Also, Ben does good analysis but he doesn’t do investigative journalism which is what was good about Grayzone.

Yeah, this was the best about them. They had a track record of consistently good work, and Moderate Rebels was one of my favorite shows. It was funny, educational and the guests were how I found out about a lot of cool people.

Aaron from what I remember is a radlib á la Chris Hedges, people with a good heart, but without theory, who still regard the USSR as ‘‘authoritarian’’, or speak ill of the Stasi and East Germany without understanding the context of those moments in history. He’s still got some anticom brainworms and it’s related to his father coming from Hungary. He lived through the 1956 counterrevolution, and regards that uprising against the socialist government as a good thing. Despite all this, Aaron does good work when he sticks to the facts, he just has this blindside, or hurdle. I haven’t followed them in years now so this is going from memory.

What came of this disappointment with Grayzone was a great lesson in applying Ockham’s Razor. When Covid happened, instead of observing the fact that China did better than the West, and understanding how they did it, people decided to spin tales and over complicate everything with antivax conspiracies. It was so baffling to see otherwise smart people getting spun around like that. I think that was my main takeaway from all this, that the simplest explanation is the way to go.