In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American politician and political commentator, Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard). She's best-known for blaming absolutely everything on the US Democrats and NATO, and for being a fan of totalitarian regimes like Russia and Syria.
1/19
Tulsi was raised up in accordance with the teachings of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), a religious group described as secretive and abusive cult. Former member has described SIF as "virulently homophobic, often anti-Islamic and misogynist" where its founder,...
2/19
Chris Butler, is "considered to be akin to a God". Gabbard became politically active at a relatively young age, and she was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives when she was 21. She was in a field medical unit and was deployed to Iraq between 2004 and 2005 and...
3/19
...was stationed in Kuwait between 2008 and 2009 as a platoon leader. While in Congress, she was a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) between 2013 and 2016. She later resigned to endorse Bernie Sanders' campaign for the 2016 US presidential election.
4/19
While in Congress, she was a staunch critic of Barack Obama for refusing to admit that the real enemy of the US is actually radical Islam and Islamic extremism, often appearing on Fox News to comment on the issue. Since she started criticizing Obama and picking fights...
5/19
...inside the Democratic Party, she's been praised more by the people like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson than the Democrats. Gabbard ran for US presidency in the 2020 election. Hillary Clinton described Tulsi as "the favorite of the Russians," and that she was being...
6/19
..."groomed" by the Republicans for the candidacy. Gabbard filed a defamation lawsuit against Clinton, but dropped it five months later. Interestingly, Tulsi used the same law firm that represented Rudy Giuliani and George Papadopoulos during the investigation into the...
7/19
...Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Gabbard was also endorsed by former KKK boss David Duke, and neo-Nazi and conspiracy theorist Richard B. Spencer. After dropping out of the race, she endorsed Joe Biden.
8/19
Gabbard has criticized the "neoliberal/neoconservative war machine", stating that the money the US uses for wars should be used for other stuff, like war against (Islamic) terrorism. Some (well, me) have speculated that this harsh stance against Islam might stem from her...
9/19
...upbringing in a anti-Islamic cult.
Tulsi visited Syria in 2017 in a "fact-finding mission". She had two "unplanned" meetings with Syrian totalitarian leader Bashar al-Assad. Later she expressed skepticism about the Khan Shaykhun chemical attacks, and voted against...
10/19
...condemning the Syrian government for "war crimes and crimes against humanity". OPCW-led investigation later attributed the Khan Shaykhun attack to al-Assad's forces. She also refused to say who paid for her trip to Syria. Gabbard's trip to have a chat with al-Assad...
11/19
..was later praised by our favorite weapons inspector/chatroom-enjoyer, Scott Ritter.
When it comes to Ukraine, Gabbard parrots the same Kremlin narrative: the US and NATO provoked Putin to attack Ukraine, peace negotiations are needed (after Putin got what he wanted, ...
12/19
...as is tradition) to prevent nuclear war, it's a "proxy war" between US and Russia, and sanctions are hurting the West and not Russia. She also blames the "elite cabal of warmongers" for the war. She's said that the war could've been prevented by declaring that Ukraine...
13/19
...can't join NATO, but as those who have read Putin's 2022 essay, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", it was never about NATO but Putin's obsession over Ukraine being part of Russia. In a recent keynote speech, she also praised the Durham report, ....
14/19
stating that the Russian collusion in the 2016 election was a "manufactured hoax".
She was also one of the speakers at the "antiwar" event Rage Against the War Machine in Feb 2023.
15/19
Tulsi has been careful about commenting on the atrocities and the ongoing genocide, and I couldn't find any mention of Bucha, Izium, Kherson, Donbas, Crimea,etc. I guess she wants to be careful and just defame Biden & the Democrats and disregard the complexity of war crimes.16/19
Gabbard left the Democratic Party in Oct 2022, blaming its leadership for "cowardly wokeness, anti-white racism, (being) hostile to people of faith and spirituality, and dragging us closer to nuclear war". After this, she signed a deal with Fox News and started working...
17/19
...as a paid contributor for the network. She also endorsed several Republican candidates for Senate, including J.D. Vance who has said that he doesn't "care what happens to Ukraine".
18/19
Some have speculated that she'd be a running mate for Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election. This would make sense, since these days Gabbard is speaking like any MAGA member would, condemning the "woke mind virus", and outright refusing to condemn Russia's war.
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
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. 1/8
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. 2/8
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. 3/8
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.
1/15
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.
2/15
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.
In today’s Wumao Soup, we’ll tell you 15 things about the People’s Republic of China that you didn’t learn from TikTok, Douyin or DeepSeek.
1/20
This is our 2nd Wumao Soup. In the 1st one, we introduced how the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) online propaganda works. Now we’ll cover some of the big topics they hide or lie about. Think of it as an antidote soup to their propaganda.
1 - Tiananmen Square massacre
Yes, it happened. Yes, it was a massacre. Vatniks, wumaos, and tankies in the West deny it, while China censors the slightest mention of it, even the date it happened.