In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing an American journalist, author and lawyer, Glenn Greenwald. He's best known for revealing the classified documents from Edward Snowden about the American and British surveillance programs.
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Greenwald started blogging about national security after 9/11. Based on his 2006 book, "How Would a Patriot Act?" he was strongly in support for the Iraq war and had wrote that "I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration".
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At some point he's worldview seemed to shift more towards anti-Americanism & he became increasingly critical of "mainstream media". Many have characterized Greenwald as being on the "political Left", but to be honest I don't even know what that means policy-wise these days.
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Before becoming a journalist, Greenwald was working as a lawyer. In 1996, he co-founded his own law firm, Greenwald Christoph & Holland. The company focused on cases concerning issues of civil rights and the constitutional law of the US.
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One of Greenwald's customers was neo-nazi Matthew Hale. Hale was the founder of the New Church of the Creator - a racist, holocaust-denying, homophobic religious movement. Hale had studied law & by his own words, wanted to be an "advocate for white people in the courtroom"...5/24
...and be an "open racist" lawyer. Hale was denied of this right, and Glenn started defending him in the courts. Eventually Hale lost the case, and two days later one of his disciples - whom Hale had just named "Creator of the Month" - went on a killing spree, killing 3...
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...and injuring 10.The Center for Constitutional Rights started a lawsuit on behalf of the victims against Hale & his church. Glenn commented on this case: "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me"7/24
Glenn later on went and recorded interviews with witnesses without their knowledge or permission. Hale was arrested in Jan, 2003, for conspiring to murder a judge, and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, thus ending the collaboration between the two.
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Greenwald has also been connected to Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker better known as weev. Weev is best-known for his neo-Nazi, white supremacist views and for acting as the webmaster of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
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In the early 2000s, Glenn was involved in LGBT journalism and porn production. He was one of the co-owners of StudMall, a gay porn DVD site, and Hairy Studs Videos, and wrote columns for HX Magazine. He admitted the co-ownership of the companies but suggested that his ...
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...involvement in the porn industry ended already in 2004, 2-3 years after it actually started. Greenwald had also created a fake persona, "Curtis Jacobs", who ran websites like RioMaleEscorts.com and RioGayGuides.com.
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He then advertised these sites under his real name together with his partner, David Miranda, in ads-disguised-as-articles on HX Magazine. It also seems that Greenwald was promoting Miranda's sexual services through these websites.
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Greenwald and Laura Poitras rose to fame after Edward Snowden shared sensitive documents exposing a large-scale global and domestic surveillance under the Obama administration. These revelations were published by The Guardian in 2013 and the incident was featured in ...
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... an award-winning documentary Citizenfour. He co-founded the news organization The Intercept with Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2014, but left the company in 2020 after complaining of censorship and heavy-handed editing.
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In 2015, Greenwald suggested that the "the 'moderate' Free Syrian Army was largely a myth" and that the opposition was actually led by "various Al Qaeda manifestations and even more extreme elements". Glenn's source for this was Syrian Vice-Foreign Minister, Faisal Mekdad.
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Greenwald has been a harsh critic of the "Russiagate", calling it "wildly exaggerated hysteria and the kind of jingoistic fear-mongering". This rhetoric is very much in line with The Grayzone's blogger Aaron Maté, and they have spoken about it on Maté's "Pushback" podcast.
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He's constantly spoken about the "Azov nazis" and how they've been whitewashed by the press. He's also referred to the Azovstal defenders as "real Nazis". Alasdair McCallum has written a good article on Azov, you can read it here: lens.monash.edu/@politics-soci…
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Glenn, riddle me this: if they were the real nazis and the war is about eradicating them, why did Putin trade them for his buddy oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk?
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Greenwald has also shown support for the Russia's March 2022 disinformation campaign about "bioweapons labs in Ukraine". Journalist Justin Ling suggested that the conspiracy spread from QAnon channel to Fox News and from there to Donald Trump Jr. Tucker Carlson of ...
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... Fox News claimed that the US was "funding the creation of deadly pathogens" in Ukraine. Greenwald was one of the guests in Carlson's multi-episode story that mostly focused on Russian and Chinese sources. Of course the problem with this whole debate is that many ...
20/24
...people use biolabs and bioweapons labs interchangeably. In the attached map you can see the various biolabs in the vicinity of Helsinki, Finland. Many of these have been co-funded by Chinese and US institutions, yet they haven't used it as casus belli against Finland.
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And yes, some of these biolabs have "deadly pathogens". To conclude, Carlson's rant on bioweapons labs in Ukraine is full-on pro-Russian propaganda (the word "weapons" appears 21 times in this segment; "secret" comes up 19 times) and Greenwald was happy to take...
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...part in this absurd show. It'll be interesting to see how Glenn spins the story about Tucker Carlson wanting to fire co-worker Jacqui Heinrich for not finding evidence on vote system manipulation during the 2020 US presidential election.
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From "the American left's most fearless political commentator" to "bomb-throwing media-critic", these days Glenn visits often Carlson's show (between 2017-2021 he was a guest 40 times) and shares content by figures like Jack Posobiec, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a Belarusian politician and dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. He’s best-known for giving up his country to Russia, and for cracking up political opposition and dissidents in Belarus, ruling the country with an iron fist.
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Alexander was born in the Byelorussian SSR, living an unhappy childhood with his mother, taunted by his schoolmates due to being fatherless. His father’s identity is not known, but there’s a rumour that his father was a Roma traveler passing through the region.
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Lukashenko joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1979, and a few years later he became the deputy chairman of a collective farm. By 1990, he had risen to the rank of Deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian SSR. He claimed to be an opponent of corruption…
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss social media superspreaders. Due to their effectiveness, superspreader accounts are often used to spread "low credibility" content, disinformation and propaganda, and today this is more often done by hostile state actors such as Russia.
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DeVerna et al. (2024) described superspreaders as "users who consistently disseminate a disproportionately large amount of low-credibility content," also known as bullshit. It’s worth noting, that some of these people may actually believe the lies they spread.
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The numbers behind these accounts are astonishing – a study by Grinberg et al. (2019) found out that 0,1% of Twitter accounts were responsible for sharing approximately 80% of the mis/disinformation related to the 2016 US presidential election.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American politician, Angela McArdle (@angela4LNCChair). She's best-known for turning the US Libertarian Party into a wing of MAGA Republicans, and for promoting pro-Kremlin narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian War.
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McArdle received her Bachelor's from the evangelical Christian university Biola in 2009 and paralegal certificate through the UCLA extension progam in 2013. She's also trained as a craniosacral therapist through the Upledger Institute.
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She started her political career as the Libertarian nominee in the 2017 California's 34th congressional district special election, finishing the primary with 0,8% of the total vote. A few years later, she had gained popularity within the Libertarian Party,...
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Russian businessman and financier, Yury Kovalchuk. He’s best-known for being a close friend, confidant and "personal banker" of Putin's, and for strongly supporting the Kremlin's genocidal war against Ukraine.
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Kovalchuk was born in 1951 in St. Petersburg. He started his career during the 80s at the Loffe Physico Technical Institute, eventually becoming the institute's first deputy director. But Yury aspired for more & the fall of the iron curtain gave room for his business plans.
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Kovalchuk quickly learned that one didn't have to play fair to become rich in Russia during the 90s. He joined the board of directors of the Joint Ventures Committee, a government body involved with restructuring companies and finding (foreign) partners.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a Georgian politician &oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili. He’s best-known launching the pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream party, and for running the government from behind the scenes, slowly shifting Georgia’s course from the West back to Russia.
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Ivanishvili was born and raised in a small village in Georgia. Their family was poor but he showed a business mindset from a young age. In 1988, he moved to Moscow and began his first business, importing and selling computers with Vitaly Malkin, a Russian-Israeli oligarch.
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The rapid growth of Ivanishvili’s businesses can be attributed to his close ties with government officials. In 1996, he joined Seven Bankers (семибанкирщина), a group of influential Russian bankers who supported Boris Yeltsin’s re-election.
In today´s #vatniksoup REBREW, I´ll introduce a Hungarian lawyer and politician, Viktor Orbán (@PM_ViktorOrban). He´s best-known for turning Hungary into an authoritarian state, and for cooperating with other authoritarian regimes like the Kremlin, the CCP and Iran.
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Orbán has been Hungary´s Prime Minister since 2010, and under his leadership the country has basically become the first nondemocracy in the EU. Orbán himself has described Hungary as an "illiberal state", and he´s used the Kremlin playbook to create it.
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He created a nationwide right-wing media network and interfering with independent media has plummeted Hungary´s Press Freedom Index into 67th place, one of the worst in the EU. The state has also spied on Hungarian journalists by using the infamous Pegasus spyware.