Pekka Kallioniemi Profile picture
May 28, 2023 27 tweets 19 min read Read on X
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Malaysian conspiracy theorist, journalist and social media addict, Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray). He's best-known for his online attention-seeking activities, for his anti-Ukraine stance, and for simping @elonmusk and other techbros.

1/24 Image
Ian's online history goes way back. During the early 2010s, he was a moderator on Reddit, moderating some of its biggest subreddits. He was eventually banned for paid promotions he hadn't disclosed to the site. He was also working as a games journalist, working for sites...

2/24 ImageImage
...like Gameranx, The Guardian and Ars Technica. When some of his older chat logs were leaked, they showed his edgelord-y behavior where he praised one Adolf Hitler. He apologized but blamed everything on the "toxic gaming community."

He also SWATted a fellow YouTuber.

3/24 ImageImageImage
Some time later, he attacked this "toxic community" again in the for of GamerGate, a cultural online debate revolving around games journalism. It seems that around 2015-2016 Ian made a shift from someone who strongly supports LGBT+ rights and condemns totalitarian regimes,..
4/24
...to someone who doesn't. He also started supporting Trump and his rather strong right-wing views.

On thing you should know, is that Mr. Cheong spends most of his time online & especially on Twitter. All this time spent online has made him an expert on military strategy...
5/24 ImageImage
...,US foreign policy, geopolitics, and basically every other topic out there.

He also has a knack of figuring out the REAL truth on every topic, and based on Ian "telling the truth matters." Because Cheong cares about the truth, we can trust everything he's tweeted.

6/24 ImageImageImage
But Ian wasn't always like this. Before 2018, he was quite anti-Russia and anti-Putin. He was calling Russia homophobic, blamed the Russians for killing his countrymen in the down shooting of MH17, doubting each and every election Russia held, and quite strongly condemned...
7/24 ImageImageImageImage
..the Russian invasion of Crimea. I mean, he even called Putin "an asshole". But no one cared. He got barely any likes or retweets, nobody gave a shit about his meaningless opinion. Only after he became a Trump-supporting edgelord who suddenly loves Russia, his engagement...
8/24 ImageImageImageImage
...began to increase. It must've felt good to be at the top of the social media food chain again, being NOTICED, like he was previously as a Reddit moderator. So he kept drifting towards the extreme, perhaps for that extra attention.

9/24 ImageImage
Naturally, he did the exact same thing with Syria: 2012 he strongly condemned al-Assad's plans to attack with chemical weapons, ten years later the whole thing was a false flag planned by the US and the humanitarian aid group White Helmets.

10/24 ImageImageImageImage
When it comes to cheering for Russia and parroting their narratives, Cheong got them covered. In Feb 2022, he denied the chance of invasion, and on the first day of fighting he stated that he "wouldn't be surprised if there's going to be a coup in Ukraine," because,...

11/24 ImageImage
...according to Ian, "their main forces don't appear to be fighting back." "Ukrainian Nazis", bioweapons labs in Ukraine, "Crimea is Russia", "NATO proxy war", Nord Stream, Ukraine banning churches, Bucha massacre was staged, Zelensky being a cokehead... they're all there.

12/24 ImageImageImageImage
But he's also come up with some new stuff, like for example the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, being dead.

13/24 ImageImageImageImage
By Cheong's account, the counteroffensive that re-captured Kherson was a failure, and Bakhmut was a Russian master plan to put Ukrainians into a meat grinder. He's also called Russia the underdog in the war.

14/24 ImageImageImageImage
He's claimed that NATO is escalating the war, apparently by shooting Russian rockets into Ukrainian cities, and that EU and NATO should be dismantled as "fascistic organizations". In the case of Nord Stream, he believes Sy Hersh and @KimDotcom's "whistleblower thread",...

15/24 ImageImageImage
...declaring that the sabotage was done by the US. He's criticized EU and NATO officials (without naming any) for calling Russians "subhuman" and "orcs", suggesting that they're resorting to racism.

16/24 ImageImage
By Ian's words, Ukraine is not a democracy and it relentlessly attacks its churches, political parties and imprisons journalists. There might be some kind of confusion here, and maybe he was actually talking about Russia instead of Ukraine.

17/24 ImageImageImage
In Mar 2023, Ian was a guest at the Donbass Devushka podcast, spouting about American fascism, Zelensky's cocaine addition, and praising the brave Soviet efforts during WW2. He hasn't commented on the exposé of her actually being a Jersey girl with a fake accent.

18/24 ImageImage
But I guess if Jersey girl can support the Russian war effort and claim to be a "poor girl from Lugansk", Malaysian can claim to be an expert on US politics and act like they have a big impact on his day-to-day life in Kuala Lumpur.

19/24 ImageImageImage
These days he's a staunch supporter of "traditional values", and the days when he was defending LGBT+ rights are long gone. Every event that seems to challenge Ian's worldview, including QAnon, Allen shooting, Nick Fuentes, Kanye West, are a "psyop".

20/24 ImageImageImageImage
Mr. Cheong's a big fan of billionaire techbros, and he's often praising them for basically anything they tweet about. His big favorite is naturally Twitter owner Elon Musk, whose boots he has cleaned on many occassions. And it's not just one-way "notice me senpai"...

21/24 ImageImage
...asskissing from Ian (although there's a lot of that) - Elon seems to actually listen what Cheong has to say. On 9 Oct 2022, Ian tweeted to @elonmusk that it "might be a good idea to take Starlink offline for the terminals used on the front lines,"since it could lead to..
22/24 ImageImageImage
...further escalation in the war. And this is exactly what Elon did in Feb 2023, in order to "avoid escalation."

Now that Musk seems to be endorsing DeSantis by offering him a platform on Twitter, Ian has suddenly forgotten about Trump and started endorsing Ronnie.

23/24 Image
Ian seemed to be excited about the Twitter Spaces chat that was held, even claiming that it was unscripted.

To conclude, to me it seems that Ian Miles Cheong is an attention whore with broken morale compass. Also, he lies a LOT.

24/24 ImageImageImageImage
Support my work: buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi
Subscribe for my upcoming YouTube channel: youtube.com/@TheSoupCentral
Past soups: vatniksoup.com
Thanks for all the coffee, it seems that people REALLY dislike Ian.
CORRECTION TO TWEET 3/24:

I couldn't find any articles written by Ian for Ars Technica, and a person who has worked for the site for 20 years didn't have any recollection of this, either. So, apparently Cheong never wrote for them.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Pekka Kallioniemi

Pekka Kallioniemi Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @P_Kallioniemi

Jun 2
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll discuss the Ukrainian SBU’s “Spiderweb” operation and the main disinformation narrative vatniks have been spreading during the afterfall. While domestic Russian media stays silent, the vatniks and Russian milbloggers have been extremely loud.

1/20
This operation was probably the most impactful strike since the drowning of the Moskva, massively reducing Russia’s capability to bomb Ukrainian cities (or anyone else’s). It involved smuggling 117 FPV drones hidden in trucks into Russia. Once near airbases,…

2/20 Image
Image
Image
…the roofs opened remotely, launching drones in synchronized waves to strike targets up to 4,000 km away. The mission took 18 months to plan. The unsuspecting Russian truck drivers who transported them had no idea they were delivering weapons deep behind their own lines.

3/20 Image
Read 21 tweets
May 28
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Russian movie director, propagandist, and former priest: Ivan Okhlobystin. He’s best known for his strong support for the war on Ukraine and for his radical views, which are often used as a testbed for the domestic Russian audience.

1/20 Image
Ivan was born in 1966 from a short-lived marriage between a 62-year-old chief physician and a 19-year-old engineering student. She later remarried, and the family moved from Kaluga province to Moscow. Ivan kept the surname Okhlobystin from his biological father.

2/20 Image
After moving to Moscow, Ivan began studying at VGIK film school. He soon became a playwright for theatre productions and also wrote for Stolitsa magazine, which he later left because, as he put it, “it had become a brothel.”

3/20 Image
Read 21 tweets
May 22
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Ukrainian-born former State Duma deputy, Vladimir Medinsky. He is best known as one of the ideologues of the “Russkiy Mir”, for his close ties to Vladimir Putin, and for leading the “peace talks” in Turkey in 2022 and 2025.

1/20 Image
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Medinsky interned as a correspondent on the international desk of the TASS news agency, learning the ways of propaganda at an early age. Some time later, he earned two PhDs – one in political science and the other in history.

2/20 Image
Image
As is tradition in Russia, Medinsky’s academic work was largely pseudo-scientific and plagiarized. Dissernet found that 87 of 120 pages in his dissertation were copied from his supervisor’s thesis. His second dissertation was also heavily plagiarized.

3/20 Image
Read 21 tweets
May 15
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce an American social media influencer, Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson). He’s best known for his plagiarism while working as a clickbait “journalist”, and for being paid by the Kremlin to spread anti-Ukraine and anti-Democratic narratives.

1/23 Image
Benny graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009 with a degree in developmental psychology. His former high school buddy described him as the “smartest, most articulate kid in school,” and was disappointed to see him turn into a “cheating, low standard hack.”

2/23 Image
After graduating, Benny dived directly into the world of outrage media. Benny’s first job was writing op-eds for far-right website Breitbart, from where he moved on to TheBlaze, a conservative media owned by Glenn Beck, and a spring board for many conservative influencers.

3/23 Image
Read 24 tweets
May 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Cypriot politician and social media personality, Fidias Panayiotou (@Fidias0). He’s best known for his clickbait YouTube stunts and for voting against aid to Ukraine and the return of abducted Ukrainian children from Russia.

1/20 Image
Fidias hails from Meniko, Cyprus. In 2019, he began posting videos on YouTube. After a slow start, he found his niche with clickbaity, MrBeast-style content featuring silly stunts, catchy titles and scripted dialogue. Today, Fidias has 2,7 million subscribers on YouTube.

2/20 Image
Image
Image
Fidias’s channel started with trend-riding, but he found his niche in traveling without money — aka freeloading. In one video, he fare-dodged on the Bengaluru Metro. The train authority responded by saying they would file a criminal case against him.

3/20 Image
Image
Read 22 tweets
May 9
In today’s May 9th Vatnik Soup, we discuss the ambiguous relationship of the Kremlin with Nazism and explain why so many vatniks can be outright Nazis, and promote or excuse them while at the same time being so hysterical about alleged “Nazis in Ukraine”.

1/23 Image
Of course, Kremlin propaganda employs the Firehose of Falsehood and often lacks any consistent ideology other than spreading chaos and seeking power, so such contradictions can be commonplace. However in this case there is a certain cynical consistency there.

2/23 Image
Image
To understand modern Russia, we need to go back a hundred years to the beginnings of Soviet Russia/Soviet Union — a genocidal terror regime under dictators Lenin and Stalin, whose totalitarian and imperialist legacy Putin’s Russia fully embraces.

3/23 Image
Image
Image
Image
Read 24 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(