In today’s Vatnik Soup REBREW, I’ll re-introduce a Canadian propagandist and social media personality, Aaron Maté. He’s best-known for whitewashing al-Assad’s and Russia’s war crimes in Syria and for denying Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections.

Maté’s biography reads an awful lot like that of his accomplice Max Blumenthal. Another failson of a well-to-do and famous father, in this case, of bestselling Canadian pop psychologist Gabor Maté, Aaron similarly fought a losing struggle to make a career in liberal journalism.

Maté’s personal life is also a bit weird. Records show he was married to a former NPR reporter named Starlee Kine, yet neither he nor Kine have ever publicly acknowledged their marriage on social media, even at the time it took place. Perhaps this is because it also…

…coincided with Maté’s move from Canada to NYC & his acquisition, thanks to Kine, of US citizenship. Was it true love or a Green Card arrangement?

Around 2010, Aaron landed a job for Democracy Now!, a far-left cable news site, which occasionally hosts experts on Syria…

…who tell the actual truth about that conflict — earning Maté’s enmity that his former employer has sold out to the CIA and regime change industrial establishment.

After this, he worked for a time at a website called The Real News, but was fired some time around 2019.

Little birds told me that Aaron angered a board member of The Real News by doctoring a debate between Mary Ellsberg, the daughter of famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and one Max Blumenthal. The debate was on Nicaragua and Maté sneakily tried…

…to make Blumenthal come across as less ignorant and unhinged than he was on tape. It was a match made in vatnik heaven, and from then on, the two praised authoritarian regimes around the globe together through their fake news outlet The Grayzone

Despite having no background in chemical weapons or even any real experiencing in reporting on the Middle East, Maté has become one of the most visible proponents of a conspiracy theory about Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebels and civilians.

Namely, Maté doesn’t think Assad used them — he has claimed that “Every major chemical weapons allegation against the Syrian government has been undermined by Western leaks” and/or “other damning evidence”. This fake narrative, which exonerates the Assad regime from some of…

…its most notorious crimes, is also one prized by the Kremlin. Maté has even admitted that he was working with RT to doxx Syrian eyewitnesses to one horrific chemical weapon attack in Douma, Damascus, in 2018. He even traveled to Syria, at the invitation of the Assad…

…regime and under the supervision of the Syrian intelligence services, to further peddle his claim that the Douma attack was a hoax. However, in 2023, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, found that it was all-too-real. This report even engaged…

…with the various alternative explanations advanced by Maté and others, debunking their validity with forensic precision. Maté has received funding ($5000 for the award at least, possibly more via The Grayzone) for his propaganda from an organization that funds apologists for the Assad regime:

Pro-Assad Lobby Group Rewards…

Another big obsession of Maté’s is that Russia’s election interference in 2016 — which he derisively labels “Russiagate” — never happened. He has claimed, for instance, that there is “no evidence” the GRU hacked the Democratic National Committee, when in fact there is…

…plenty, starting with Mueller’s indictment of a dozen GRU hackers for doing just that. Actually, the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation against the Democrats was a central finding of the Mueller Report, which also noted that Russia’s goal was to help the Trump candidacy.

Even with the overwhelming evidence of Russian interference, Maté claims that the Mueller report found no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. But as the term has no legal basis in the US, “collusion” was dismissed by the very same…

…Mueller report as a premise for federal investigation.

For Aaron, the US intelligence community is both a cynical and pathological liar and the definitive word on any subject, depending on how what it says confirms or disconfirms Maté’s worldview.

For example, the Republican-led subcommittee identified Konstantin Kilimnik, a former associate of convicted Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a “Russian intelligence agent.”

Maté’s response was to call Kilimnik on the phone and ask him if he was a Russian spy.

Kilimnik told Aaron he wasn’t, and why would he lie? Case closed for Aaron Maté, whose standard of proof for other, real journalists is usually much higher than that. For example, he’s called the respected investigative journalism group @bellingcat a “NATO state psyop”.

Maté, like Blumenthal, caters to an ill-informed audience who think that everything the US government says is false and therefore everything its enemies say must be true.

Uyghur Muslims interned in concentration camps in China and deemed victims of genocide?

They’re doing just fine, according to the Grayzone boys, who even come up with new lines of attack against Uyghur defenders, propaganda which the Chinese Communist Party later uses. As is tradition, propaganda boys defame the messenger and disregard the actual message.

When it comes to Ukraine, Maté can’t stop talking about “Ukrainian neo-Nazis”. His favorite topic seems to be the Odesa clashes, which were heavily influenced by pro-Kremlin agitators. More on the incident here:

2014 Odesa clashes

To be fair, Maté has “never claimed expertise on Russia, Ukraine, or Syria” — and it shows. For example, he’s falsely claimed that Russia was not a signatory to the two Minsk agreements. His dishonest takes on Ukraine have been dissected thoroughly here:

Dumb or dishonest?

For Putin apologists trying to deflect onto other parties Russia’s obvious culpability for the war, these are the only two options the evidentiary record permits.

Aaron Maté isn’t dumb. That leaves us with dishonest.

How @aaronjmate is full of shit: A 🧵

— Neil Abrams (@neil_abrams) November 18, 2022

Dmitry Polyanskiy, the Russian SVR officer residing in NYC, loves Maté even more than he does Blumenthal. Dima refers to Maté as “dear Aaron”, and he’s even invited Aaron to speak at the United Nations Security Council, where Russia enjoys its Soviet Union seat.

For some reason Maté crops his SVR handler out of all the content they’re in.

To conclude, Maté is a propagandist whose work is strongly supported by authoritarian regimes like the ones in Syria and Russia.

As Neil Abrams put it, “Aaron Maté isn’t dumb,” only “dishonest”, which makes him a valuable asset in spreading pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad BS.

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Pekka Kallioniemi (@vatniksou…

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