In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Canadian social media personality and QA tester, Patrick JM (@vonClownsewitz). He's best-known for spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda & for creating a fake persona as an academic expert on international relations and strategic studies.
1/19
This investigation was put together by The Unintelligence Agency.
Patrick is a self-proclaimed expert on international relations, regularly pissing on people who comment on geopolitical issues but who have no background on the topic.
2/19
According to the man himself, he's a "published strategic analyst" who does "defense research" and who is also "speaking at panels." He also claims to be one of his institutions Russia experts, which is of course yet another lie.
3/19
Let's start with the obvious: Paddy is not an expert on anything, and his credentials are completely made up. In reality, he double-majored in studio arts and on political science, probably having a Bachelor's level degree in both.
4/19
By the way, the picture in the first tweet is his campaign poster for running to become a student representative at his university. Including the Soviet flag and the cat ears in the photo was a brave move, but unfortunately he lost the election.
At the time, he was 35.
5/19
Paddy's name is mentioned in exactly one technical paper that's basically a pamphlet, but not as an author but as a contributor to the technical analysis.
In reality, Paddy works as a video game tester at a local company that pays him around 2CAD/hour over the minimum wage.
6/19
The online fake persona he created has landed him some spotlights as a geopolitical analyst. He's appeared on Sarah Bils' Donbass Devushka podcast before Bils' fake persona was exposed and the channel was re-branded as @DD_Geopolitics:
DDG also promoted Paddy's hilariously bad analysis on Prigozhin's mutiny in Jun 2023. He's also spread false narratives on Holodomor, a Soviet policy that resulted in millions of dead Ukrainians in 1932–33 due to starvation.
8/19
He participated as an expert in @MarioNawfal's Twitter Space about the Prigozhin mutiny. The other top analysts that were commenting on this dire situation were @KimDotcom and DDG activist @Kahlissee, who will be introduced properly on #vatniksoup at a later date.
9/19
According to @elonmusk, this particular Space was the "best coverage of the situation I've seen so far," so Paddy's contributions in the Space must've been pretty good.
10/19
In Jul 2023, Patrick was a guest Riverwest Radio/WXRW, a community radio that provides "an outlet for marginalized and alternative voices", in which he was described as an "IR academic" and "social media superstar".
11/19
Paddy seems to be a big fan of communism and the USSR, often posing with the hammer and sickle flag in the background. I mean, the man even bought a brand new flag for Russia's Victory Day in 2020.
12/19
He also has a tendency to laugh at people who have been tortured and beat up, like he did in the case @cossackgundi. Imagine being a dweeb and laughing at people who are ready to defend innocent people from genocidal maniacs and are then tortured for that.
13/19
When discussing Ukraine, Patrick's all about them Nazis. Below you can see the man himself wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt depicting the Nazi eagle. As you can see, he's also wearing a red fedora with some leopard stripes - pretty cool, eh?
14/19
In addition, we have the same old boring stuff: Bucha denial, promotion of Mariupol's Potemkin village (and even comparing it to Grozny!), downplaying Ukraine's attack in Kherson, and claims that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia wasn't planned in 2014.
15/19
Paddy seems to dislike NAFO, probably because of its effectiveness. He often refers to them as "furries", probably while still wearing the cat ears you can see in the first tweet. Incidentally, he likes to call NAFO activists "incels".
Could he just be projecting?
16/19
Mr. Clown was one of the many people who sneered over Merdan E doxxing the wrong Pekka Kallioniemi, possibly putting the man in real danger. I just want to tell you Paddy,that I don't hold any grudge over this but I also disagree with you over what's doxxing and what's not.
17/19
Now here's some kitchen sink psychology: Paddy's someone who's attempting to connect with a particular part of his identity and family history, and doing it in the most cringe, 13-year-old edgelord way possible, despite having been in his 30s and now his 40s.
18/19
I would like to close this soup with the tweet below and beg to differ with Paddy here: I'd argue that even funnier than a racecar driver turning geopol expert is the game tester making barely minimum wage at 41, promoting himself as a geopolitical expert.
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.
1/20
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.
2/20
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.
1/7
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