In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American far-right social media personality, Stewart Peters (@realstewpeters). He's best-known for his (short) rap career, and for promoting conspiracy theories related to COVID-19, "global elites" and the Russo-Ukrainian War.
1/21
Peters falls in the category of "far-right conspiracy theorists monetizing outrage & lies" with a white trash twist. As is the case with all of this type of accounts (for example @mattwallace888 & @bennyjohnson), Stewie has no interest in correcting any fake info he shares.
2/21
It is important to note, that this type of people have no interest in the truth. These people also almost always lack any set of moral values, and are willing to share any trendy topic to get engagement for their content and buyers for their snake oil products.
3/21
As a young boy, Stewie really wanted to become a police officer. He wanted it so much, that he even took classes towards a law enforcement degree, but eventually was either too slow or too conspiratorial to make it. At the ripe age of 32 and after the failure to become...
4/21
...a police officer - Peters decided to try his second career option as a rapper named Fokiss.
His song titled "I Never Made It" tells how well his career as an artist went. This might be the saddest thing I've seen this year, and I've seen a lot of war footage.
5/21
He has always wanted to become someone famous & without any talent his only chance for stardom was to lie. In 2000 he was kicked out of a movie production after he lied about his brother being a famous sitcom actor during the 90s.
6/21
After failing to become a police officer, radio DJ, rapper, and a film star, Stewart started his own bounty hunting company. While working, he dressed up as a cop and his police-like uniform even resulted in a change of Minnesota laws, restricting how similar bounty...
7/21
...hunter's uniforms can resemble the police's. One County Sheriff complained that the attention-seeking Stewie desperately wanted to become like the celebrity bail bondsman Dog the Bounty Hunter.
This guy wanted to be a cop so much, that he even LARPed as one.
8/21
He eventually had to close down his bounty hunting business in 2021 after he was found guilty of disorderly conduct. One night in Feb 2021, Stewie's wife called the police, claiming he was in drunken rage and was throwing household items at her.
9/21
When asked whether she was scared of Stewie attacking her, she nodded and responded "That’s the reason that I had to call you guys." Stewie's wife said he "regularly became belligerently drunk," and that this type of incidents were "happening too frequently."
10/21
Incidentally, Peters has publicly promoted "family values" (without the Mrs...),while at the same time blaming the "woke culture" for ruining them.
Peters launched his podcast, The Stew Peters Show, in 2021. The show mostly featured conspiracy theories and hosted various..
11/21
...American far-right figures like L. Lin Wood and Paul Gosar. Gosar is a strong opponent of any aid to Ukraine and says "Russia is not our enemy".
In 2022, he launched his own media company called the Stew Peters Network.
12/21
The network features shows from fellow conspiracy theorists like QAnon follower DeAnna Lorraine and anti-semites Lauren Witzke and Edward Szall. Stewie's own shows average between 40 000-70 000 views on Rumble - a relatively high number on the platform.
13/21
So what disinformation and conspiracy theories Stewie spreads? Absolutely ANYTHING that creates controversy and engagement. His pet peeve is COVID-19 vaccinations, and in 2022 he published a documentary called "Died Suddenly", that "exposed" how global elites were...
14/21
... involved in the vaccine production and how they're used to "depopulate the planet."
His first COVID-19 documentary, "Watch the Water", claimed that the virus is actually derived from snake venom and it contains the "Satan's DNA".
15/21
In 2023, he claimed that the wildfires in Canada and in Hawaii were caused by "orbital energy weapon platforms" - a narrative stolen from Marjorie Taylor Greene when she talked about "Jewish space lasers" starting fires in California.
16/21
As most contrarian conspiracy theorists, Peters has often tweeted & spoken about the war in Ukraine. According to him,the whole war is completely fabricated,the Ukrainians have a black market for organ trading & Zelenskyy is a drug addict and a thief.
So,nothing new there.
17/21
He's claimed that Mexican cartels bought the weapons that were sent to Ukraine,the bioweapons program in Ukraine was started by Obama & Putin is the "one man standing between what’s left of a 'free' world, and a totalitarian, tyrannical,murderous one-world government body."
18/21
Naturally, all this is then complemented with various money-making schemes. From his website, one can buy Stewie-merch like T-shirts and hats, buy premium access to most ridiculous conspiracy theories that ever existed, and even buy "wealth protection", whatever that is.
19/21
To conclude, Stew Peters is relatively popular conspiracy theorist who monetizes rage and disinformation. We can safely assume, that he'll ditch all narratives related to Ukraine as soon as there's a new fad, but at the moment he's sharing vast amounts of fake...
20/21
...information to hundreds of thousands of uninformed people. At the same time, he's fighting against the "woke culture" and promoting Christianity while getting drunk at a bowling alley and assaulting his (ex-?)wife after.
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
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
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.”
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll discuss the state of X in May 2025. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, this platform has rapidly transformed into his personal political tool and a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation.
1/22
Not everyone is following this shitshow as closely as I am, so I thought it would be good to write a summary of all the changes that have happened on this forum and outside of it. These changes have drastically changed how the platform operates and who gets “a voice” here.
2/22
Elon’s team has been tweaking the algorithm many times after the takeover. One of these tweaks happened already around Nov 2022, when the platform heavily suppressed the visibility of pro-Ukraine accounts. This change was then noticed & reported by many pro-Ukraine accounts.
3/22