Pekka Kallioniemi Profile picture
Creator of #vatniksoup and The Soup Central. Inquiries to pekka@thesoupcentral.com

May 16, 2023, 7 tweets

In today's #vatniksoup, I'll be introducing an Australian "citizen journalist", astrologer and conspiracy theorist, Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz).

She's best-known for promoting outlandish conspiracy theories, and for blaming the US and the West for absolutely everything.

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First, let's take a closer look where Caitlin is coming from - between 2009 and 2011, she was mostly tweeting about spiritual teachers and gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Osho. In 2008 she published a book on astrology.

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Her first somewhat political tweets were about Bernie Sanders, whom she called "impressive" in the debates. After Hillary won the nomination, Caitlin started promoting all kinds of weird conspiracy theories, including the one where Sanders' family was held as a hostage and..
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..he had to endorse Clinton to "to get him and his family out alive". From there on she claimed that the whole thing was staged, that Hillary and Donald Trump are actually friends, and that the whole presidential race is just a ruse to stop the leftists' rise to power.

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Soon after she started promoting the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which suggested that high-ranking Democrats were involved in a human trafficking and child sex ring. Pizzagate is generally considered to be predecessor of the QAnon cult.

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A lot of the conspiracy theories Johnstone promoted during these times came from right-wing outlets like InfoWars and Project Veritas, and in Jul 2017, she published a blog post titled "Lefties Need To Stop Being Shy About Working With The Anti-Establishment Right".

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And once again, the horseshoe theory becomes reality.

In addition to Pizzagate, she's promoted various other conspiracy theories, including "9/11 was a false flag", the murder of Seth Rich and the DNC leaks, "there is no Uyghur genocide", and that the chemical attacks...

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