By James Kirchick
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
When I saw that the commentator Max Blumenthal was going
to speak in Washington, D.C., about his recent trip to Iran, I couldn’t stay
away. I have long been fascinated with Americans—especially privileged,
well-connected Americans—who, out of alienation from their own country, show an
admiration for distant authoritarian lands.
Blumenthal, the son of the Clinton-family adviser and
former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, was one of some 400
pro-regime influencers
invited by the Iranian government to cover the funeral earlier this month of
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli air strike on
February 28. Speaking last week at the flagship location of the progressive
bookstore and restaurant chain Busboys and Poets, Blumenthal portrayed the man
who’d overseen the mass slaughter of young Iranian protesters in January as “a
father, a guide, a religious teacher” and presented the regime that he’d led as
not only legitimate but also an inspiration to the world. Khamenei’s
assassination, he told the standing-room-only crowd, ought to have generated
far more outrage than it did. “Imagine,” he said, “if a rogue foreign state
went and assassinated the pope, how so many Catholics would feel.” The analogy
feels slightly off: Pontiffs aren’t typically known for brandishing
rifles at Mass or calling for the death
of entire countries.
Blumenthal has become part of an ignominious tradition.
In the early 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent
Walter
Duranty wrote stories denying the famine that Joseph Stalin’s
forced-collectivization policies were causing in Ukraine and mocked journalists
who reported the truth. “Russians Hungry, but Not Starving,” read the headline
of one Duranty dispatch, which repeated an insouciant justification of
revolutionary violence: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Blumenthal doesn’t have the prestige of the newspaper of
record behind him. But illustrious affiliations are no longer necessary to gain
an audience. On X, Blumenthal has nearly 860,000 followers. He appears
regularly on Russian, Chinese,
Turkish, Iranian, and Venezuelan state-funded
media. He founded a website, The Grayzone, whose roster of contributors
includes alumni of Kremlin-backed media
outlets. (Blumenthal did not respond to a request for comment for this
article.)
On multiple platforms, Blumenthal has vouched for the
world’s worst mass murderers. At Russia’s invitation, Blumenthal addressed
the United Nations Security Council, where he denounced Ukraine and described
Western support for it as an “international Ponzi scheme.” He denied
that deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used
chemical weapons against his own people and
has implied that Syrian rebels did. He denied
Hamas’s systemic sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7. “A Chinese
state media darling,” according
to Axios,
Blumenthal has downplayed evidence
that the Chinese government is repressing its Uyghur Muslim minority.
***
Outside Busboys and Poets before Blumenthal’s talk, two
young Iranian women held a banner commemorating the demonstrators who had been
killed by forces of the Islamic Republic during two days of protests in
January. On his way into the store, Blumenthal paused to berate them.
“Zionist cuck,” “Sellouts,” and “Persian gusanas,” he shouted at them. (Gusanas
is the feminine form of the Spanish word for “worms”—what Fidel Castro called
Cubans who fled his dictatorship.)
When Blumenthal entered the venue, he received rapturous
applause. Sitting on a stage beneath portraits of the Dalai Lama, Mahatma
Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., he began with a breakdown of “Operation
Epstein Fury,” a nod to the claim that President Trump initiated the war
against Iran to distract the American people from his connection to the
deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But the actual instigator
of the conflict, Blumenthal explained, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
America’s “real president,” who’d visited the White House Situation Room in
February and taken “the unprecedented step of sitting at the head of the table,
moving Donald Trump to the side.” (The most
detailed account of the meeting, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The
New York Times, placed Netanyahu on a side of the table, opposite
Trump). It was at this meeting, according to Blumenthal, that Israel (“the
epicenter of evil in the world”) ordered the United States (“the most
perfidious force on the planet”) to attack Iran.
Blumenthal presents himself as a courageous truth teller
whose work is too daring for the corporate media. But mainstream outlets abound
with criticism of every aspect of the war, including Israel’s role in it.
Indeed, outside the precincts of Trump-friendly media, the daily coverage of
the conflict has been almost uniformly negative. But there’s a market for a
darker and more insidious explanation as to how the world works. Blumenthal
delivered just that—a conspiratorial account of Jewish power, American malignity,
and the Islamic Republic’s righteousness. When he mentioned mourners at
Khamenei’s funeral holding signs declaring KILL TRUMP, a smattering of applause
broke out.
Blumenthal then returned to the country that Iranian
leaders call “the Little Satan.” “Do we actually believe that the U.S. would be
attacking Iran right now if Israel did not have full control over the Trump
administration?” Blumenthal asked. He insinuated that Miriam Adelson, a Jewish
Republican donor, had bribed the president to attack Iran, and he accused the
Jewish state of trying to “weaponize the assassination attempts to manipulate
Trump.” Israel would be “indirectly responsible” for an Iranian attempt on
Trump’s life, which would be “blowback for the special relationship with
Israel.” In other words, anything that happened to the president would be
Israel’s fault.
Assessing the real motives and intentions of the regime
in Tehran is difficult. Because Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that
routinely arrests and in some cases executes journalists, Western reporters
hoping to cover the country must either work clandestinely or submit to
government supervision. Blumenthal sneered at his mainstream-media colleagues
who disclosed in their stories that they were reporting from Iran with the
Iranian government’s permission. “So they’re basically trying to say Iran is
this authoritarian country that controls their coverage,” he argued. Blumenthal
also defended the regime’s monitoring of foreign journalists due to “the long
history of U.S. surveillance and spying and sabotaging.” Jason Rezaian, the Washington
Post reporter who was convicted
on phony espionage charges and jailed for 544 days, might beg to differ
with Blumenthal’s analysis.
In defending the Islamic Republic, Blumenthal made one
false or misleading assertion after another. He parroted the regime’s claim
that 35 million people had participated in Khamenei’s funeral, “possibly the
largest gathering in human history.” He said that women make up a greater
percentage of the Iranian Parliament than the U.S. Congress. (In reality, only
5 percent of members of the Majlis are women, compared with more than a quarter
of Congress.) He described Israel’s apparently unintentional bombing of a
Tehran synagogue as a deliberate act; the presence of a captive Jewish
community in Iran “discredits Zionism,” by Blumenthal’s account. The
exile-staffed news network Iran International, he said without evidence, is
“run by Israeli intelligence,” and “there is so much U.S. air power
concentrated in Israel right now that Israel will not allow U.S. planes to be
at Ben Gurion International.” In reality, the Tel Aviv airport has bent
over backwards to accommodate the U.S. Air Force, at one point reducing
its civilian flight capacity to about a third of normal.
***
Blumenthal was particularly keen to minimize the Iranian
regime’s brutality toward its own people. The regime maintains that slightly
more than 3,000 people were killed during January’s anti-government protests,
which Blumenthal characterized as “riots.” Reporting by human-rights groups and
other journalists tells a different story. According to Time,
so many people were killed during the two days of protest that “the state’s
capacity to dispose of the dead” was “overwhelmed.” Two senior health-ministry
officials, speaking anonymously, told the magazine that at least 30,000 dead
(and possibly many more) was a likelier figure, and one that was corroborated
by a group of first responders who collected data surreptitiously. Blumenthal
insisted that a death toll this high isn’t possible. Regime opponents’
estimates of 40,000 or more dead, he said, are “fake numbers.”
Blumenthal was most contemptuous toward Iranians who do
not share his rosy view of the late ayatollah and the brutal theocracy that he
led for nearly four decades. He described Masih Alinejad, the Iranian exile
whom the regime brazenly tried
to murder in Brooklyn and who wears a flower in her hair in protest of the
forced hijab, as “basically a CIA asset” and “the lady with the hair.” Her
flower, he said, “should be drenched in blood.” Blumenthal showed no patience
for Iranians he met who blame their government’s economic mismanagement, and
not America, for their troubles. “I mean, as ignorant as you think Americans
are about sanctions, there are many Iranians who don’t really see the role of
sanctions in their economic misery,” he complained.
Presidents of both parties have provided critics of
American foreign policy with endless grounds for legitimate criticism. But the
work of Blumenthal and others like him reveals a reflexive paranoia, if not
hatred, of the United States and its allies, to the point where criticism is
insufficient. Far too often, they veer into downplaying or even endorsing the
depravities of illiberal governments and movements simply because they adopt an
“anti-imperialist” posture.
Sadly, there is a large and growing audience for this
reactionary analysis. “One of the reasons why I opened Busboys and Poets is to
educate people,” the chain’s owner, Andy Shallal, said before Blumenthal took
the stage. Shallal extolled the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of
expression, international law, and international norms. These are fine
principles, the bedrock of any decent society. What’s jarring is to hear them
invoked on behalf of someone doing public relations for a regime that flouts
every one of them.
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