YASHA LEVINE—When we think “immigrants in America” we rarely consider those who are privileged and weaponized in service of American Empire. The attack on Max Blumenthal by Venezuela’s ex-ruling elite diaspora — which has been key to pushing regime change in Venezuela — is such a clear example of that: the use of a rightwing emigre as a legal/physical weapon against a journalist. It’s a weapon designed to intimidate and silence him and his colleagues at The Grayzone — especially Anya Parampil, who has been doing amazing work on this issue.
-
-
Butina: Imagine you are in a foreign country, away from your parents… you have no contact with your family. You are locked up in solitary confinement. It’s very cold and you sit on the floor. You might be facing a 15-year sentence. I thought about how old I was going to be and whether my parents were going to be alive when that day came. And then you find out, that according to statistics, in the US about 98% of defendants who face a jury get convicted. So the chance of you losing is, well, quite high. Besides, who would have been judging me?
-
MARK AMES—One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.
