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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
May 11, 2023 • 24 tweets • 13 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American political analyst and media executive, Steve Bannon.

He's best-known for being Trump's chief strategist, "flooding the zone with shit", and for attempting to unite far-right, pro-Putin political parties around Europe.

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Bannon worked as an officer in the US Navy in the late 70s and early 80s, after which he worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He's also produced several Hollywood movies between 1991 and 2016. In 1980,Bannon was deployed to assist with the Operation Eagle Claw...
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.., a failed effort to save 52 embassy staff members from Tehran ordered by Jimmy Carter. In a 2015 interview, Steve stated that this marked a turning point in his political stance, turning him into a "Reaganite". This ideology of a battle between "good and evil" can be...

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clearly seen in his rhetoric. He's also been influenced by the so-called Fourth Turning theory which predicts that we are entering a phase where populism, nationalism and state-run authoritarianism will be on the rise around the world.

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In 2007, Bannon was a founding member of the website Breitbart News,later describing it as "the platform for the alt-right".Time journalist Philip Elliott said that the site pushes "racist, sexist, xenophobic and antisemitic material into the vein of the alternative right".

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Former editor of Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, called Steve a "bully" who "sold out" the website's original idea to back up Trump. In 2018, Breitbart funders Robert & Rebekah Mercer got rid of him,allegedly due to his "impulsive and attention-seeking antics" and high expenditures.
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Bannon served in the board of Cambridge Analytics, acting as its vice president. This company was also owned by the Mercer family, and it allegedly deployed illegal tactics in targeting US voters in the 2016 presidential election. Former Analytica employee, Christopher...

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...Wylie, has claimed that Bannon oversaw the collection of data from Facebook. He called the company a "psychological warfare tool".

Bannon's probably best-known for his work as a chief strategist for Donald Trump. Few days after Trump's inauguration, Bannon told the...

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...NYT that "the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. I want you to quote this: the media here is the opposition party".

Bannon was interviewed on several occasions by Robert Mueller as part of his investigation...

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...on the Russian interference in the 2016 US election. In Nov 2019, he gave evidence against Roger Stone, saying that Stone was Wikileaks' access point for the Trump campaign, and he was subsequently convicted on all charges, only to be pardoned by Trump.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee also looked into his activities and connections to George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, who both played a role in the Russian interference in the 2016 US election. In Aug 2020 members of the senate intelligence committee said that they...

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believed that Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Don Trump Jr. may have misled them with their testimonies. Bannon later said that he considered the meeting between Don Jr., Kushner, Paul Manafort and the Russian officials "treasonous". He also said that investigators will likely..
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..uncover money laundering activities that involve Jared Kushner and Deutsche Bank. He's called the Trump business a "criminal enterprise". Bannon himself was arrested in Aug 2020 and was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering - Bannon & others...
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...collected money to build a wall at the US-Mexico border, and allegedly made payments to themselves instead. Prosecutors alleged that Steve got more than 1 000 000 million USD in connection with this plan.

Trump pardoned Bannon in Jan 2021.

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Steve has adopted the Russian "firehose of falsehood" propaganda style, calling it "flood the zone with shit". He's stated that "We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls."

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The Economist has stated that Bannon (along with political analyst Stephen Miller) sees Putin as a "fellow nationalist & crusader against cosmopolitanism". He's said that Putin is "standing up for traditional institutions, and he's trying to do it in a form of nationalism".
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He's also a fan of Alexander Dugin, a Russian political strategist, whom he allegedly met in Rome in 2018. He's cited Dugin on various occasions, and has described himself as a fan of his 2009 book The Fourth Political Theory.

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The book has been referred as an inspiration for Russian foreign policy, including the war in Donbas.

Bannon's described Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a "border dispute" and "a Slavic fist fist on the eastern border of Ukraine".

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During 2018, Bannon formed a foundation called The Movement, where he tried to unite right-wing populist parties around Europe. He visited and had talks with many of the pro-Kremlin parties in Europe, including Austrian FPÖ, British UKIP, German AfD, Italian Lega Nord,...

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...Hungarian Fidesz, Spanish Vox, Swiss SVP, and France's National Rally.

Incidentally, all these parties and/or some of their members have been previously featured in #vatniksoup.

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A 2023 study conducted by Brookings Institution revealed that Bannon's podcast broadcasted the highest proportion of disinformation and unsubstantiated statements among 79 political podcasts examined.

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These days Bannon is still flooding the zone with shit with his "Bannons [sic] War Room" show on Rumble. Recently he's also encouraged conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run against Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries.

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As a traditionalist, Bannon has been married and divorced three times. In 1996, his then-wife accused Steve of domestic abuse, but the charges were later dropped after she failed to appear in court.

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Support my work: buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi
Past soups: vatniksoup.com

Related soups:
2016 Trump campaign:
Firehose of Falsehood:
Roger Stone:

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

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.

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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:

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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.

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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
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Feb 25
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…
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…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.
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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.
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Read 5 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Feb 18
In this 6th Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about a complex and controversial topic: conscription. It is used by vatniks to attack Ukraine for drafting men to fight, while conveniently ignoring the alternative, including the horrors of conscription into the Russian army.
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Military obligations are a reality in many countries, from the most peaceful democracies to the most tyrannical dictatorships — unless you have “bone spurs”. Some argue it is a necessity for defense against invading armies, especially for small countries.
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Others point out that it goes against individual rights or that a professional army is better. And Zelenskyy might agree: he did in fact end conscription. But then a full-scale invasion happened: exactly why many nations, including the US, still keep some form of draft.
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Read 8 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Feb 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce the International Olympic Committee (IOC) @Olympics . It’s mostly known for organizing sporting events, and for being supposed to foster the Olympic ideal while actually submitting to dictators.

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 in Paris by Pierre de Coubertin with a noble goal: promote peace through sports. Politics out, sportsmanship in: sounds great in theory.

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But in practice, the IOC has a long history of accommodating authoritarian regimes, always in the name of “neutrality,” “dialogue,” and “keeping sports separate from politics”, usually not in a particularly consistent or moral way.

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Read 16 tweets

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