Mark Ames has just posted an epic take-down of bought and paid for pimp for mass murderers Joshua Foust, and by extension, his employer, Atlantic Magazine.
Here is a sample:
Last week, some troll named Joshua Foust attacked my article about the massacre in Kazakhstan on December 16. I really had no idea who Foust was until I started getting emails from readers telling me “some guy with a goatee is having a meltdown on Twitter.” What upset Foust so much about my article was that I dared to report a death toll number, “up to 70,” that differed from the official figure of 15 that the regime in Kazakhstan wanted the outside world to believe. Why did Foust take on the role of massacre-denier for Kazakhstan’s notoriously brutal, corrupt regime?
Foust, it turns out, has spent much of the past decade getting paid by defense contractors to front for them as one of their paid PR monkeys. One example: Last year, Foust published a hit piece in the Columbia Journalism Review attacking an award-winning Washington Post investigative series about the vast hidden defense contractor industry, without disclosing the fact that Foust was an employee of Northrop Grumman–one of the largest defense contractors in America.
Foust’s job is the opposite of journalism—he gets paid by war-profiteers to lie to the public, to cover for them while they soak the public for government contracts. That’s what Joshua Foust does for a living; and besides carrying the water for defense contractors as a “strategic communications” flak, Foust has spent the past few years talking up Kazakhstan’s despot-for-life, Nursultan Nazarbayev—and talking down the appalling human rights records both in Kazakhstan and in Uzbekistan.
This is truly epic.
It’s harsh, but perfectly justified, and it’s really a thing of beauty.
I love savage writing.