In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American pro-Russian propagandist, Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13). He's best-known for his work for Sputnik, and for parroting the classic Kremlin narratives such as "Ukrainian Nazis", "genocide in Donbas" & the "corrupted Kiev regime".
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Like with so many Kremlin propagandists, Wyatt's motivation stems from his deep hatred for American imperialism, and as is tradition, Reed's praised "public intellectuals" like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger.
2/19
Reed was also an author at the fake news blog, @TheGrayzoneNews, where he co-authored articles with Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton on Bolivia's political crisis in 2019. He hasn't published anything there after 2020, perhaps due to his contract with Sputnik.
3/19
Wyatt has called himself an "impartial analyst", but naturally he's nothing but a paid mouthpiece for the Kremlin. He's worked for the Russian-state controlled Sputnik for several years.
4/19
Reed's heavily involved in the circle jerk of pro-Kremlin propagandists who for some reason call themselves journalists. He's been interviewed by Katie Halper & Aaron Maté (@UsefulIdiotpod), Gonzalo Lira (@GonzaloLira1968), Liubov Sivaya (@liusivaya), ...
5/19
Tara "Joe Biden raped me" Reade (@ReadeAlexandra), Lee Camp from RT (@LeeCamp), and of course by our own favorite "poor woman from Lugansk", Donbass Devushka.
6/19
Wyatt's propagand relies heavily on the "genocide in Donbas" narrative. He's often reported from Donetsk, claiming that the "Ukrainian Nazis" are bombing civilian targets. Apparently for Wyatt the definition of a Nazi is "anyone who supports Ukraine".
7/19
Between Mar and Apr 2022, Reed was constantly tweeting about Mariupol. He tweeted about the "Azov base" with "copious quantities of nazi paraphernalia", like the hat with the coat Nazi Germany Coat and Arms and SS Totenkopf logo that the Russians planted there.
8/19
He's also shared several propaganda videos of crisis actors blaming the Azov for using them as human shields & forcing them to stay in the city.For some weird reason he did not tweet about the Mariupol theater or the maternity hospital bombings conducted by Russia.
9/19
After Bucha, Reed attempted to muddy the waters with Ukrainian war crimes. He also referred to the event as "so-called Bucha massacre", and stating how the Western media is silent on the "clearing operation", referring to the eradication of Russian forces in the area.
10/19
He was an "international observer" at the sham referendum in Sep 2022 in Sevastopol, Ukraine. "Everything I've seen so far has been very transparent, very open," he commented to TASS when asked about the situation at the polling station.
11/19
In Oct 2022, Wyatt was all about that cold, gasless, European winter. He stated that "It's gonna be a long winter", and fantasized about Europeans huddling over a burning barrel and slowly roasting a rat carcass.
12/19
In the end of Feb 2023, Reed was tweeting how "50,000 Germans came out [...] to call for peace and demand their government "stop the escalation of arms deliveries" to Ukraine". He just forgot to mention that these events were also orchestrated by the Kremlin.
13/19
In his promo video for an "antiwar gathering", Reed accuses Ukraine of Russia's strategy of "double-tapping" (i.e. bombing twice) civilian targets.
In the same video he claimed that the whole war is waged because US needs to launder money to the "elite".
14/19
Wyatt also likes to spice things up with historical revisionism. His claims that it was the Soviets who stopped the Nazis incidentally forgets to mention the military aid and involvement of the US, and the breakthroughs made from UK intel.
15/19
He also forgot to mention that it was actually the Poles, Belorussians and the Ukrainians who lost the largest percentage of population.
16/19
Wyatt is just another "independent journalist" who hails from the "far-left" - he parrots all the Kremlin-supported talking points, and in interviews and podcasts he speaks about his brief visit in Ukraine.
17/19
Now that Russia is doing nothing but losing, he's making subpar propaganda on pretty much anything, including a "sexualized image of the Hindu goddess Kali".
18/19
Oh, and as is tradition: Wyatt claims that the Uyghur genocide is "totally made up" and "CIA propaganda".
All these "journalists" are just predictable carbon copies of each other, toeing the line of totalitarian regimes around the world.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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
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:
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.
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
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:
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.
In this 7th Debunk of the Day, we’ll expose the “Chickenhawk” fallacy. The chickenhawk accusation or the “go to the front!” imperative is a dishonest attempt to silence anyone supporting Ukraine by pushing them to go fight. A barely hidden death wish, as it’s always uttered… 1/5
…with zero regard for who you are or what your personal circumstances might be — you could already be there, on your way there, a veteran, or unable to fight. More broadly, not everyone can or should be a soldier, just as not everyone can or should be a policeman or a nurse. 2/5
Yet a society still needs those things to be done, and the fact that not everyone can go to medical school or fight crime does not mean that we have to surrender to invaders and criminals, nor that we cannot all have an opinion on healthcare. 3/5