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Jan 13, 2023 17 tweets 6 min read Read on X
In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing a US representative and a pathological liar, George Santos. It is almost impossible to do a proper profile on this guy, since it's hard to know what aspects of his life are true and what are false.

But let's try!

1/16
Santos is a member of the GOP, & he was elected to the open seat in 2022. He is the first openly gay Republic elected to congress.Interestingly, he was married to a woman during 2012-2019 - they divorced just 12 days before officially filed his first congressional campaign.
2/16
He's said that his maternal grandparents are Jewish and that they fled Soviet Ukraine and Belgium from the Holocaust - they were actually both born in Brazil. He later gave an interview to WABC radio, where he stated that "I never claimed to be Jewish, I am Catholic...

3/16
... Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.'"

Santos has used a fake Jewish name Anthony Zabrovsky to raise funds for a pet charity. He never gave any of its proceedings to the charity organization.

4/16
He has also claimed that his father is African American with Angolan roots. There is no evidence of this.

George speaks highly of her mother, writing that she was "the first female executive at a major financial institution" and survived 9/11.

5/16
In Jul, 2021, he tweeted that "9/11 claimed my mothers life"; then in Oct, 2021 he said that she was "caught up in the ash cloud" but was never treated for it. Then, in Dec, 2022 he claimed that both of his parents survived 9/11.

6/16
In real life, George's mother was apparently a home care nurse in Brazil and, accordingly to George's friends, she didn't speak much English.
Based on George, his education is top notch: he's claimed to hold a bachelor's degree in finance and economics from Baruch College...7/16
... graduating at top 1% of his class. During his claimed attendance he was actually in Brazil. He has also said that he was a "star player" on the Baruch volleyball team. He also has a fake Master's degree in business from NYU.

8/16
In Dec, 2022, he told The New York Post that "I didn't graduate from any institution of higher learning. I'm embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé".

Besides being a volleyball star, George has also worked as a "seasoned Wall Street financier and investor"...9/16
... at both CitiGroup and Goldman Sachs. Neither company has any record of him working there. His latest real job was in a alternative investment firm accused of being a Ponzi scheme.

10/16
In an 2020 interview, he said that he had a brain tumor and that he received radiation treatment for it. Perhaps he's been cured: as of Dec, 2022, there hasn't been any more mentions of his illness.

11/16
Santos has called the Ukrainian government a "totalitarian regime". Regarding the puppet states of Donetsk and Luhansk, he has said that Ukraine "welcomed the Russians into their provinces" and that Ukrainians in the east "feel more Russian than Ukrainian".

12/16
In Feb, 2022, George tweeted that Joe Biden is "willing to start a war in Eastern Europe". At the time of these statements, he had received a 32 800 USD donation from Columbus Nova, owned by Andrew Intrater, a cousin of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

13/16
George is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, and he also attended "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan 6, 2021. He was caught on camera stating that he had written a "nice check to a law firm" to bail the US Capitol arrestees out of jail.

14/16
As almost always with vatniks, George has trouble with money - he has unresolved charges for check fraud in Brazil. Somehow he's managed to make some money for his campaigning - in 2020 he listed his net worth at 5000 USD, ...

15/16
... but by 2022 his fortune had increased to somewhere between 2,5 and 11 million USD. He's campaing spendings are just absurd and too long to list here, you can find more info here: politico.com/news/2022/12/3…

16/16
*His campaign spendings

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More from @grok

May 1
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American streamer and millionaire. He’s best known for his champagne socialism, rabid criticism of the US and Israel, support for the Soviet Union and for Chinese and Russian invasions, and for mistreating his dog.

1/20 Hasan Piker in Havana, Cuba
Born in 1991, Piker grew up in a privileged and well-connected environment. His father held senior roles at big corporations and his uncle, Cenk Uygur, is the founder of The Young Turks media network. He graduated cum laude from Rutgers, a top-tier university in New Jersey.

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His main activity and primary source of income consists of hours-long livestreams on Twitch where he comments on news and yells at videos. He also keeps his dog in place the whole time with a shock collar.

3/20

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Read 20 tweets
Apr 26
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.

Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.Image
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:

Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.

1/20 Image
Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.

2/20 Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.

3/20 Greek PM Alexis Tsipras appoints radical economist to new government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/greek-pm-alexis-tsipras-economist-yanis-varoufakis
Read 20 tweets
Mar 29
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.

1/7 A flight of French and Polish Rafale and F-16 fighter jets above a NATO flag during the opening of the exhibition “Powerful because we are united”, dedicated to the 19th anniversary of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to NATO (OTD 22 years ago), in the bastion of the Vilnius defensive wall on March 29, 2023 (OTD 3 years ago) in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”.
2/7 Trump aides struggle with how to spend $500 billion more on military, Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/21/trump-hegseth-budget-military/
Trump calls for US military spending to rise more than 50% to $1.5tn https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy59kxl2xwzo
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To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.

3/7 Newsweek falsely claiming that the US pays 68% of NATO’s budget. The real number is 15%.

Elon Musk falsely claiming that the US pays for 2/3 of European defense. In another post he claimed it was 1/4. Both made-up numbers.  https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870903805845598428 https://x.com/i/birdwatch/t/1870903805845598428
NATO has annual budgets and programs worth around EUR 4.6 billion in 2025 (representing 0.3% of total Allied defence spending), and up to EUR 5.3 billion in 2026. The US share for 2026-2027 is 15% of that: 0.8 billion.  Source: Funding NATO https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/funding-nato
Read 7 tweets
Mar 9
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.

1/20 Image
War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.

But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:

2/20
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Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.

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Read 20 tweets
Mar 2
In this second (and possibly last) Basiji Soup, we’ll explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran has prepared for a conflict with the US and Israel. We won’t cover the military aspects, but another kind of war — information warfare.

1/20 Image
In the 1st Basiji Soup, we souped the Islamic Republic, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, its support of terrorism including Russia’s, its (one-sided?) relationship with Putin, and the mass protests against it that started two months ago:

2/20
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The Internet blackout has been crucial in allowing the regime to cover up its massacre of the protesters and especially the scope of it, making it difficult to assess the number of victims. They went to great lengths to jam Starlink, after having made its use illegal.

3/20 Image
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Read 20 tweets

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