of the aisle called for Maduro’s ouster. A false narrative was quickly sewn up tight with pertinent facts unmentioned, among them: that Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves; that US sanctions played a major role in the nation’s economic woes; and that the right-wing…