I sometimes see New Atlas videos popping up, and I have often needed to have the same struggle session with the poster of the video. So my problem, being an old fuck that I am, have been following Brian since the late naughts. Back in 2009-ish, being an internet nerd meant Indymedia, Blogger, and Geocities created webpages. He was a pretty open reactionary before Twitter and YouTube became big. He tied his wagon pretty solidly to Inforwars around 2010.
Brian Berletic used to go by the name of Tony Cartalucci. The original Tony C used to write HEAPS for Infowars [example] [example - he cites Paul Joseph Watson] [example]. Sadly the Wayback Machine doesn’t have a search name feature, but you can still find Infowars when you type his name in. The message was very globalist, George Soros kinda stuff.
I hear you saying, hey ButtBidet, that was in 2012. Maybe the guy has grown in the last twelve years. Hey, many of us started out as libs.
To which I answer: with the name change to Brian Berletic, he’s distanced himself from the Infowars garbage and gotten a better message, but he’s still far right as fuck.
For example, he did the antivax thing hard during 2020-21. He’s done a lot of climate change skepticism pretty recently. Lastly, he’s very clearly pro-monarchy.
I see that he writes from the maybe Russian funded journal NEO (according to Wikipedia which I’m too lazy to verify). Honestly I couldn’t care less if Russia is funding him, but I just assume that he’s an intellectual for hire.
You’re right about the key takeaway.
I wrote much the same thing way back when the Ukraine war started and we all started sharing some of these same sources on the news mega. They can all be somewhat useful to get a hang of the current geopolitical news cycle and some of them are a broken clock etc.
But absolutely do not follow or blindly endorse their views. Even though people that I’ve consumed from in the past e.g Mercouris, Brian etc I am confident enough I can tell exactly when they have either a shit take or are incredibly right wing biased. For example I can’t recall any specific time Mercouris was ever critical of Russia, Putin or Trump. He only ever likes China when China is adversarial to the US but is not critical when China backs down or tries to please the US.
For some of them like Brian its pretty easy now because 90% of what he does is expose the west/US incompetence and how they’re likely to fail here and there. Its that old saying you’d be surprised how far you can get with just saying US bad and US wrong all the time even among the left.