For fourteen years, the playbook never changed.
Max Blumenthal, the son of former White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, built a second career not as a journalist covering Syria, but as a stenographer for Bashar al-Assad. The trips were regime-hosted. The visas were regime-approved. The itinerary rarely changed: a guided tour of Damascus, lavish praise for a dictatorship that turned a country into a graveyard, and then the real work—discrediting the people who tried to uncover its crimes.
No target absorbed more of his attention than the White Helmets. The volunteer rescue workers who pulled children from the rubble after barrel bombs and Russian airstrikes were portrayed by Blumenthal as Al-Qaeda operatives, CIA proxies, or a public relations front. Victims of chemical attacks were mocked, and their testimony was dismissed as staged. Every allegation of sarin attacks, chlorine attacks, or systematic torture and killing was met with essentially the same response: Assad did not do it—and if he did, his enemies somehow deserved it.
It was genocide denial packaged as journalism. Pose with regime loyalists, film a segment for The Grayzone, then return home to be celebrated as an anti-imperialist truth-teller by audiences far removed from the realities of war.
That regime is gone now. Its archives have been opened. Sednaya Prison—the symbol of a vast system of repression that Assad’s defenders long sought to minimize or deny—has been exposed to the world. The documentary record, the photographs, and the testimonies of survivors have fundamentally reshaped public understanding of what occurred.
And so the stenographer needed a new patron.He appears to have found one in Tehran.
In the aftermath of Assad’s fall, Blumenthal has directed similar sympathetic coverage toward Iran’s leadership. Critics argue that he has echoed official narratives, framed the Islamic Republic primarily as a victim of Western aggression, and downplayed or dismissed its record of domestic repression and regional influence.
The cast around him appears familiar: many of the same fringe activists, livestreamers, and self-described journalists who defended Assad now devote similar energy to defending Tehran.
The location has changed. The method has not. Sympathy for the rulers. Skepticism toward their victims. Doubt cast on documented abuses.
From Damascus to Tehran, the client changes.The service remains the same.
https://radiofreesyria.com/from-damascus-to-tehran-the-stenographer-changes-dictators/
