On the strange case of Alex Gladstein’s instance of hypocrisy.

I still like Gladstein overall, he knows Bitcoin extremely well and is the expert on global debt slavery, but he got Ukraine so massively wrong. The only reason I care about this is because he was a huge asshole to me once over it, even though I tried my best to maintain civility because his demeanor was wildly out of character, almost like someone hacked his account.

To offer an olive branch, I think he got too much flak for what were more valid than invalid criticisms of Bukele, even from me. Now, from that, what was hypocritical of him was how he went at Bukele and Putin…but NOT Zelensky. You know, the guy who shut down newspapers, indefinitely suspended elections aka democracy, enslaved citizens to fight against their will, and shut down an early peace deal so hundreds of thousands of people could die instead and Ukraine ends up in a worse negotiating position than when they started. Gladstein tried to gaslight me by saying that conscription is somehow okay if you’re on defense. When Russia conscripts: bad. When Ukraine conscripts: hey it’s their call, not for me to say how they defend their country. Where are the human rights of Ukrainian military slaves?

It’s a really strange incident, for Alex to be such a consistent freedom fighter on so many things, but be so catastrophically wrong and hypocritical on this one thing, Ukraine.

I see two possible reasons for why this happened:

1. The HRF at the time of our interaction was headed by Garry Kasparov, a huge anti-Putin activist, which is fair, that’s Garry’s prerogative. Maybe Garry set the policy that the HRF was unequivocally anti-Russia and therefore, had to be unequivocally pro-Ukraine. Maybe the HRF is somehow embedded with the neocon war party too, but who knows.

2. More likely, Alex doesn’t know the history, which is understandable. The full story is loaded with US propaganda and tensions that go back to WW2. Luckily, listening to a couple hours of Scott Horton can remedy this issue. A simple fix.

I’d have ultimate respect for him now if he admitted he was wrong for being so hypocritical with his defense of Ukraine/NATO/Zelensky and critiques of Russia/Putin. I’d lose respect for him if he memory holes it or downplays how rabid his Ukrainian propaganda was. I’ll never forget that one disturbing interaction and it’ll always give me pause when listening to him and the HRF.