In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing a neo-nazi,conspiracy theorist & a troll, Andrew Anglin (@WorldWarWang). He's by no means a prominent figure of influence,but I wanted to introduce him as a cautionary tale of how people with fragile egos become brainwashed online.
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It seems that throughout his life Andrew has been soul searching, but in all the wrong places. As a teenager, he was a declared atheist and a vegan, wearing clothes with "Fuck Racism" written on them. Even as a youngster, his friends described him as erratic and sadistic.
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Ironically, he even flirted with homosexuality during his teenage years, something that he would strongly condemn later on, supporting the ISIS-style of throwing gays off buildings.
At some point he became interested in conspiracy theories, and became a fan of InfoWars ...
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... and other fringe medias. Lizard people, chemtrails, fake moon landing, fetus-eating pedophiles and their blood rituals... he embraced them all. He also spent a lot of time on 4chan, and he's declared that "4chan was more influential on me than anything".
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At some point he roamed around Southeast Asia for some years and stated that the only way for the humanity to survive was to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. He apparently wanted to marry two local Muslim women until "by the Grace of God", ...
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... he found Hitler and neo-nazism. You can't make this shit up, unless you're Andrew Anglin.
In 2012 he launched a neo-nazi website, Total Fascism. It was a failure and he decided to switch to more provocative, short-form content with his new website, The Daily Stormer.
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The website was quite popular, drawing in millions of readers. Anglin used his website to organize a brigade against Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent. In Jul, 2019, a judge issued a 14 million USD default judgement against Anglin.
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These days Andrew is fighting against the American obesity epidemic, women's rights and NAFO. He's a stout supporter of Russia's genocide in Ukraine, and he's (ironically) spouting about Russia being "the last White Christian country".
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Bankrupt, disenfranchised and alienated, Andrew resorts to only thing he can do: trolling. The best thing people can do is ignore him and move on.
He was banned from Twitter in 2013. but Musk reinstated his account in Dec, 2022.
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce an Irish politician and a MEP from (South) Ireland: Mick Wallace. He aligns himself strongly with another Irish MEP, Clare Daly, and his love for both Russia and China has been evident in his recent comments and appearances.
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His political career started at the Irish 2011 general election, and he was elected as an MEP in the 2019 European Parliament election. Wallace falls to the general category of "anti-imperialists", basically meaning anti-US and NATO.
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Wallace's views also line up perfectly with folk from the fake news blog The Grayzone: he's supported Venezuela, China, Russia, Belarus and Syria during his period as an MEP.
So if there's an authoritarian regime somewhere, it probably has Mick's support!
In today's #vatnik soup I'll talk about the "fifth column": a group of people who undermine and sabotage a nation or a group from within, usually in favor of a another nation or a group. Their activities often include sabotage, disinfo & propaganda, espionage, and terrorism.
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Maybe the most famous case of fifth column is Russia's illegals program. Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) trained several Russian agents to live indefinitely in the US. Their mission was to get involved in high position in the society, build contacts with ...
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... executives, academics and policymakers, and gather and send intel for the SVR. These "illegals" were often given the identities of dead people and they were supposed to live a normal American life to not raise any suspicion among the common folk.
In today's #vatnik soup and another edition of "You pronounced this nonsense, not me". Today we're going to talk about the "genocide in Donbas" disinformation and propaganda trope, that's been debunked many times but just refuses to die in the social media sphere.
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First, let's talk a bit about what Donbas is: it's an area in the Eastern Ukraine and today refers to two Ukrainian oblasts: Donetsk and Luhansk. The area was mostly depopulated during WW2, after which Stalin brought in a ton of Russian immigrant workers, ...
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... restricted the use of Ukrainian language and forced most schools to use Russian. With this move, the demographic shifted towards Russian: in 1989 census, 55% were Ukrainian and 45% Russian.
After Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, Russians started campaigning ...
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In today's #vatnik soup I'll discuss Russia's disinformation and propaganda campaigning in more detail, and go through four of the main "big" themes around which most of their propaganda is based on.
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The first theme is historical revisionism. Russia LOVES to distort historical narratives so that they favor themselves. They have conveniently "forgotten" the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between the USSR and Nazi Germany,and Putin even published a refurbished version... 2/13
...which blamed other countries for WW2. Even though the US reinforcements played a huge part in the downfall of Hitler, Russians love to portray themselves as the heroes who beat the evil Nazis. They even have another name for WW2 (during 1941-1945): The Great Patriotic War.3/13
In today's #vatnik soup I'm going to talk about conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them. These theories are an explanation for an event that's orchestrated by powerful and often hidden groups.
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Conspiracy theories are often political and they're even more often explained with insufficient evidence.
Douglas & Sutton (2011) concluded that belief in conspiracies correlates with lower analytical thinking, low intelligence, paranoia and Machiavellianism.
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2022 meta-analysis by Stasielowicz
supports this, adding that conspiracy theorists often believe in pseudoscience, are narcissistic or religious/spiritual and have relatively low cognitive ability. Douglas et al. (2017) stated that conspiracy theories correlate strongly ... 3/15
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce an American, pro-Russian politician and a conspiracy theorist, Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG). She's also a US representative for Georgia and member of the Republican Party, and is best known for her love of guns and QAnon.
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She started her political career after the 2016 Republican Party primaries, and in 2017 she was writing dozens of articles for fake news blogs such as the American Truth Seekers and Law Enforcement Today. In 2018 she was also "moderating" a FB page for the Family America...
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... Project, an organization known for posting death threats against Democrats, racist post against the Obama's and generally supporting the wackiest conspiracy theories out there.
Greene knows her audience and campaigns accordingly: ...