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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
Mar 28, 2023 • 17 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatniksoup I'll introduce another Dutch politician and MEP, Marcel de Graaff (@MJRLdeGraaff). He's best-known for his beliefs in conspiracy theories, for his strong pro-Russian stance, and for his pro-Kremlin voting patterns in the European Parliament (EP).

1/16
He was elected as a MEP in the 2014 European Parliament elections. In 2015 he joined the far-right coalition called Europe of Nations and Freedom, with de Graaff and Marine Le Pen as its first co-presidents.

2/16
Marcel actually voted for Le Pen in her absence on many occasions, and was fined for this.

His party didn't obtain any seats in the Parliament in the 2019 European Parliament elections, but he was given a seat nevertheless due to Brexit and UK losing its representatives.

3/16
In national politics, he defected to Thierry Baudet's party, Forum for Democracy (FvD), due to his critical stance on Dutch COVID-19 measures. There he found a home with other rabid conspiracy theorists, including Baudet.

4/16
The party's ties to Russian leadership and funding has also been proven: In 2020 Dutch TV program Zembla published Whatsapp group messages with interaction between the party leader Baudet and Russian Vladimir Kornilov, damning the party of accepting Kremlin money.

5/16
De Graaff has methodically voted against all 20 so-called milestone anti-Russian resolutions and against 16 out of 22 Russia-condemning documents, skipping the voting on the rest. His radical stance made him opt out of the EP far-right coalition, Identity and Democracy.

6/16
He said that "their attempt to silence me about NATO/Ukraine is indigestible", suggesting that he's going to create his own group that supports "de-escalation" of the war in Ukraine.

7/16
Marcel is a working prototype of Homo Putinicus - a person who swallows ALL Russian narratives and conspiracy theories whole, and then spreads these fake stories like wildfire. If Russian propaganda were Pokémon, Marcel would have catched 'em all.

8/16
Marcel's spoken harshly against the "woke" culture and LGBTQ+ rights. He's shared various Putin's "truth bombs" about the "decadent West" and traditional values maintained in Mother Russia. Based on Marcel, the West truly is decadent and only the Russian culture can save it.
9/16
He's also questioned the down-shooting of MH17, a tragedy in which 193 Dutch passengers (including children) lost their lives. In Sep 2014, de Graaff, along with Le Pen, Salvini and others, called for a thorough investigation on the shoot-down.

10/16
Later he criticized the investigation, maybe because the main culprit turned out to be the Russian military.

And what was his source for the "real" information? RT.

11/16
Few weeks before his departure from Identity and Democracy, he had suggested that the US is "a puppet used by satanic elites to impose a communist wold dictatorship, where citizens are digitally controlled", while combining so many conspiracy theories that even I lost count.12/16
De Graaff also thinks that the Ducha [sic] massacre was conducted by Ukrainian soldiers, that NATO is planning a nuclear strike against Russia, that "Zelenskyy and his nazi army are committing war crimes", and that there are bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

13/16
He was also part of that big group who denied the upcoming invasion in early Feb 2022.

Like a Putin's good lapdog, he started promoting "peace talks" only after the fake referendums and illegal annexations of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

14/16
He's also suggested that the ICC-issued arrest warrant against Putin was executed due to bribery.

15/16
To conclude, Marcel isn't even a low-hanging fruit - he's a rotten apple on the ground. Dutch followers - how did these people get elected to power? And is it bound to happen again?

And a question to you, Marcel: Did you call for peace negotiations before 22 Sep, 2022?

16/16
Ping: @g900ap @CarelBrendel

Support my work (and get some AI art!): buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi

Past soups: vatniksoup.com
Related soups:
Thierry Baudet:
Marine Le Pen:

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Vatnik Soup Profile picture
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 21 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
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
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
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
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
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
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
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
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
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:

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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.

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Read 20 tweets

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