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.

1/13
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.

2/13
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!

3/13
He's called the Belarusian presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya a "pawn of Western neoliberalism", and Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as an "unelected gobshite".
In 2021, he visited the HQ of "Popular Mobilization Forces" an Iraqi militia supported by Iran.4/13
He also blamed the Syrian volunteer organization "White Helmets" - who have revealed several atrocities by the al-Assad troops in Syria, including bombings of hospitals - being corrupt and "paid for by the US and UK to carry out regime change in Syria".

5/13
He was also one of the few MEPs who voted against condemning Nicagarua's Daniel Ortega for his human rights violations.

Wallace attempted to wipe out parts about the Russian involvement in the shooting down of MH17, which stirred up some emotions inside his MEP party.

6/13
He's also criticized the sanctions imposed on Russian individuals by the US and EU as being illegal and not complying to the UN Charter. Mick has also attended protests supporting Algirdas Paleckis, a Lithuanian politician who was convicted of spying on behalf of Russia.

7/13
He's also voted against Ukraine aid packages, demands of Putin to withdraw Russia's troops from Ukraine and against a resolution to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.

In Mick's defense, he's also called for peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

8/13
Incidentally, like so many other vatnik, this support started only after Russia's illegal annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhanks & Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

Mick Wallace doesn't love just Russia - he also puts a lot time and effort to supporting China's geopolitical goals.

9/13
He has downplayed the Uyghur concentration camps and called the reports on them "grossly exaggerated". In 2021 he stated that there is no solid evidence of the existence of these camps. Overwhelming evidence about the existence of these camps have been presented since 2017.
10/13
In an interview by the Global Times,a Chinese state-run newspaper,he said that China "takes better care of its people" than the EU.Mick's also in the "Taiwan is part of CCP" gang. He's been featured the most in Chinese-language news articles than any other Irish person.

11/13
Wallace's company declared bankruptcy on Dec,2016 with debts over 30 million EUR. Mick seems to be very bad with money in general: in 2012 it emerged that his company forgot to pay 2,1 million EUR in taxes.Later on he admitted "fiddling" his company's VAT returns on purpose.12/13
Bad financing seems to be almost an epidemic among pro-Russian actors...

Mick was going speak at the NO2NATONO2WAR event in Feb, 2023 with The Grayzone gang and other vatniks, but the venue cancelled their booking.

The Grayzone:

13/13

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Jan 12
In today's #vatnik soup we'll travel to the land of tulips & get to know a Dutch politician & a conspiracy theorist, Thierry Baudet (@thierrybaudet). He's the founder and leader of Forum for Democracy (FvD) party and also a member of the House of representatives since 2017.

1/12 Image
Thierry belongs to the group of Eurosceptics, and advocates for both the Netherlands' exit from EU and the dissolution of the whole institution. He has strongly opposed the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that promotes the economic collaboration between the two.

2/12 Image
This agreement was made in 2017 & during the campaign, he spread a ton of fake news, including false reported of crimes by the Ukrainian military: nytimes.com/2017/02/16/wor…

Baudet was strongly against the EU sanctions on Russian individuals after the occupation of Crimea.

3/12
Read 12 tweets
Jan 10
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.

1/9 Image
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.

2/9 Image
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 ...

3/9 Image
Read 9 tweets
Jan 9
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.
1/19
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 ...

2/19
... 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.

3/19
Read 19 tweets
Jan 8
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.

1/12
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, ...

2/12
... 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 ...
3/12
Read 12 tweets
Jan 7
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.

1/13
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
Read 13 tweets
Jan 6
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.

1/15
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.

2/15
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
Read 15 tweets

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