In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Dutch right-wing activist, conspiracy theorist & social media personality, Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@evavlaar). She's best-known for her promotion of the "decline of the Decadent West" trope, and for promotion of pro-Kremlin narratives.
1/19
Eva's main audience is conservative traditionalists, and basically everything she does revolves around this theme. She also promotes various conspiracy theories about the "global elites", COVID-19 and vaccines, World Economic Forum and digitalisation of society.
2/19
She's also a raging populist, and is not afraid to take current events and rally around them to get more attention to her conspiratorial ramblings. Recently, she's been involved with the protests by European farmers against increasing costs and tiny margins.
3/19
In 2016, she joined the far-right political party, Forum voor Democratie (FvD). Some years later she became an intern at the FvD faction in the European Parliament, and soon left her position at the university in order to fully focus on her political career with the FvD.
4/19
FvD leader Thierry Baudet soon announced that Eva would fill the 5th spot on FvD's candidate list for the House of Representatives.Few months later FvD faced a huge crisis when its youth wing had made some extreme remarks, including praise of Anders Breivik & Brenton Tarrant.5/19
Soon after this, many members resigned from the party. Eva was one of them - she joined a morning talk show in which she announced that she had chosen sides against the FvP leader and her former boyfriend (or "fling", as Eva called it), Thierry Baudet.
6/19
For the time being, she left politics and focused more on political commentary and promoting herself on podcasts, talk shows and right-wing political events. She promotes various conspiracy theories, and often talks about the "The Great Reset" and its dangers.
7/19
In 2021, she appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, stating that Europe is becoming "a tyrannical regime, of mass surveillance and control". In the same year, she also worked as presenter of her own YouTube talk show "Let's Talk About It".
8/19
The show was part of Swedish media outlet Riks, which is affiliated with the far-right party Sverigedemokraterna. It seems that the show ran for only 10 episodes. She was also working as a legal advisor at a law firm, but her employment was terminated just after 4 months.
9/19
Eva then continued her career as a political commentator and speaker, calling for people to "reject Globalism and embrace God" at events like the Brussels National Conservatism Conference. She also became a regular commentator on European matters at Carlson's show on Fox.
10/19
She's also appeared as a regular commentator on Mark Steyn's YouTube show, on which she's commented - among other things - about how "young girls are being sacrificed on the altar of mass migration," and how the governments are trying to control us with digital currencies.
11/19
Like most conspiracy theorists, Eva often creates doomsday scenarios around topics she has no clue about, like for example cybersecurity and the threat of "cyber pandemics", which according to her would lead to martial law and the adoption of Europe-wide mass surveillance.
12/19
Eva doesn't speak a lot about Ukraine, but when she does, she condemns it as a pointless money sink. She's also claimed that the whole thing is just another scheme to make weapon manufacturers and companies like BlackRock even wealthier.
13/19
After the Carlson interview with Putin, she praised the dictator's 30 minute revisionist history rant, stating that it has "current political relevance", and that no other leader could give such a detailed (biased and made-up) "historical account" as Putin did.
14/19
She also commented on the Tucker video about the "low prices" in Russian supermarkets, stating that the Western standard of living is low "by design" and that it was "made by people who hate us." Almost half of Russians state that their salary doesn't cover basic spending.
15/19
It doesn't take a genius to see the conclusion here - Putin as a traditionalist is in the right by "defending Russia" and the "decadent West" in the wrong by giving up all power to "global elites" and by sending military and monetary aid to Ukraine. The whole narrative...
16/19
... is based on a silly conspiracy theory there is some kind of clandestine power that is trying to enslave the whole of humanity through degradation of "conservative values", lockdowns, vaccines, mass surveillance, and depopulation.
As is tradition.
17/19
As a traditionalist, Eva's been desperately looking for that far-right love of her life - between 2012 and 2014 she dated far-right fascist Julien Rochedy, after which she had a "fling" with Baudet. In 2022 she got engaged with Will Witt, but I don't think that worked out.
18/19
Oh, and Eva: if you're reading this, here are some of the lies Putin told to Carlson:
And below is Tucker making excuses why he didn't ask Putin any tough questions and basically calling him a killer.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American far-right social media personality, Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes). He’s best-known for his white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic rhetoric, and for being the poster boy for the so-called incel movement.
1/17
Like so many from the white supremacist movement, Fuentes dropped out of university after his freshman year. He studied introductory international relations, which apparently made him a geopolitics expert. Nick was introduced to the white supremacist movement at an…
2/17
..early age - he took part in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,Virginia. In 2017, Fuentes launched his political talk show “America First”. Initially the show was aired on Trump-aligned Right Side Broadcasting Network, but it was dropped after the rally.
3/17
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss foreign malign influence operations during the 2024 US elections. As in 2016 and 2020, these recent elections were also a target of massive disinformation and hacking campaigns originating mostly from Russia and Iran.
1/17
First of all, my opinion is that these influence operations alone didn’t affect the elections so much, that they actually made a difference.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s win over Harris was clear and these short-term campaigns didn’t really change that much this time.
2/17
Yet, many of these online campaigns attacked both Harris and Walz on various social media platforms. Especially Walz became a big target after his nomination, and many Russian efforts attempted to defame him.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a social media personality and TV presenter, Raisa Blommestijn (@rblommestijn). She’s best-known for her far-right rhetorics, spreading conspiracy theories, and spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives on Dutch television.
1/24
Raisa studied philosophy of law at Leiden University. The faculty is best-known for one of its professors, Paul Cliteur. He’s a member of the pro-Kremlin party Forum voor Democratie (FvD), where he is one of the leading figures.Cliteur is also known for supervising the FvD…
2/24
…founder Thierry Baudet’s doctoral thesis, and can be considered a central figure in this Dutch “anti-establishment” movement. While studying at Leiden, Raise also met her best friend forever, Eva Vlaardingerbroek:
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American podcaster, Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade). He’s best-known for “Martyr Made”, a history podcast that provides a strongly revisionist and biased analysis on historical events such as the Revolution of Dignity and World War II.
1/22
Darryl became known to big audiences in 2021, when he published a Twitter thread in which he basically described a massive conspiracy against Trump during both 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The culprits were predictable: the corporate press, intelligence agencies…
2/22
…and of course the evil Democrats. To Darryl, Russia was not working together with the Trump campaign, even though there’s clear evidence that many of his officials - including Carter Page, Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort - interacted intimately with…
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’m going to outline the current situation in the West’s information war against Russia & its allies. Currently,the West’s counter-disinformation measures are severely underfunded,making it difficult to combat Russian influence operations effectively.
1/17
Europe today is repeating the same mistake in information warfare that it made in conventional warfare: we are not dedicating enough resources to counter it. Just as Europe was unprepared to fully support Ukraine and prepare for kinetic warfare against Russia,...
2/17
...we have been neglecting information warfare. Next year, Russia is reportedly set to spend around 3 billion USD on its information operations domestically and abroad, with allies like the CCP, Iran, and North Korea likely following suit.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation (@Heritage). Heritage is best-known for opposing military aid to Ukraine and for their political initiative called Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a Trump presidency.
1/23
Before we begin, I want to justify this soup that focuses heavily on US domestic politics. As a strong supporter of Ukraine, I see Donald Trump as a threat to Ukraine’s existence, and the reasoning for that can be found in this previous soup:
Heritage was founded in 1973, but it took a leading role in conservative politics during the Reagan presidency, whose policies were mostly taken from the foundation’s book series called Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of this series.