Ask Lemmygrad

Good journalism. I particularly liked Blumenthal's recent piece in remembrance of the late Michael Parenti.

My first thought was, quit getting information from Wikipedia.

Given the scarcity of leftist news in the US, one has to take what one can get, and, as with all news sources, verify, verify, verify. The Geopolitical Economy Report is better than most of the garbage one finds online, but it is far from being a Socialist newsletter. I quit reading the Grayzone ages ago.

They do invaluable reporting. You don't have to agree with all of their positions (i certainly don't) but you can't deny that they publish very important stories and investigations that no one else does. They are a crucial resource for anti-imperialists.

Their reporting regarding Venezuela and Iran have been very good. They are very good at digging US attacks on other countries.

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/12/27/story-venezuela-coup-cia-officials/

https://thegrayzone.com/2026/01/12/western-media-riots-iran-govt-regime-change/

Grayzone does actual investigative reporting from an anti imperialist position and as such I'm very glad they exist. I think we should read them with a critical eye, as we should when reading anything, taking what is of value and leaving weaker/incorrect bits. Grayzone and Max B sometimes give me libertarian vibes, but I feel like with the orientation of their work being mostly war/conflict reporting, any weird economic takes can be discarded. In that sense it's actually very good Ben Norton and Max B went separate ways bc Ben's work is much more focused on economics, so the outlets have different focuses.

Sidebar: I remember watching Aaron Mate and Ben Norton reporting together like 10 years ago on The Real News. Cool to see they both are still doing important work.

Back when I used to watch them, I found that Max himself and others under the greyzone umbrella are outright transphobic.

There are some examples in this article: https://socialistcurrents.org/?p=4428

I noticed this on some of their videos on youtube as well. I think that they do valuable reporting on a number of anti-imperialist causes, particularly with respect to Palestine, but I'm not going to watch people regularly who are outright bigoted against trans people like me.

Ben Norton does great work though, I watch him regularly, the Geopolitical Economy Report is well researched and well presented and I've yet to get a whiff of this sort of bigotry from him. Glad he went his own way.

5/10. its ok for news media but far from perfect.

Blumenthal is a reactionary egoist and sensationalist who has an obsession with "breaking" stories. He often takes personal credit for work that was published under the greyzone banner as if he was the writer. He regularly talks out his ass without evidence and it occasionally comes back to bite him but he never makes a retraction. and to top it off he likes to platform anti-mask/anti-lockdown "Covid is just a cold" people and fired Ben Norton for calling that stupid.

Their bias is anti-imperialist but in a "war is expensive waste of tax payer dollars" way not a "murder and exploitation are immoral" way. That said they do occasionally do good digging and bring things to light.

I don’t know about the gray zone but geopolitical economy report is pretty good.

Its one of the few western news sources I will use. Obviously read it all critically but it's not like reading mainstream western media where only one sentence at most per article is truthful.